An excellent piece in The I by Kriakos Petrakos highlighting the strength and depth of feeling against the water companies up and down the country.
January 26 2025
The people facing the water giants in court over refusing to pay their bills
Campaign groups have said that thousands are withholding payment from all 11 water companies in England and Wales due to sewage spills
Water companies are taking customers to court who have refused to pay their bills over sewage spills.
In 2023, sewage levels in England’s rivers, seas and lakes reached record levels.
The Environment Agency (EA) said there were 3.6 million hours of sewage released into waterways, more than double the previous year. In March 2024, a report from the EA showed a 54 per cent increase in the number of sewage spills in 2023 compared to 2022.
The Government has launched an independent review into the water sector and pledged to crack down on spills, but despite that, a number of customers have refused to pay their bills in protest and will now face the water companies in court.
This comes despite Ofwat and the Consumer Council for Water warning customers withholding payments to continue paying their bills, warning that water firms can take debt recovery action that could impact their credit ratings or result in additional charges.
Caz Dennett – Wessex Water
Caz Dennett, 53, from Weymouth, Dorset, will be appearing at Weymouth County Court on 10 February over her refusal to pay her water bills since April 2023.
Ms Dennett said she has been asked to pay Wessex Water nearly £850, including outstanding charges and legal fees associated with recovering her debt.
“The campaign’s aim is clear,” Ms Dennett said. “We just want clean water. That’s it.
“Most sensible people would agree that, morally, it is not right for corporations to be paid for a service when they pollute the open environment regardless of the amount of money you’re paying them.
“I hope that I can also make a case for that in law.
“If you can demonstrate that your water company is not providing all of the services that they are supposed to provide you on a statutory basis, which includes the provision of water and the collection, treatment and disposal of sewage, then you can request a rebate.
“I can prove that, on occasions, sewage from my property has been discharged untreated into the open environment and therefore I believe what I should be doing is negotiating a rebate with Wessex Water.
“I’m hopeful that there is a reasonable legal basis for that in court.”
While water companies are permitted to discharge untreated sewage into waterways during periods of exceptional rainfall if their networks are overwhelmed, concerns have been raised over how often that is happening.
Wessex Water discharged sewage into waterways from storm overflows 41,453 times in 2023 for a total of 372,341 hours – a nearly three-fold increase when compared to 2022 – Environment Agency (EA) data shows.
In November, the company was fined £500,000 after sewage leaks from its network killed over 2,100 fish, including eels, lamprey and bullheads – three threatened species.
The EA said Wessex Water was found to be negligent after it failed to report the incident as early as it should have.
A Wessex Water spokesperson said: “We understand storm overflows are an issue for customers and we’re always happy to discuss our solutions and where we are investing with them, which we have already done with Ms Dennett.
“We’re currently spending £3m every month on schemes to reduce discharges from storm overflows, with plans to almost triple this investment from April 2025.”
Mike Deacon – Southern Water
Mike Deacon, 69, of Lewes, East Sussex, monitors pollution incidents for the Ouse and Adur Rivers Trust and has been angling for over 60 years.
He began boycotting his Southern Water bills as a protest against sewage pollution in 2021, only paying the company £1 a month before he was taken to court in March last year.
“I paid up after being ordered to by the court. It was about £2,000 I withheld.”
Mr Deacon said he resumed his boycott after the proceedings ended by withholding 50 per cent of his latest bills.
“When they sent me the new bill for 2024-25, I sent them a letter saying I was withholding 50 per cent of my bill because of the disgraceful behaviour historically they had in polluting the rivers and the sea.
“They have subsequently ignored my letter and continue to send me demands to pay the whole amount.
“In the letters they are saying you need to settle this bill now, otherwise we may take court action.”
Despite facing the prospect of being taken to court again, Mr Deacon said he will withhold his bill payments “until the very last minute”, claiming he refuses to pay a company whose profits are “the proceeds of crime”.
“It benefits them, financially, not to invest in the infrastructure that would prevent pollution and instead of dealing with the sewage in a responsible way, which is their remit, they dump it into the environment.
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“I have seen the water quality deteriorating over the years and the effect this is having on fish breeding and fish populations.
“Not just fish, there’s all the other wildlife that depend on the rivers and the seas for their livelihood, for instance, otters and king fishers and other river animals.
