There are many of us across England and Wales who have opened our water bills and glanced at the payment breakdown only to be jolted into annoyed sarcasm. “Really?” you say to the water company’s logo. “I’m paying you to dispose of sewage, am I? And how is that working out for us all?”
In 2023, sewage spills in England increased by 54% from the previous year, according to the Environment Agency. A study also released in 2023 showed that enough raw sewage to fill 4,352 Olympic swimming pools was released from 30 water treatment works in one year. And yet shareholders must still be paid: analysis conducted by the Financial Times showed that UK water companies paid out £1.4bn in dividends in 2022, up £540m from the previous year. There are news items every day: swimmers are told to sign up for water-quality alerts; paddling children and triathletes contract vomiting bugs. Local Facebook groups – such as one for the River Severn, near where I grew up – share stories of vile smells and videos of strange froths. When I see talk online about its condition it feels like a personal affront: how could someone do this to my river? Meanwhile, the River Lea, the Thames tributary closest to where I live now, is described as “dangerously polluted” with “high levels of faecal E coli”. The river valley is one of my favourite parts of London, but I wouldn’t want to fall in, let alone swim.
For most of us, the direct debit leaves our bank account and we go on with emptying the washing-up bowl and flushing the loo, feeling powerless or just forgetting. But a number of people are looking at their water bills and deciding that they’ve had enough. That they won’t pay any more.
“We are paying for a service that we are just not getting; a service we absolutely have to have,” says Caz Dennett, founder of the Don’t Pay for Dirty Water campaign. “We don’t have a choice in creating the sewage in the first place and we don’t have a choice in who we take the service from. People are really aware that they’re being ripped off.” Campaigners such as Dennett see refusing to pay their water bills as the only way to do something.
“I would call it a developing and growing movement, because of the inherent injustice,” says Katy Colley, a founder of Boycott Water Bills. “As a people we are really wedded to the idea that things should be fair. And this just isn’t fair.”
Colley and her family run a campsite in Hastings. Her local water company is Southern Water and she has been withholding wastewater charges since December 2022. (Southern Water is majority-owned by the Australian investor Macquarie, which has been criticised for its stewardship of Thames Water and in July came under fire for awarding its chief executive a £183,000 bonus.) A friend had previously mentioned the idea to her, but she forgot about it until she was galvanised by a bout of E coli. It was summer and Colley and her family had been hanging out at the beach. “We were having a great time in the water,” she says. “And then that night I got ill. You wouldn’t wish E coli on anyone. It’s just awful. It really affected me. When my next water bill came I thought, ‘I’m going to do it and I’m going to complain at the same time. I’m going to see how far I can take this.’”
Colley found a group of withholders in Whitstable. They teamed up and launched Boycott Water Bills in May 2023. So far more than 13,000 people have visited the site for advice.
One of the Whitstable withholders is writer Julie Wassmer, who ceased making payments in 2021, alongside friends, including Emma Gibson, a former Greenpeace campaigns manager, Green party councillor Steve Wheeler and then-Conservative councillor Ashley Clark. “We did so, not as a campaign, but as a group of committed individuals who wanted to make a stand,” she says. News of their action hit the local press and was amplified by Bob Geldof, who lives in nearby Faversham. Wassmer notes that since starting Boycott Water Bills with Colley, “We’ve been contacted by thousands of people from across the country, as well as other groups, such as Extinction Rebellion, and we now have boycott action in all 11 wastewater areas.”
Jim Murray is an actor, known for playing Prince Andrew in The Crown. He began fly fishing some years ago, finding that it helped him after the death of his baby daughter in 2009. “Nothing had really helped me get through the trauma,” he says, “but fishing did, for whatever reason.” He started to become invested in the health of rivers, especially his local Hampshire chalk streams. “I vowed to give the rivers back what they had given me,” he says. “They saved me and I felt I needed to save them.”
Murray also falls into Southern Water’s catchment area and is currently only paying the supply part of his bill “because I genuinely believe we’re not getting the service for the wastewater part”. He has leveraged his celebrity to found the group Activist Anglers, create the podcast The Last Salmon and get into talks with Southern Water. “I am very clear with them,” he says. “Just because we’re talking doesn’t mean I trust you. It would be absolutely remiss of me if I suddenly gave up my activism and protesting.”
In Weymouth, Dennett’s water is supplied by Wessex, who typically bill six months in advance. “And, like a good little citizen, for 15 years I did that,” she says. “And then I just thought, ‘I’m not going to pay for this.’ I paid, in advance, for all those years only for them to take that money and give it straight to their shareholder.” (Wessex Water has just one shareholder, the Malaysian multinational YTL Corporation Berhad.) By late July this year, after two years of non-payment, Wessex served Dennett with a legal action notice for the total of her unpaid amount. She says she intends to defend her case and possibly counter-sue if she can compile the needed evidence.
Dennett has joined with Extinction Rebellion to make Don’t Pay For Dirty Water a national campaign. The group says their aim is to sign up 10,000 boycotters.
There are some who are withholding independently, without a group or campaign around them. Devon-based Imogen May is probably the best known. She has been withholding her water bill since 2019. In June, when her non-payments to South West water totalled £2,809, the company seized a stake in her home via the Land Registry (weeks after an outbreak of diarrhoea caused by a parasite in Devon’s water supply led to some customers having to boil their drinking water). “I am using this house,” she says. “I’m in a position of privilege and this is a tool. My children have their own homes now and I’m doing this on my terms. Unless people stand up and say no, this will continue.
