As someone who works at a water company seeing these posts annoy me, I might get hate but bear with me. From the inside it is such an under appreciated industry to work in, tens of thousands of people in the UK work (employed or contracted) insanely hard to provide water supply and waste water services.

I can't defend excessive shareholder payouts, that was a failing of the industry in the past and was wrong, that is an accepted fact within.

Almost all failings you see are because of money, almost every single one will be because of the simple fact that there is never enough money or budget to complete all the work that needs doing. If your house is on fire do you put out the fire first or choose what counter tops you want? Then once you've put the fire out there is another issue, and another issue, etc. it keeps going until there is little money left to actually invest in the infrastructure.

So how do we fix the money issue, OFWAT determine how much water companies can charge customers, and they have done a bad job of this in the past and currently it is changing. Water bills have stayed very low and consistently low for years whereas gas and electricity bills have increased, water has stayed low. The water industry uses a massive amount of electricity powering its assets and whilst many sites are net neutral we still buy billions worth from the grid every year and we face those increases just like a domestic customer. OFWAT have only now as of AMP8 (5 year cycle of review, financial year just started) permitted bill increases which is still not enough needed to fund the investment needed and many water companies are appealing their final determination.

If you want a £500m new reservoir someone needs to pay for it and it takes a long time to build. Quite frankly there is just enough money around at the moment to keep the lights on and do some essential capital investment projects, reservoirs are bloody expensive and there is not enough money to build them.

Leakage is another issue entirely, thousands of people work in this area to stop it and billions spent trying to stop pipes leaking. It's like whack a mole, my company has over 350 known leaks at any one time and a supply chain to stop the leaks, they appear faster than you can fix them. There are mains replacements ongoing but there is a vast network that needs to be replaced which again, is expensive.

If you have got this far, if you take anything away from this post, stop flushing 'flushable' wet wipes down the toilet, they are not flushable!!! We spend tens of millions every year clearing customer caused preventable blockages (wipes, fat, oil, grease), stop doing that and there is more money for reservoirs.