“Their environment is being degraded by the crimes of this company, it’s not just humans. The environment as a whole suffers.
He added: “On the one hand they are charging me money for a service I’m not receiving and, on the other hand, they are polluting the rivers and the seas that are my joy.
“Despite prosecutions, they are still doing it, so there must be profit in it, but their profits are the proceeds of crime.”
Southern Water was fined a record £90m in 2021 over the pollution of rivers and coastal waters in Kent, Surrey and Sussex, and causing major harm to conservation sites and oyster beds, between 2010 and 2015.
Last year, the company was fined a further £330,000 after raw sewage escaped into a stream in Hampshire for up to 20 hours, killing about 2,000 fish including brown trout.
A Southern Water spokesperson said: “We invested more between 2020 and 2025 than ever previously spent. And we will be spending more than double that amount over the next five years.
“Our shareholders have injected £1.6 billion in to the company since 2021 more than has ever been paid in dividends to previous shareholders and not a penny since 2017.
“Continued investment and performance improvement relies on customer bills.
“We provide discounts on bills of up to 90 per cent for cash-strapped customers.”
Julie Wassmer – Southern Water
Author Julie Wassmer, from Whitstable, Kent, has refused to pay the wastewater portion of her Southern Water bill since October 2021 to protest the company’s “unacceptable record of sewage dumping”.
She said that she currently owes the company over £1,000.
In August 2023, Southern Water sent Ms Wassmer a pre-action protocol document over her boycott – a legal document filled out by parties involved in a dispute to try to resolve it before court proceedings are commenced.
“While I have received several Final Notices, and a ‘courtesy call’ warning me of imminent legal action, I still await formal notice of court action for debt recovery,” Ms Wassmer said.
If taken to court, Ms Wassmer said she intends to issue a counter-claim, challenging the suggestion that she is required to pay the entirety of her bill regardless of the service she receives.
“It isn’t easy living with the constant threat of debt recovery via court action, but neither is it easy to accept the environmental damage that’s still being done to our seas and waterways by sewage dumping from companies that have continued to profit from an industry that should never have been privatised.”
Ms Wassmer has teamed up with boycotters from Hastings, East Sussex, to launch the website www. boycottwaterbills.com, which raises awareness of their campaign as well as the implications of withholding bill payments, including a reduced credit rating or potential legal action.
She told The i Paper: “We know from responses given to www.boycottwaterbills.com that we have boycott action in all 11 wastewater areas and from the same, we believe there are thousands of water payment boycotters across England and Wales.”
Angela Jones – Welsh Water
Wild swimmer Angela Jones, 58, from south-east Wales, told The i Paper she has refused to pay the wastewater component of her Welsh Water bills for around four years, owing the company over £1,000, in protest at sewage pollution, primarily in the River Wye.
“The Wye is my river,” she said. “My favourite thing in the whole world is to be below the water, to have an eel go past or to monitor the aquatic life.
“I was on the side of the river one night, monitoring the otters, and I could see the river dying. I could see below the water how the aquatic life was changing.
“I started investigating more. Obviously, there is a major problem with intensive poultry units on the Wye, but we also have sewage going in.
“I tried everything for Welsh Water to actually change what they were doing, and they didn’t.
“I know that they are pumping sewage illegally, and a lot of it untreated, so I gathered years of data on that and showed Welsh Water, told them what was going on, but they still do it.
“So my last resort is withholding my payment.”
Ms Jones also said her house flooded with sewage last year as a result of a burst pipe belonging to Welsh Water.
“It devastated my whole life for a year. They had to rip the kitchen out, all the floors out. I had no kitchen to eat. I was living out of a van. It was horrible.
“Welsh Water denied it, so I had people come down with cameras to put down my drains to show that it was their pipes that had fractures.”
In June, Welsh Water entered a guilty plea and was fined £90,000 for exceeding permitted levels of sewage effluent into the Wye, which the EA described as “preventable” and “completely unacceptable”.
The company announced in February that it will be investing £27m to reduce phosphorus released from wastewater treatment works in Hereford, improving the quality of the effluent entering the Wye.
Welsh Water has been contacted for a comment.
Imogen May – South West Water
Imogen May, 52, of Crediton, Devon, said she received a charging order from South West Water claiming a stake in her home after she withheld £2,000 from the company.
“They are charging orders in order to force eviction so that they could sell my house under the market value to pay off what I owe them,” she told The i Paper.
