UK gov lies about Scottish Water exposed
The UK’s former environment secretary risked “misleading the public” by repeatedly attacking Scotland’s water quality and insisting it was inferior to England’s, a watchdog has ruled.
Believe in Scotland reported last month that UK Environment Secretary Steve Reed stated - wrongly - that publicly owned Scottish water was performing worse than England’s scandal-hit private firms. His lies were platformed unchallenged by Channel Four News - which did not fact-check or correct the misleading claims.
Reed later repeated his claims in the House of Commons and in letters to the Scottish government and MP Stephen Flynn.
Reed was reported to the UK statistics authority, which has now rebuked him for using bogus statistics to back up his attacks on Scottish Water. The Authority concluded: “We consider that these statements lacked enough transparency about their sources to be verified, and that the broad evidence did not support them.”
Reed is not the only Unionist politician or news outlet to make these misleading claims. However, this episode marks a change in the position of the Labour Party. In the past, Labour has been a big supporter of keeping water in public hands - most notably, they backed Scotland’s united front to successfully oppose the privatisation of water in Scotland by Conservative governments in the 1990s.
Scottish Water provides better outcomes
Scottish Water is a publicly owned utility company that provides water and wastewater services in Scotland. England’s water system was privatised in the 1980s and is now owned by 10 private firms.
Scottish Water responded to Reed’s comments. "Scottish Water is the UK's top performing water company and most trusted utility in the UK according to the Customer Service Institute. In addition to producing world-class drinking water, the independent regulator, Sepa, says 87% of water bodies in Scotland are either good or excellent, the highest proportion ever.”
The Independent Water Commission, led by Sir Jon Cunliffe, found many more of Scotland’s water bodies are of good ecological status than England or Wales:
- 66% in Scotland are of good ecological status
- 29.9% in Wales
- 16.1% in England
Water Charges Are Diverging
- The average annual charge in Scotland this year is around £450.
- In England, it’s over £600,
- In London, around £640.
The extra cost to English households will not be spent on improving the system, but simply on servicing debt. The private firms used the guaranteed revenue from customers’ water charges to borrow money, which they then paid out in dividends instead of investing.
Scotland has a more progressive way of helping the poorest households with water bills, based on their council tax band.
In England, shareholders have “invested less than nothing.”
“Since privatisation, shareholders have literally invested less than nothing,” wrote David Hall of the University of Greenwich in a report for the trade union Unison.
That calculation goes like this: by 2023, England’s ten privatised water companies collectively owed more than £64 billion in debt, having extracted dividends of over £77 billion. In other words, they paid themselves not only every penny they borrowed since privatisation, but much of what they owned beforehand too.
Those numbers come from a fascinating investigation by Oliver Bullough in Prospect magazine (perhaps the basis of his next book?), where he argues that “investors” is hardly the right word for companies that have sucked out every penny they could.
The English model is so uniquely bad that no other developed country has fully privatised its water supply.
Investment in Scottish Water
Challenges are many :
- Climate change is bringing unpredictable weather patterns, increased rainfall and flood risk.
- Conventional sewage techniques don’t remove pollutants like forever chemicals, nano-plastics and medication residues from the water that goes into the sea.
- New housing puts pressure on water and sewage infrastructure.
- Scotland is a country with a low population density. That makes infrastructure investment relatively more expensive per head, so every penny has to go literally further.
There is always a need for more money - however, there is funding going into the system here.
There’s a huge tranche of investment coming down the pipeline for Scottish Water — up to £9 billion will be spent from 2027–33 to improve wastewater management and climate-change resilience.
The main basis for the misleading claim that Scotland’s water is bad is the allegation that Scottish Water doesn’t monitor combined sewer overflows (CSOs).
What Are CSOs?
Victorian cities built combined sewers that carry both wastewater and rainwater. When heavy rain falls in a short period - something that’s happening more often with climate change - the network can’t swallow the surge.
Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) act as safety valves: they spill highly diluted, screened stormwater into rivers to stop homes and streets from flooding. That’s not “dumping by design” - it’s the last resort of a 19th-century system dealing with 21st-century rain.
The fix involves a mix of storage tanks, smarter pipes, and blue-green infrastructure that keeps rain out of the sewers in the first place.
Does Scotland Fail to Monitor Its CSOs?
Initially, Scotland made a strategic decision to target spending where risk was highest. That meant monitoring only a proportion of CSOs - perhaps one per area instead of every single one. The figure that is often quoted is 4%.
That’s changed fast over the last couple of years - the percentage being monitored is now about a third. Scottish Water has installed more than 1,000 monitors across its network, with more being added every year. There’s a live public map here showing what’s happening at these outlets in near real time.
(Scottish Water is also working with the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency on a £500 million programme to identify and improve problem areas.)
Scotland’s CSO monitoring is extensive and intentional. It is not credible to argue that it is not picking up vast amounts of overflow.
Breaches that incur a low fine are commercial no-brainers for the private firms
Scotland doesn’t have private companies gaming the system for profit, which you can see in England’s repeated breaches and the multi-million-pound fines regulators are dishing out in a last-ditch effort to make wrongdoing less of a profit/loss no brainer.
Fines tell the same story
Scottish Water incurred just one fine of £6,000 in the last year for breaking environmental regulations last year - compare that with the multi-million fines for egregious and repeated flouting of the rules by several of England’s privatised water businesses.
Only 30 swimming beaches are monitored
SEPA monitors bathing quality at 30 beaches where people swim, every day in the summer and publishes the data. Clearly, they could monitor more, and some people are angry that their local beach isn’t on the list. But there is a cost to doing this, so it is a balance.
Perhaps SEPA could set a bar - eg - to monitor every beach where more than 4 people swim on an average day.
Also, when bacteria levels spike in bathing water after heavy rain, it’s not always the sewer. Dog waste, gulls, farm runoff, and road wash all contribute. Investigators can use DNA testing techniques to find out what it is.
For example, at Portobello last summer, the bathing water briefly failed tests. SEPA investigated and found that it wasn’t coming from the sewage system.
Why Is Scotland’s Water Still in Public Hands?
In the 1980s and 1990s, Governments that Scotland didn’t vote for privatised: electricity, gas, the national grid, railways, harbours, the Post Office, and more.
After the 1992 general election, there was rising anger in Scotland about yet another Westminster government the country hadn’t voted for taking high-handed decisions on Scotland’s behalf with no democratic legitimacy.
When that government - with only 11 of 72 Scottish MPs - tried to privatise water, there was unified resistance.
The opposition was demonstrated in a referendum held by Strathclyde Regional Authority, where 97 per cent voted No to privatisation - on a 71% turnout. Then-Labour MP for East Lothian John Home Robertson said:
“The Secretary of State for Scotland prefaced his remarks by saying that we had to return to the issues of state in Scotland today and consider this controversial issue.
“I have news for the Secretary of State for Scotland: this is not a remotely controversial issue. It is one of very few issues about which it would be impossible to start an argument in the streets, households, pubs, clubs or anywhere else in Scotland today. There is no support anywhere in Scotland for the proposal to take the water and sewerage industries out of the control of democratically accountable local authorities.”
Strength in unity
The lesson from the story of Scotland’s water is that when Scotland is united, it wins, The UK Government was forced to back down on this - although it forced through privatisations in many other areas. As a result of this strong stance, Scotland still runs water for service and the environment; England’s companies run it for profit.
Scotland can be confident that when it stands together and demands independence from the UK, it will succeed. That will allow it to take decisions over Scotland’s resources and utilities that benefit ordinary people.
This is the moment to relight the fire for Scottish independence but we need your help to do it: https://www.believeinscotland.org/crowdfunder2025
