Today two reports set out how Yorkshire Water is continuing to fail. The public do not have trust in Yorkshire Water’s ability to deliver projects and cannot believe that the regulators have allowed our bills to be increased in the face of such incompetence. The responses from Yorkshire Water Chair to our recent complaints persists in prioritising the CEOs leadership of finances, enabling significant financial gains by the shareholders whilst our rivers, lakes and seas suffer. The public have little say in how our water sector is organised and governed but we demand our elected government steps up and recognises that more of the same privatised system will not deliver a clean water or water security whilst profit trumps the environment.

Ofwat reports that Yorkshire Water is lagging behind, along with Thames and Southern.

The Environment Agency reports Yorkshire Water’s performance near the bottom of the league table at 2 stars, citing the under delivery against agreed water quality improvement projects.

 

 

This is what we know about Yorkshire Water’s performance despite the Chair writing to us with these assertions when we sent a letter of outrage about Ms Shaw’s 1.3M additional salary payments:

“Nicola Shaw’s leadership

Nicola was brought in to lead this long-term transformation. Her leadership has been instrumental in securing over £500 million of new investment from shareholders, with a further £600 million committed by 2027, and in strengthening engagement with regulators and stakeholders. She has also chosen to decline bonuses in 2022/23 and 2024/25, recognising that remuneration must reflect performance and that trust must be earned.”

She says that performance is improving using this example

“We reduced leakage by 15% between 2020 and 2025” (thats down to 260m litres of water a day) “and are targeting a further 12% reduction by 2030” (so that reduces leaks to to 228m litres a day). Note the EA target is a reduction of 30% 2032. This is hardly stretching.

Yorkshire Water’s ACTUAL Performance

  • Last year Yorkshire Water was found to have mis-managed wastewater treatment works and wider sewer networks including their operation of storm overflows. Currently subject to a £40m (reduced from 47m) redress package,
    • £150,000 for polluting the River Don,
    • £19.85m for missing targets on customer satisfaction, supply interruption and drinking water, and
    • £1.6m for polluting a Bradford watercourse.
  • Yorkshire Water is also still under criminal investigation by the Environment Agency.
  • YW serious pollution incidents almost tripled in 2024, totalling one fifth of the national incidents.
  • Yorkshire Water was responsible for at least 68164 sewage overflows in 2024, On average 186.8 times a day. These lasted for 430,262 hours That’s 49.8 years! Affecting 1,949 different locations across their service area’ (https://top-of-the-poops.org/company/yorkshire-water).
  • The EFRA committee notes that “In July, the Environment Agency downgraded Yorkshire Water from three stars to two. It pointed out an unacceptable and disappointing record.” (Hansard February 2025).
  • At the same time Ms Shaw appeared in front of the EFRA Committee with the Director of Finance, stating that Yorkshire Water’s asset health is poor, whilst Yorkshire Water reports that in the previous PR19 Yorkshire Water underspent its allowance by 31%, but had also been recording profits year on year.
  • YW Yorkshire Water currently leaks 260m litres of water a day and its recent drought permit was to extract 120m litres of water a day

In 2024 number of spills in Yorkshire was 68,164 with a total hour spill of 430,263 hours.

84.4% were attributed to ‘hydraulic capacity failures’ (insufficient capacity in the network i.e. spills not from ‘exceptional circumstances’ nor ‘asset maintenance’).

This means there is not enough conveyance or storage capacity in the sewage network to cope with wastewater and typical rainfall.