Thames Water's operation is simply not good enough

Deeply in debt and proposing huge price hikes, the troubled company is holding customers to ransom

- James Moore

The latest results from Thames Water are difficult to wade through. Despite the company declaring it had made “solid progress” on its transformation and turnaround, it’s not exactly clear what “progress” means in this instance.

Companies like to report several different measures of profit, and Thames Water – which, remember, still needs to find £3bn to survive past March – says its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation, increased by 14 per cent to £715m, when compared with the same period in 2023. It also declared an “underlying” profit after tax of £190m, after throwing £427m of “exceptional costs” into the mix.

However, it is when you get to the statutory number (the real number with nothing left out) that reality bites. Thames Water lost £190m – a marked deterioration from the previous year’s £172m profit.

But that’s not all: the company also reported a stunning 40 per cent increase in total pollution incidents, blamed on “record rainfall”. As we live in a country where it rains a lot, though, it should not come as a surprise – least of all to a water firm.

The company also complained about its “ageing” assets on four separate occasions, neglecting to mention that they are only ageing because it hasn’t invested sufficiently in their modernisation.

Here’s something that isn’t even darkly amusing: it paid out £770,000 in bonuses.