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Thames Water chief says leakage and pollution targets are not realistic
The company says it successfully treats 99.5% of waste most of the time, while Ofwat argues leakage remains high enough to require delivery on funded commitments.
Thames Water boss Chris Weston said some of the targets set for the UK utility over leakages and pollution are not realistic, despite the company saying it wants to improve performance, BBC Business reported.
Weston said Thames treats 4.3 billion litres of waste a day and that 99.5% of the time it is treated successfully, while acknowledging that sometimes something goes wrong. The company has faced criticism for sewage discharges and leaks in recent years, and Ofwat fined Thames a record £122.7 million last year for breaching sewage spill rules, according to the report.
Ofwat said the targets are intended to be ambitious, pointing to around a fifth of water still lost through leakage, and said companies must deliver on the commitments they have been funded to achieve. The BBC also cited an Environment Agency spokesperson saying the expectation is that Thames Water complies with the law and that regulators will continue to hold the firm accountable when performance falls short.
The report said Thames, which has struggled under billions of pounds of debt, could be placed into a temporary nationalisation regime known as a special administration, but Weston warned of a risk that the taxpayer would bear the funding cost. He instead backed a rescue deal put forward by the firm’s lenders, while an environmental campaigner argued sewage pollution should not be treated as inevitable.