Ofwat accuses Thames Water of 'catalogue of failures'
The chief executive of Ofwat has accused Thames Water of a "catalogue of failures" over sewage spills. The regulator has proposed fining Thames Water, Yorkshire Water and Northumbrian Water a total of 168 million pounds after conducting an investigation. David Black adds Ofwat is talking to the government about giving them additional powers to block chief executive bonuses "where companies fail to comply with the law". Report by Brooksl. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00So today we've announced we've imposed £168 million pounds of fines on three water companies
00:06Thames Water, Northumbrian Water and Yorkshire Water and the fines have been imposed because
00:12of failures by companies to comply with their wastewater obligations. In summary these
00:17obligations are to maintain a minimum level of capacity at sewage treatment works and to only
00:22discharge wastewater to the environment in exceptional circumstances. We've found companies
00:28have failed to do so and we've also found they failed to have sufficient oversight over their
00:32processes. We've found a range of failures so for example some Thames Water had a significant
00:39number of wastewater treatment works where they were not operating at the required levels of
00:43capacity. All companies had overuse of sewage storm overflow sewage discharges and then for
00:52example Thames also found that during the investigation so when they started the when
00:56we started the enforcement case Thames considered they had around 250 storm overflows they then
01:03uncovered they had a further 300 overflows which were not permitted so it's a range of failures
01:09and then the final point I'll make is the boards have a responsibility to oversee and to have
01:13sufficient management oversight over the operations and we've found they had insufficient understanding
01:19insufficient data about what was going on in the sewage treatment works so it is a catalogue of
01:23failures and these are serious issues. So Thames had a greater scale of the problem so as I said
01:29they had around two-thirds of their wastewater treatment works were not operating at the
01:33required levels of capacity. For other firms it was a much smaller number and so we see differences
01:39between Thames, between Yorkshire and Northumbrian with Northumbrian being the least severe offender
01:45and followed by Yorkshire and then by Thames. So that's a question I think for Thames Water
01:51but it is I guess it reflects the level of concerns that we've had about Thames Water's
01:57poor operational performance. They've been clear that they need to do much better as a company
02:02and I think the findings reflect that. We've been very clear that companies need to pay chief
02:07executives and pay bonuses demonstratively linked to performance for customers in the environment.
02:13We've taken new powers to mean that we can ensure that customers
02:17will not pay for any chief executive bonus which is not demonstrated to be linked to
02:22performance for customers in the environment. We'll be examining the chief executive of Thames'
02:27bonus along with other chief executive bonuses later this year and if we think it's if we think
02:33steps need to be taken we'll step in to stop customers paying that. We're also talking to
02:37the government about new powers to block executive bonuses where companies fail to comply with the
02:42law and so that may be a new power that we get over this coming year.