Is it time to nationalise United Utilities?

When I joined The Post from a financial admin job just under two years ago, my new boss promised me that my days of perusing reams of stultifying data were behind me. And yet here I am at my laptop, searching through double-figure tabs of graphs, charts, spreadsheets, and a live tracker of a steadily increasing number. 

That figure isn’t some landlord’s fiscal bottom line, though: it represents raw sewage being released into the Mersey Estuary at Bromborough Wastewater Treatment Works (WWTW). Over the past two weeks at this site alone, United Utilities has leaked effluent into the river for nearly 40 hours across eight “discharge events.” Add similar happenings at the nearby combined sewer overflows (CSOs) at Dock Road South, the Dell and St Paul’s Road, as well as the WWTWs at Birkenhead, Wallasey, and Sandon Dock across the Mersey and you have, to misquote Dr Ian Malcolm, one big stream of shit heading out towards Liverpool Bay.

This story isn’t exclusive to Merseyside. In February, Yorkshire Water — United Utilities’ North East equivalent — were fined £733k for polluting a Chesterfield country park stream. That same month, Channel 4 released docudrama Dirty Business, partly based on the real-life campaign group Windrush Against Sewage Pollution, who have watched their idyllic Oxfordshire river turn brown and rich with e-coli over the last decade or more. Last month, Weymouth Beach on Britain’s Jurassic Coast was evacuated of swimmers when lifeguards spotted a cloud of collated human effluent floating towards them.

This summer, the Observer reported that privatised water companies have since the start of this year dumped sewage into the country’s rivers for 1.5 million hours, according to preliminary data collated by the unfortunately-named Top of the Poops (TotP) website. It feels like anywhere you turn, our seas and coasts are subject to a Great Enshittening. 

But how does United Utilities — which runs water and sewage across the north west of England — compare? According to at least one analysis, not well. Earlier this year the Telegraph, using data from Ofwat, the Environment Agency (EA) and the companies’ own reports, ranked the UK’s ten major water companies by weighting 11 metrics, including spills, outages, the average annual bill and customer satisfaction. United Utilities was second-bottom, just above the much-maligned Thames Water. 

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