Sarah Lambert took her usual morning swim for 40 minutes off Exmouth town beach before her volunteer shift helping disabled people get access to the water.
A wheelchair user herself, Lambert’s regular sea swims twice a week between the lifeboat station and HeyDays restaurant were the perfect form of exercise for her disability.
It was August 2024, and a dry summer’s day on England’s south-west coast.
At 4.15pm, lifeguards shut the beach, erected red flags and asked people to leave the water after East Devon district council was alerted to a catastrophic burst of the main pipe pumping sewage to the town’s Maer Lane treatment works.
But it was too late for Lambert. She started vomiting later that day and was admitted to hospital suffering life-threatening sepsis after being infected by E coli and Citrobacter bacteria, both of which are commonly found in sewage.
Anger about the state of the privatised water industry in England intensified this week after the screening of Channel 4’s docudrama Dirty Business. It weaves the human tragedy of the death from E coli O157 poisoning of eight-year-old Heather Preen in 1999, who had paddled just the other side of the Exe estuary from Lambert’s swimming spot, with the unfolding of an environmental and public health crisis. It explores three decades of underinvestment by water companies, uncovered in part by amateur sleuths Peter Hammond and Ash Smith, as well as the cosy relationship between the water companies and those meant to be holding them to account.
Lambert is now frightened and anxious about sea swimming, the form of exercise she used to love. “I was seriously ill, I spent a week in hospital before I had to have 10 more days of intravenous antibiotics at home,” said Lambert, 47, who is part of a group environmental legal claim against the local water company, South West Water.
“It took me a long time to recover. I am disabled, so I am quite vulnerable, and I moved to Exmouth to be coastal. The sea is just on my doorstep, but I don’t swim there any more. None of this is right, none of this is acceptable.”
England remains an anomaly across the world, as the only country apart from Chile where water, a natural resource, is owned by private companies for profit. The then Conservative prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, promised in 1989 that privatisation would deliver higher investment.
But as far back as 2002, ministers were warned in a report, which has remained secret, that privatisation would allow large external private equity shareholders to load companies with debt, and the financial regulator Ofwat inevitably would lose any regulatory control.
Now, Prof Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the UN special rapporteur on the human right to clean water, has singled out the English system for criticism, saying water should be managed as a publicly owned service, rather than run by private companies set up to benefit shareholders.
Lambert, like others across the country who closely monitor the performance of their water companies, agrees with the UN rapporteur.
“The situation is not getting better, things are getting tangibly worse,” said Andy Tyerman, of Exmouth’s anti-sewage pollution campaign Escape. “South West Water set its own target for 2025 to be a four-star performer. But they have never been anything higher than two-star for more than 10 years. They set a target of no more than 20 sewage spills on average; last year there were 40 spills on average. We seem to be going backwards to the 1990s.”
Increased rainfall as a result of climate breakdown, combined with increased housebuilding, is adding pressure to an industry that has had decades of underinvestment. The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) says it is vital to have regular mapping and reporting of ageing pipes and treatment plants to prevent failures, rather than just reacting to them.
“None of us can expect every service to be 100% reliable in the face of big shocks to the system, but we should at least know what we can reasonably expect from different utilities when extreme events occur,” said Jim Hall, a professor of climate and environmental risks at the University of Oxford and an adviser to the NIC.
In the 27 years since Heather’s death the water industry has built debts that today stand at £73bn, having paid out dividends of £88.4bn in that time, as well as having overseen record sewage spills. Dozens of people have fallen ill, sometimes with life-changing conditions, after swimming in waters polluted by sewage. Once-clear rivers have turned brown, countless fish and other animals have been killed, and local communities have resorted to waging endless David v Goliath battles against the water industry and political inaction.
English water companies have accumulated nearly 1,200 criminal convictions for pollution and environmental offences, but not one chief executive has been charged with any offence. The biggest criminal case against any water company, the prosecution of Southern Water for dumping billions of litres of raw sewage into protected seas, for which it was fined a record £90m, did not put any director in court despite the prosecutor saying there was “long-term corporate knowledge”.
There have been moments when ministers in one of the seven governments over the period have taken on the water companies, waving the stick of growing public support for renationalisation unless they reform.
In 2018, Michael Gove, as environment secretary for the Conservative party, accused the companies of financial engineering, pointing out that not a single new reservoir had been built since privatisation, while 95% of the industry’s profits had been paid in dividends to shareholders.
The Labour party took power in 2024 promising to be tough, banning bonuses for poor-performing companies. Its draft legislation promises the biggest shakeup of the water sector in a generation, focusing on tougher regulation with a single powerful body, ending the policy of water companies reporting their own pollution.
But ministers are resisting any kind of public control of water, even for the most egregious performers, such as Thames Water, which provides water and sewerage services to 16 million customers across London and the south-east and is struggling with £20bn debts. In effect Thames is now being controlled by a consortium of global private equity firms and hedge funds, who say they will not comply with environmental rules for 15 years and are pushing to be let off any resulting pollution fines, something ministers are seriously considering.
Examples across the world show nationalised systems running more efficiently. In Paris, France, water is 100% municipally owned and the customer satisfaction rate of the publicly owned Eau de Paris ranges from 90-96%. In the UK, ministers repeat the figure of £90-£100bn as the cost of restoring water to public control, but it has been criticised as “economically illiterate” and is based on an estimate from a thinktank funded by water companies.
Clive Lewis, a Labour MP who is leading a campaign for the public ownership of water, said: “Public ownership works around the world. The cost the government keeps putting up of £100bn has been thoroughly debunked, and there is no good argument not to do this.”
Public control of the water industry has always been popular, with a 2024 poll indicating support from 82% of people.
At the grassroots, campaigners responsible for shining a light on the scale of sewage pollution by water companies believe public control is key.
“Everyone thinks nationalising will be the same as it looked in the 1970s, but there are lots of modern models we can look to,” said Tyerman.
Becky Malby, of Ilkley Clean Water campaign in West Yorkshire, said: “The [government’s plan] shackles the public to failed privatised water companies with long-term increases in bills and no end in sight to broken infrastructure and pollution for profit.
“There are interesting hybrid public ownership models, none of which the government has considered.”
From within the Environment Agency, the government regulator that has been criticised for failing to protect the environment from sewage pollution, a whistleblower who has worked with the Guardian and who revealed his identity in Dirty Business has spent the past nine years trying to expose what is going on from the frontline. Robert Forrester, who was an environment officer for 21 years, believes the structure of a water regulator – funded in large part by permit fees from private water companies, which in 2025-26 provide £149m out of the total budget of £189m for water regulation – is corrupted.
The Environment Agency did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for South West Water said: “We are sorry to hear that someone has been unwell, however we are unable to comment on individual cases.
“We are planning important improvements to the Maer Lane sewage treatment works to help cut storm overflows and better manage wastewater for the Exmouth community. The early stages are going well, and we’ve already completed the first surveys and flow‑modelling needed to plan the upgrade properly.”
Forrester said: “Public control is absolutely needed. [The] regulator cannot regulate because it has so many vested interests in the businesses it is regulating.”
London & Valley Water, the consortium of investors in effect running Thames Water, denied it was seeking leniency from fines in discussions with Ofwat.
A spokesperson said: “Our plan will transform Thames Water’s operations, investing billions of pounds to upgrade infrastructure, deliver long-term performance improvement and clean up the local environment.”
