Water companies need flexibility and lower compliance costs, not overzealous regulation that will drive private investment away, says Kitty Thompson

Sewage has dominated the environmental conversation for years. Responding to public pressure, successive governments have lumbered water companies with more and more regulatory burdens in an attempt to show that they are tackling the issue. So why is this problem of poor water quality not going away?

As the water quality debate has grown in toxicity, the flexibility of water companies has diminished over time, replaced with an overly prescriptive approach that sees water companies submit a staggering 53,000 pages of plans and spend over £250m on the most recent price review process alone. Piling regulations onto water companies is only making it harder for them to solve the problems they’ve been tasked with.

A lot of the blame can and should be laid at the feet of

© City A.M.