“I swim in the rivers. I swim in the sea. And it hurts, what they are doing, what they are getting away with. It actually hurts.” She is currently deciding if she can risk the expense of going to court. There are, however, many stages a non-payer will reach before legal action or loss of property.
Domestic users cannot, by law, have their water supply cut off or restricted. Non-payment will escalate through several levels, starting with the reminder notices familiar to anyone with a bad memory, especially before the days of direct debit. The water company will then send a notice for each unpaid bill, giving the customer seven days to pay. That should be followed by a telephone call and then the debt will be passed to a debt-recovery agent. Then, says Citizens Advice, “The company can take you to court to get a county court judgement to recover the money you owe. You may then get a notice of enforcement from a firm of bailiffs telling you they are going to come round. If they come, they could take goods to sell to pay the money you owe.”
In practice, this can take several months. “To begin with, I didn’t even write to them and complain,” says Dennett about Wessex Water. “I thought I would just see how it played out and how long it took them to catch up with me.” However, her experience talking with non-payers around the country has shown that the timing and severity of the response can vary from company to company, “and sometimes how you are treated can even be down to the customer service rep you speak to on a given day”.
There are varying levels of engagement and various ways to make the process longer. The first level of disrupting the supply of what Dennett calls “free-flowing money” is to stop paying in advance and switch to monthly payments. Following that, some activists have chosen to cancel automated payments and to stop paying all or a portion of their bill. The most popular action seems to be to continue paying for supply, but withholding the wastewater charges. On their website, Boycott Water Bills say people should complain to their water providers in writing. They continue: “Insist in your communication that while you are disputing this part of your bill they should not chase you for payment or refer your case to a debt-collection agency.
Not paying a bill can adversely affect your credit score and receiving a county court judgement will affect it even further. Those who have previously built up good credit, particularly those who own homes, could be more insulated from the worst aspects, but there will be an effect for everyone. Both Boycott Water Bills and Don’t Pay For Dirty Water acknowledge that refusing to pay can create difficulties. “Our advice is always not to risk your financial good name,” says Dennett. “Don’t do this if you are in a precarious financial position.”
Each non-payer has a personal tipping point, but the main source of anger is that, as they see it, a stated service is not being provided – adequate sewage management –and that both the environment and public health are being degraded. “You look at how these water companies are run and you don’t just feel great about boycotting, you feel absolutely ethically OK,” says Murray. “The ethics are so barren and thin on the ground. The institution cares not one jot about the destruction it’s bringing on the assets, in this case the waters in the river. All it cares about is profit.”
“The water companies call us customers, but we’re not really – customers have the choice to take their custom elsewhere,” says Dennett. Because of the monopoly companies have, a bill-payer dissatisfied with the service from, say, Thames, cannot switch their supplier to Severn Trent.
Then there is the issue of where the money is going. Data released by the Labour party at the beginning of this year showed that the chief executives of nine water companies received a total of £25m on top of their salaries since 2019. “Money is just leaking out,” says Colley, referring to executive pay and shareholder dividends. And, while this happens, bills rise and infrastructure crumbles. “It’s raw profiteering,” says Dennett. For Julie Wassmer, “it’s infuriating that companies have been allowed to borrow irresponsibly, racking up debt of £60bn, while rewarding executives and shareholders over £70bn.”
There is some hope for change. This July, the Manchester Ship Canal Company won a Supreme Court ruling against United Utilities, allowing them to seek redress for unauthorised discharges of foul water. This is the first ruling of its kind and there is now potential for further legal action by the owners and users of waterways.
On 11 July, following the general election, Defra were quick to release a statement that promised, among other things, that new funding for infrastructure would be ring-fenced and can only be spent on upgrades benefitting customers and the environment and that nothing can be diverted for bonuses, dividends or salary increases. The money talked about by Defra included £88bn from water companies, but that also meant there would be bill increases.
In the raft of new legislation recently announced by Sir Keir Starmer’s government there is a new Water (Special Measures) Bill, which gives powers to levy criminal liability on water company heads for pollution, ban bonuses if environmental standards aren’t met and introduce a new code of conduct. There will also be powers to impose automatic fines for polluting companies and a requirement for them to install real-time monitors on sewage outlets.
To those who have been invested in the cause for a long time, the promises feel hollow. “The fact that water company shareholders refuse to invest any more money into their own assets should be plenty enough warning that there’s a serious flaw in the business model but, instead, toothless Ofwat insists on us, the customer, paying for these mistakes. Again,” says Murray. “The industry is a huge con and with Ofwat ruling over it, it will most certainly take the real threat of a national boycott to clearly show government that we’re not as stupid as they think we are and that we demand a fairer system.”
“The companies want to be allowed to charge customers all over again for infrastructure work they failed to do in the first place, while we customers are adamant they won’t receive a penny until they do what they were originally paid to do,” says Wassmer. “Let them go instead to those who profited from what has become not only a national, but an international, disgrace.”
For now, more and more eyes turn towards the practices of our water companies and the activists remain resolved and their bills unpaid: “They can whistle for it,” says Wassmer.
