In the pipeline Floods, explosions and asbestos among risks from crumbling assets

When Sarah Bentley and Sarah Albon met at Beckton sewage treatment works in east London, the choice of location was designed to underline Thames Water's predicament.

- Anna Isaac

The site is Europe's largest sewage treatment operation, with Grade II-listed parts of the site dating to the 1860s. It is now connected with the new Thames Tideway super-sewer, but insiders say several parts of the site are simply crumbling. The site is also riddled with asbestos.

At the meeting in July 2022, the then chiefs of Thames Water and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) discussed how assets at the water company had deteriorated so much that some now posed a risk to public safety.

Bentley was trying to garner support for negotiations with the regulator, Ofwat, which had been resolute that Thames could not increase water bills unless services improved.

This presented a catch-22, according to insiders, as poor performance was symptomatic of decades of underinvestment, as well as years of financial mismanagement that could not be fixed without a substantial injection of fresh cash.

Bentley's gamble was that convincing the health and safety watchdog would help to drive home the urgency of the request.

She painted a picture of gas digesters that could explode in densely populated areas and near train lines, and of creaking trunk mains that passed through or near the most sensitive streets in Westminster and could flood basements in minutes, potentially drowning people living in basement flats.

Albon was sympathetic to the risks involved, according to sources familiar with the meeting, but in her view it was a matter for Thames and Ofwat to resolve.

The HSE had penalised Thames before: a death in 2010 at another big Thames site, Coppermills in Walthamstow, resulted in a fine of £300,000 from the HSE in 2014, and an incident in 2017, when three workers were caught in a flood of sewage while working in a tunnel, resulted in a fine of the same sum.