United Utilities, the region’s favourite (only) water utility of North West England, is responding to the national outrage at the state of our water resources which has most recently been stirred up by the Channel 4 docudrama Dirty Business. They are at the beginning of a five-year plan, involving £13bn of investments to improve water quality, upgrade the resilience of the network and reduce the number of sewage overflows.
Good news
Some of these investments, in places like Barrow, Wigan and Skelmersdale are already coming on stream.
Our largest ever environmental investment programme
- Improving the quality of our rivers by reducing storm overflow spills by 60% over the decade to 2030
- Protecting and enhancing over 500km of rivers and improving our bathing waters and shellfish beds
- Strengthening our network against increased rainfall to reduce flooding of homes and businesses
- Working with local authorities to separate rainwater from our systems so we build more resilient communities as we all respond to the impacts of climate change such as flooding
There are signs of progress being made. North West Bylines has been tracking the performance of United Utilities since the Environment Agency began releasing annual data on the number and duration of storm overflows. These occur by design to prevent sewage from backing up into people’s houses in times of extreme weather but, as we now know, this happens far more often than it should. This leads to sewage entering streams, rivers, estuaries and the sea without being treated.
2025 shows a distinct improvement in both the number and the duration of United Utilities storm overflows according to data from the annual Event Duration Monitoring (EDM) published by the Environment Agency, but to what extent is this improvement due to changes in rainfall from year to year?
Raindrops keep falling on my head
The North West of England is one of the wetter parts of the country as we all know. And storm overflows must be linked to rainfall, since overflows are due to the amount of water exceeding the capacity of the system. Now we have six years of data, is it possible to answer the question: “Is United Utilities actually improving”?
Fortunately the UK Met Office publishes a regional breakdown of rainfall data. These charts are based on their data for England NW/Wales N region. The first chart is the total rainfall and the second is the number of days with measurable rainfall.
A simple comparison of Figures 1 and 2 with Figure 3 shows an obvious similarity in the pattern of data. The amount of rain changes, and the number and duration of spills rises and falls in the same pattern.
The key question then, is how many spills, of what duration, are being triggered by each mm of rainfall over time? Are United Utilities doing better now than they were back in 2020 when this scrutiny started?
If United Utilities were achieving nothing, one would expect these two graphs to be basically flat, which is clearly not the case. In conclusion – following a few years of fairly marginal improvements, United Utilities is beginning to demonstrate significant progress in addressing storm overflows.
The not so good news …
United Utilities continues to be one of the less well performing water companies. High rainfall and too many combined sewers (sewage and rain in the same pipe) are usually given as the explanation.
But the really bad news …
You are now paying for these improvements through significantly increased charges for water. The estimated annual charge for a metered water supply has increased by over 40% in the last two years. This is part of a deliberate policy imposed by Ofwat, the water industry regulator, to push the water companies to rectify several years of under investment, in return this allows them to front load the cost onto consumers. Their five-year plan for United Utilities calls for
- A 60% reduction in storm overflow spills on 2021 levels
- A 30% reduction in total pollution incidents
- A 40% reduction in internal sewer flooding events
- Funded by a 32% increase in revenue (above inflation) by 2030. It appears that United Utilities have already imposed this increase.
Political pressure to keep water bills down is now replaced with the need to deal with public anger over water quality and the performance of our water companies. We, the consumers, are footing the bill.
