On an unseasonably warm October afternoon, underneath a row of Weeping Willows leaning lazily into the River Thames in Oxfordshire, Ash Smith and I settle down in a pub beer garden. The water is clearer here than the Windrush, a short walk away (see blog Part 1). Ash throws a thumbnail of bread into the water, and a silver mob of fish fry rush up to eat it – “do that in the Windrush and you might see one Minnow at best”, he says.
Ash Smith (left), co-founder of Windrush Against Sewage Pollution (WASP), talks with WaterMatter’Tim Smedley beside the River Thames about the sewage scandal, political accountability and the growing campaign to bring Britain's water industry back into public ownership.
Having caught up with Ash on the background to his campaign, I’m now keen to bring us fully up to date, and drill down into the detail of the political context of the water sector in late 2026, and into 2027.
At the parliamentary debate in September, triggered by Ash’s petition, Paul Davies MP rubbished Defra’s previous claim that it would cost £104 billion to fully renationalise Thames Water, saying a recent valuation put it at closer to £4b. The debts would be wiped off with special administration. Davies also pointed to the example of Berlin’s water company, brought back into public ownership in the 2010s. So if Nationalisation does happen, I ask Ash, do we now have a clearer view of what the costs would be, and what the new ownership model could look like?
“When you say nationalisation, people think, oh, the government's going to be running it”, says Ash, “as if it's going to compete with the NHS and defence”. But that’s not the case. In fact, people simply pay their water bills as before, “That money will be ring-fenced, and that money will be spent on delivering the service. And if we'd done that back in 1989, then we would be £85 billion better off now because that's how much was taken out by shareholders…. they just used our money and they charged us a fee for doing it. So public ownership will look like stopping that, and also then stopping the incentive to take out as much money as possible for [shareholder dividends]”
EFRA Committee Chair Alistair Carmichael MP reiterated this just four days after the debate, stating that the most likely course of events will “see Thames Water placed in Special Administration once its money runs out at the end of the year. But this may be the only way to reset the fortunes of this company and put it on a sustainable footing in the long term. Liabilities that the government will face in the short-term may be offset by a future sale of Thames Water once a new buyer can be found.”
The special administration regime entails the government and regulator Ofwat appointing an administrator to take over management of a water company’s services if it becomes insolvent, or fails to carry out basic functions. Ash argues that Thames Water now qualifies on both counts. This used to be a minority view; now it is mainstream.
In truth, the Parliamentary ‘debate’ saw very little debate – of the 66 MPs who spoke, the vast majority spoke in favour of public ownership. “Only one person spoke up for a market solution, and everybody laughed”, says Ash, who sat in the public chamber throughout, alongside his colleague Peter Hammond and Julie Maughan, the mother of Heather Preen, the child who died two weeks after contracting E. coli after playing near a water company sewage release. Many of the MPs acknowledged those in the public gallery during their speeches. Just a week later, Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the Labour Party conference that “Water is a symbol of what has gone wrong with Britain”. But he disappointingly stopped short of what Ash, the majority of MPs and the EFRA Committee were calling for, instead saying he would “start a 10-year journey to a very different water system”.
The Houses of Parliament, where MPs debated a petition calling for a referendum on public ownership of water companies after it attracted more than 200,000 signatures. The debate brought the future of Britain's privatised water industry firmly into the political spotlight.
We don’t want a 10-year journey. We want change now. As Lloyd Hatton MP said at the debate, “We must now look at alternative ownership models. Whether that be municipal control, mutuals, not-for-profits, full nationalisation or a government bond-backed public utility, there are so many options on the table. What my constituents and the tens of thousands of people who have signed this petition have made clear is that they want to see action; they want to see that move to public ownership without further delay.”
There are reasons for optimism. It increasingly feels like a matter of when, not if. Emma Hardy, Minister for Defra, responded that “The change in Prime Minister has opened up options that were previously not available”. Ash’s take if that to date, successive governments have “been frightened away from doing anything about the owners of the water industry [due to] lobbying that has come from within that sector, and it's very hard for them to break that”. The previous erroneous Defra stance that taking Thames Water into public ownership would cost £104 billion was simply “made up by a think tank paid for by the water industry”, alleges Ash. In fact, every year, every month, of private ownership is costing the nation money. “If Thames Water had been taken into special administration two years ago, the customer would not have wasted 1.6 billion pounds [in the meantime]… something like 33 pence in the pound [of our water bill] is servicing debt. So if we got rid of that, we'd immediately free up 33 pence in the pound. It would be like having a 33% pay bill cut”.
Some in government argue that the 2025 Water Act is working. This year has seen legal proceedings against Ex-Southern Water boss Matthew Wright accused of conspiracy to defraud to avoid £45m in water pollution fines, with a potential prison term attached–perhaps this stronger regulation will be enough to bash the private firms into shape? “Those offences, and many, many more of them [like it], took place 10 years ago”, says Ash. “The question to be asked is why was nothing done about it at the time? It's a start, but it's a token gesture of throwing someone under a bus from a long time ago to make it look like something's happening.” Matthew Wright’s case is just “the tip of an iceberg that was deliberately ignored”, he says.
Two rivers, two very different stories. The polluted River Windrush (left) joins the relatively clean River Thames, illustrating the water quality concerns that helped drive Ash Smith’s campaign against sewage pollution.
I ask him what he thinks will happen next. “For me, the most significant thing that Emma Hardy said was the Prime Minister has said that the government's priorities must be the public's priorities. Now we showed that water pollution, the water industry, and public ownership are their priority… we know from surveys that the support for public ownership is at 82%”. The final piece of the jigsaw, he believes, is to question how and where corporate interests are involved with government decision-making, in particular through special advisers and non-executive directors. If the vast majority of the country and its parliamentary representatives are calling for a particular, very specific action – that of taking the failing water sector back into public ownership – and it still isn’t happening, then, to quote Burnham back to himself, something “stinks”.
“There's been an illusion that what's good for the interests of big corporations is also good for the country”, says Ash. “That seems to me to be pretty obviously not the case, but that's what's been happening. Big interests have got far too much say in how policy has been directed”.
As for what’s next for Ash Smith and WASP, “Our aim is to not be required anymore. We're not an organization that wants to grow. We want to stop and sit by a beautiful river and talk about the old days when it was such a criminal scam, and how that's stopped now. That's what we want. We want to be redundant and no longer required.” And when that happens, the country will owe Ash Smith, and all his fellow campaigners, a great debt of gratitude – not, as is currently the case, a great debt of billions to overseas hedge funds. I hope that the next time we walk the Windrush and River Thames together, and stop for a pint, it’s just to sit by a beautiful river and talk about how great it now is, too.
