BRITAIN’S biggest water firm, Thames Water, has just awarded its chief executive Chris Weston a pay rise that has pushed his salary to £1.16 million a year.
Along with Weston, top bosses, described as ‘key management personnel’ in the company were handed out over £4.09 million in bonuses as part of its so-called ‘management retention plan’.
These obscene amounts of money have been awarded to the bosses of the privatised water company at a time when it is drowning under the weight of a massive debt of £18.5 billion, up from the £16.8 billion last reported.
This week, Thames Water admitted it only had enough cash to last until the end of the year.
Questioned about this massive increase, Weston said the board ‘offered it to me. I accepted. I absolutely think the pay rise is deserved.’
He added: ‘At Thames, we have to be able to attract the right quality of talent and experience to be able to run and lead a company in an extremely difficult situation.’
Workers and youth struggling to live on minimum wages will have no difficulty in judging what qualities the hedge funds who own Thames Water are looking for in its bosses.
Among these qualities is the ability to run rings around the Labour government, admittedly not a difficult job, given its commitment to being a business friendly government. Labour introduced a ban on performance-related bonuses for water industry bosses unless environmental targets are hit.
The company admitted in its annual report it has failed to meet targets set by the industry regulator Ofwat for reducing leakage and it recorded 386 pollution incidents in 2025 while customer complaints over water meters increased by 126%.
Despite all these flagrant breaches, the company granted its chief executive and fellow board members massive pay increases, claiming they were ‘compliant’ because they were granted before the bonus ban was introduced.
Labour’s Environment Secretary Emma Reynolds said: ‘It’s outrageous that one of the worst performing water companies is handing out bonuses and inflation-busting pay rises to its executives. It flies in the face of basic fairness, and the British public are right to be furious.’
Liberal Democrat MP, head of the environmental committee, Alistair Carmichael put it more bluntly, saying: ‘It is the corporate equivalent of blowing a raspberry, while sticking two fingers up to the government.’
Since the water industry was privatised in 1989, the private companies have made fortunes out of ‘sticking two fingers up’ to governments while treating the working class with contempt, using their control over water supplies to siphon off vast profits and ignoring all pledges to invest in crumbling infrastructure.
Thames Water was owned by the Australian bank Macquarie along with a collection of foreign pension funds for ten years from 2006.
In that time, these owners took around £2.7 billion in dividends, paid for out of the pockets of working people in the south east of England.
Today, the company is owned by a group of institutional investors, including funds from Canada, Australia and the Netherlands.
Thames Water returned a profit of £113 million for the 12 months to the end of March thanks to the decision by Ofwat to allow the company to push up the bills for its 16 million customers.
Andy Burnham, soon to be installed as Labour Prime Minister, has said that public ownership of water companies ‘would be considered’ and that Thames Water ‘should be nationalised’.
The previous Starmer government reneged on similar election pledges, claiming that it would cost £90 billion and ‘impose a huge burden’ on public finances.
The time has come for the working class to reject all these ‘should be’ vague promises from Burnham and demand that the TUC act by calling a general strike to bring down the Labour government replacing it with a workers government.
A workers government will take back control of water along with nationalising all the major industries and banks without compensation and placing them under the control of the working class building a socialist planned economy for the benefit of all, not the profit of the capitalist class.
