A number of water companies including Yorkshire Water have been banned from paying “unfair” bonuses to some of their senior executives under new legislation, the government has announced. The measures apply to water companies that do not meet environmental and consumer standards, are not financially resilient, or have been convicted of a criminal offence.
There has been growing public anger about sewage spillages, increasing pollution and rising bills for years. All this, while water companies have paid out £112m in bonuses to executives over the past decade which added to public outrage.
Under Labour’s Water (Special Measures) Act 2025, which was foreshadow in their general election manifesto and came into force recently, six firms are banned from paying some bonuses this year including Anglian Water, Southern Water, Thames Water, United Utilities, Wessex Water and Yorkshire Water.
The ban, backdated to April 2024, means regulator Ofwat can force firms to give back bonuses that have been paid or face enforcement action. It applies to share awards as well as cash.
Bonuses have been banned for Thames Water’s chief executive, Chris Weston, and Steve Buck, its chief financial officer. Southern Water, United Utilities, and Yorkshire Water have also had bonuses banned for their chief executives and chief financial officers.
The Guardian reports https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jun/05/bonuses-banned-for-10-english-water-bosses-over-sewage-pollution that Andy Pymer, the chief finance officer of Wessex Water, had his bonus banned over the company’s criminal conviction last November for sewage leaks that killed thousands of fish, which the company failed to report. Mark Thurston, the boss of Anglian Water, is having his bonus banned for a serious pollution event in Peterborough last September.
The other executives who will not be allowed to take bonuses are: Lawrence Gosden and Stuart Ledger, CEO and CFO respectively of Southern Water; Louise Beardmore and Phil Aspin, CEO and CFO respectively of United Utilities; and Nicola Shaw and Paul Inman, CEO and CFO respectively of Yorkshire Water.
The BBC News web site reports that Environment Secretary Steve Reed said the public had been “furious” over bonuses for water firm bosses “despite overseeing record levels of sewage pouring into our rivers, lakes and seas”.
“With this government, the era of profiting from pollution is over,” he recently told the BBC’s Today programme.
When challenged on the question of whether companies would try to get around the ban by raising executives’ base salaries, as happened with banking bonuses, he said water firms “would be foolish if they didn’t realise they need to rebuild trust with their own customers”.
“They need to rebuild that broken relationship,” he said. “I don’t think they will do that, but we’re keeping a watching eye, and there are opportunities to intervene if we needed to.”
In this video, Secretary of State Steve Reed, answers questions submitted to him by 38 Degrees supporters about what the Government is doing to clean up our waterways.