“The water companies are not fulfilling their obligations, so why should I have to pay for something that I’m not receiving?
“These companies that are there to provide an absolutely vital aspect of human life – water – are being so brazen in their lack of care, their lack of respect, for their one job.
“It leaves you in a state of exasperation, desperation. We’re expected to foot the bill for their failings.”
Ms May, a single mother of two daughters, aged 19 and 26, began claiming Universal Credit in 2021.
She said eviction is not an experience unfamiliar to her as her current cottage is the 14th house she has lived in with her children in the past 11 years.
“We’ve been displaced a lot and, as a single parent, there hasn’t been the support for us.
“I’ve been homeless with my eldest. We’ve lived in temporary accommodation.”
“Losing my home doesn’t frighten me,” she added. “Having a future where my girls have to fight for the same things when they’re my age – that frightens me more.”
South West Water discharged sewage into seas and waterways 58,249 times in 2023 for a total of 530,737 hours.
It was fined more than £2.1m in April for a range of environmental offences committed across Devon and Cornwall between July 2016 and August 2020.
The Environment Agency has also said it is “considering what legal approach to take” against the company after a pipe burst in August and triggered a major leak along the coast in Exmouth, leading to warnings against swimming at the town’s beach during peak holiday season.
South West Water has said that storm overflows are pressure relief valves designed to prevent homes and businesses from flooding during periods of bad weather.
However, it said reducing their use is a priority and it aims to be the first water company to meet the Government’s target of less than 10 spills per year – 10 years ahead of the 2050 deadline.
The company also plans to nearly double investment to £2.5bn from 2025-30.
Mid Devon District Council has been contacted for a comment.
Paul Kaufman – Thames Water
Paul Kaufman, 68, of east London, said that he began boycotting the wastewater component of his Thames Water bill in May 2023 and owes the company around £400.
He told The i Paper that he has now decided to boycott his bill in full after Thames Water failed to specify what proportion of it will be used to finance its £3bn bailout loan.
Burdened by over £19bn in debt, Thames Water was given court approval to pursue the emergency loan last month, with a further hearing intended to secure creditor approval set to take place in early February.
Mr Kaufman said that Thames Water and the Consumer Council for Water (CCW) both failed to clarify what portion of his bill payments will be used to finance the loan, which is being offered with an interest rate of 9.75 per cent.
“My complaint started initially over the fact that I am not getting the service I am paying for regarding the service of wastewater.
“It’s now moved on with a further complaint that they can’t answer my question regarding the amount of money that goes toward servicing the loan.
“This is something they haven’t been able to respond to for months and the CCW haven’t been able to respond to this.
“They have threatened that they will have to refer this to a credit agency.
“They’re always going to warn people that they are going to do these things, but I was able to put them off by explaining that the complaint was still in dispute.”
Mr Kaufman added that his local river, the River Roding, has been “really badly polluted”, compromising its wildlife and ecosystems.
“I am concerned about the wildlife in the area and what the future holds. The river could end up dying unless something is done about it.”
Thames Water has been contacted for a comment.
A Water UK spokesperson said: “We understand the strength of feeling on this issue and have a plan to put it right.
“Water companies are poised to quadruple investment in our aging infrastructure. This will be the largest amount of money ever spent on the natural environment, and will help to support economic growth, build more homes, secure our water supplies and end sewage entering our rivers and sea.”
An Ofwat spokesperson said: “We understand the concerns shown by customers who feel their water company’s performance is not good enough – but not paying bills in protest could leave them facing debt recovery action, affect their credit rating and result in additional costs being added to their original bill.
“We use our powers to support customers by challenging poor performance, which sees money refunded to customers through lower bills.”
Jenny Suggate, head of policy delivery at the Consumer Council for Water (CCW), said: “Our advice to anyone who is considering boycotting their water and wastewater bill is to continue paying their charges, as the implications of not doing so can be very damaging for a household.
“Water companies can take debt recovery action where someone has chosen to boycott payment and this could negatively impact someone’s credit rating and result in additional costs.
“We understand the anger and upset many people feel over some water companies’ environmental performance but our research also shows three-quarters of households accept the new five-year investment plans to improve services and clean up our rivers and seas.
“Funding for this comes from customers’ bills but people will want to see and experience a significant difference, especially when they face such substantial bill rises.”
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