Water companies in England and Wales lost more than 1 trillion litres through leaks last year | Water industry

Water companies in England and Wales lost more than a trillion litres of water last year due to leaks that observer can betray.

The figures, based on the companies' 2023-24 annual performance reports, show that millions of litres of water were leaking every day.

Thames Water performed worst, losing 570.4 megalitres of water every day last year, a total of more than 200 billion litres, or almost a quarter of the entire water supply. One megalitre is one million litres.

The company said in its 2023-24 annual report that this was “the lowest leakage in our history.”

Thames Water was placed under special measures in July and has debts of over £15 billion. In June, the company announced that it had £19 billion worth of assets, including pipes, processing plants and reservoirs, that had failed and now posed a “risk to public safety, water supplies and the environment”. United Utilities lost the second largest amount of water of all companies – more than 175 billion litres in one year – followed by Severn Trent, which leaked almost 139 billion litres.

Yorkshire Water released 94.9 billion litres, Welsh Water 90.8 billion litres, Anglian Water 66.4 billion litres and Affinity Water 56 billion litres.

Britain's water supply is under increasing pressure. The Environment Agency estimates that by 2050, Britain will need five billion more litres of water a day to meet demand. It predicts that London could run out of water within 25 years.

Feargal Sharkey, clean rivers campaigner, said:[Water companies] We need to get a handle on the leaks and get them under control because we are running out of water and we need to save every drop we can.”

He added that industry and regulator Ofwat were not prioritising companies investing money in tackling leaks as this would prove more costly in the short term than simply pumping more water out of Britain's water systems.

“This brings us back to the same epicenter as with wastewater: a lack of political control and a complete failure of the regulatory system,” Sharkey said. “These companies were run on the basis [of] “Minimum costs to maximize profits, regardless of the impact on the environment and the consumer.”

David Hall, visiting professor at Greenwich University's Public Services International Research Unit, said: “The job of water systems is to get fresh water from sources to taps. If a trillion litres of water are lost every year, it is because the pipes are not adequately maintained. This means that investments that could and should have been made are not being made.”

Hall added that the decision in recent years not to invest enough in solving the problem “makes no sense from an environmental point of view and also makes no sense for the entire supply system” because in the long run, investing in infrastructure “means that the costs for consumers are lower in the future”.

The criticism comes amid growing outrage over the scale of raw sewage being discharged by water companies into British rivers and seas. In March, it was revealed that England's water companies discharged raw sewage for a total of 3.6 million hours in 2023, more than double the amount released the year before.

The country's water companies paid out £2.5 billion in dividends to shareholders in the two years to March 2023, bringing total distributions to shareholders since their privatisation in 1991 to £78 billion.

In response to criticism of a lack of investment in infrastructure, some companies have announced new rounds of investment. These include major projects such as Southern Water's plans to spend £1.2 billion building a plant to recycle wastewater from the sewerage system and turn it into drinking water.

Sharkey was cynical about such projects, arguing that the industry was “clinging to any straw that it believes can keep it afloat for five minutes longer.”

A spokesman for the water industry's trade association Water UK said leakages had reached “the lowest level ever” and stressed that companies had “proposed to invest a record £105 billion to ensure the security of our water supplies in the future and reduce leakages by a third by 2030”.

A Thames Water spokesman said it would renovate “112 kilometres of main pipes within London” and that the aim was to reduce leaks by 23 per cent over the next three years.

They stressed that a third of the leaks in pipes were in customers' homes and that the introduction of smart meters “would play a crucial role in securing future water supplies”.