Following the revelations laid bare in Dirty Business, I called Ash Smith in April, 2026, two months after the programme aired. I wondered if there had been any legal fallout following the allegations levelled by the programme against both the water companies and the government. “No one's come back on any of this”, he says, dryly. “Interesting, isn’t it? Because we know it’s all true. It’s underplayed, if anything”. I ask him why he thinks the EA, now ‘swimming in cash’, didn’t then start properly investing and regulating sewage spills again? “Because I would say that Defra has told them not to do that. Defra’s policy is that you don’t investigate those category threes and fours”.
Channel 4. Dirty Business, Ep.3.
I previously had some sympathy for the EA, and indeed quoted James Bevan saying "you get the regulation you pay for" in my book. Now we know, thanks to WASP and Dirty Business, that the EA did have the money to investigate, thanks to lucrative ‘charge funded regulation’ bringing in hundreds of millions in water company money to the EA. But with the result that the EA were literally in the pay of the water companies. Ash tells me that “you get the regulation you pay for" was “clever wording. Yes, you get the regulation you pay for, and who’s paying? The water industry. They’re getting the regulation they pay for.”
WASP also found a “revolving door of employment between water companies and the Environment Agency”, with over 200 EA staff found to be shareholders in water companies. The lead Non-Exec Director for the Northwest Environment Agency between 2011 and 2017 was himself a shareholder of, and previously a Director of, United Utilities. Bevan himself left the EA and joined the board of Welsh Water.
When a similar docu-drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, came out in 2024, it had a big public and political impact. I asked Ash how he thinks the response to Dirty Business compares. The public response has been huge, he says, and donations to WASP’s campaign have been flooding in. However, “it's interesting that the government has tried to downplay it.” The Post Office is an independent organisation, which the Government can hold to account without copping the blame itself. By contrast, the sewage scandal “is entirely at the government's door. It's Defra and the Environment Agency. It's them. So they're trying to ignore it. And we're not going to let them do that.”
The biggest shock and scandal of all in Dirty Business is the story of eight-year-old Heather Preen, who died two weeks after contracting E. coli in 1999. To my shame, I didn’t know her story before watching the programme, and seeing it unfold across the three-part mini-series was truly horrific. The programme makers splice flashbacks of Heather and her family’s story in with the more recent investigations of Ash and Peter at WASP. I didn’t know the outcome – I found myself hoping this was just a serious illness, representing what could happen due to sewage contamination. When we saw her die in her parents’ arms, it was devastating. But that rawest of human stories elevates this issue beyond abstract notions of executive bonuses, shareholder dividends and regulatory scrutiny. It is first and foremost about public health. Our health and well-being. Our children’s lives.
Heather’s parents, Julie Maughan and Mark Preen, as depicted in Dirty Business. Ep. 2
Heather, from Rednal in Birmingham, died 12 days into a family holiday to Dawlish Warren, Devon. The family had walked the beach and splashed about in the sea, unbeknownst to them, near a sewage outflow pipe. Speaking to BBC Breakfast after the release of Dirty Business, Heather's mother Julie Maughan said, “The way Heather died, it was a horrible death – in effect, she was poisoned. I asked the [programme makers] to make sure they got that across to people… I really felt heard and listened to – the scenes are so sensitive and powerful.” Mark Preen, Heather's bereaved father, took his own life in 2016.
Ash informs me that he has been working with Heather’s mother, Julie Maughan, to do a thorough investigation into E. Coli contracted from sewage in water.
South West Water, the company responsible for the sewage system in Dawlish, gave a statement to the BBC in response to Dirty Business, saying, "The circumstances of wastewater infrastructure and regulation in the late 1990s were very different from today” and cautioning against “revisiting of historic events through dramatisation”. Yet directly underneath the story on the BBC website are two recent headlines from the past couple of years: “E. coli at swim site '20 times minimum standards'” – referring to a South West Water area – and “Sewage spills into England's rivers and seas by water companies more than doubled last year.”
The Labour government, in turn claim that its Water Special Measures Act (2025) was intended to address the sewage scandal, strengthening regulation, introducing jail time for executives, banning bonuses, and enabling faster, automatic fines for pollution. While Ministers have repeatedly said that taking water companies out of private ownership would be too complex and too costly. In response, says Ash, the Act has been in place for over a year and simply hasn’t worked. “They're still relying on illegal pollution and not doing the job they are required to do under the law. Nothing’s changed”. As for the cost and complexity of bringing water companies back into public ownership, he says it would be cheaper than the current system. “We would immediately be 33 pence in the pound better off, thereabouts. Everyone can get a bill cut.” The 33 pence being the amount paid for servicing water company debt. “And that’s getting worse”, claims Ash, “because they’re not borrowing money at 9.75% plus expenses… A ludicrous amount of money is just being milked out of bill payers. So just by not doing that, the country will be much better off.”
Editor’s Note:
Since this article was first written, the petition launched by Ash Smith and Windrush Against Sewage Pollution, calling for a referendum on the future ownership of England’s water industry, has now passed 123,000 signatures, enough to trigger consideration for debate in Parliament.
For readers who are angry about sewage pollution, rising bills, weak regulation, and the continued failure to restore Britain’s rivers, there is still time to sign the petition and help demonstrate the strength of public feeling on the issue before it closes in October.
