Water company bosses have taken home more than £100m in salaries and bonuses over the last 10 years despite overseeing a major sewage crisis in the country’s waterways, new figures reveal.

Vote Tory to “Hold water companies to account”? – Owl doesn’t think so!

Richard Vaughan inews.co.uk 

Research into the annual accounts of each of the water utility firms since 2013 shows that nine of the chief executives have paid themselves £114m, including £61m in bonuses and benefits.

It comes as the issue of the dumping of raw sewage in the UK’s rivers, lakes and seas has become a national scandal and a key battleground in the election campaign.

According to figures shared with i, among the highest earners is Liv Garfield, chief executive of Severn Trent Water, who took home £3.9m in the 2021/22 financial year and £3.2m in the 2022/23 financial year.

The research by Labour analysed the annual accounts of each of the nine major water companies, showing the total remuneration of each of the chief executives, as well as breaking it down by salary, bonuses, benefits and incentives.

It comes as the party released separate NHS data that showed more than 10,000 people have been hospitalised since 2019 as a result of waterborne diseases as both Sir Keir Starmer’s party and the Liberal Democrats ramped up attacks on the “Conservative sewage scandal”.

Labour highlighted new analysis of NHS hospital admissions data showing the number of people diagnosed with diseases transmitted via waterborne infection nearly doubled during the past two years, rising to a record high of 3,261 cases last year.

The steepest increase was in the number of typhoid fever cases, which doubled to more than 603.

Typhoid fever is typically “uncommon” in the UK and more prevalent in parts of the world that have poor sanitation and limited access to clean water, according to the NHS.

Data from the Environment Agency for 2023 shows a 54 per cent increase in the number of sewage spills compared with 2022, and a 13 per cent increase compared with 2020.

There is growing anger over the polluted state of England’s rivers and coasts, with no single stretch of river classed as being in a good overall condition, and hundreds of pollution risk alerts issued for popular beaches around the country last year.

Labour shadow environment secretary Steve Reed said the NHS figures were “sickening”, adding the Tories just looked the other way while water companies pumped a tidal wave of raw sewage into our rivers, lakes and seas, putting the nation’s health at risk.

Meanwhile, the Lib Dems set out a plan to save chalk streams, which the party’s analysis suggested suffered nearly 49,000 hours worth of sewage dumping in 2023 – more than double the previous year.

The streams, which spring from underground chalk reservoirs, are one of the world’s rarest freshwater habitats and are found primarily in the south of England and Yorkshire.

Sir Ed Davey’s party repeated its proposal to launch a public consultation within the first 100 days of the next government, which could see rivers and lakes awarded a new Blue Flag status to protect them from sewage dumping.

Labour has pledged to ban water bosses bonuses if they fail to stop sewage spills in sufficient time, and will even bring in criminal charges for executives who persistently fail to meet environmental targets.

The Conservatives said in February that they too will block payouts for water chiefs if they commit criminal acts of water pollution, starting with bonuses from April 2024.

The party has also insisted it has quadrupled the number of water company inspections, meaning 4,000 inspections will take place a year by April 2025, rising to 10,000 a year from April 2026.

The Conservatives have been approached for comment.

Severn Trent water has also been approached for comment.

Four days ago the Telegraph reported a one-off Survation poll projecting a Reform win in the new Exmouth & Exeter East constituency with Labour and the Conservatives tying for second place.

By way of contrast, three weeks ago, Electoral Calculus predicted that this new seat would be a straight fight placing Paul Arnott, Lib Dem, just 3 points behind the Tories, with all other candidates trailing far behind. Since then successive polls have narrowed the gap, on 14 June to 1 point, and then, the latest a day ago, actually places Paul Arnott narrowly in the lead.

Are all these polls equally reliable?

Martin Shaw looks under the bonnet of MRP constituency by constituency polls.

Martin Shaw 

Polling company YouGov has set alarm bells ringing with its projection that Nigel Farage will win Clacton with over 40% of the vote, prompting Alastair Campbell to call for Labour and the Conservatives to combine to block him – while others called on the Lib Dems and Greens to back Labour in the seat.

A panic had already been triggered by a Survation projection that Reform UK could win seven seats. And then Farage’s collaborator Matthew Goodwin popped up with a ‘poll’ that showed Reform nationally nine points ahead of the Conservatives.

It’s right to take the projections from independent polling companies seriously, if not Goodwin’s. Clearly Farage could win his seat, he should be blocked and tactical voting for a real alternative (not the Conservatives who are largely indistinguishable from Reform) is urgently needed. Yet we need to be clear that these are not conventional polls: they are projections, which although they use polling data, are based on complex “MRP” (multi-level regression and post-stratification) statistical models, and it is very difficult to evaluate them sensibly.

As polling expert Matt Singh points out, there is an almost complete “lack of transparency”; none of the pollsters has “yet even listed their variables either for turnout or vote choice”, let alone explained fully how they combine the granular demographic data which is MRPs’ unique selling point with assumptions about political behaviour.

One of the more transparent pollsters, Ipsos Mori, specifically warns: “we would encourage readers to not place too much certainty into specific point estimates.” Yet this is what even widely publicised and reputable tactical voting sites are doing.

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The Exmouth case

My own alarm bells were triggered by Survation’s call, since their ‘Reform’ seats included – of all places – the new constituency of Exmouth & Exeter East, which is mostly the old East Devon seat, next door to where I live. While Reform will undoubtedly garner some support, locals reported that it had hardly been seen in the constituency, and no one credited its projected first place.

Reform’s candidate Garry Sutherland appears even by its standards to be distinctly lacking in charm – he has a conviction for kicking a dog and has shared David Icke videos – and his behaviour at a recent hustings confirmed the impression this information gives.

Sceptics like British Future director, Sunder Katwala, were quick to suggest on X, formerly Twitter, that the source of Survation’s apparently rogue prediction for Exmouth was that its MRP model was finding it difficult to cope with the very unusual result in East Devon in 2019, when a left-leaning Independent, Claire Wright, was the main opposition to the Conservatives, winning 40% of the vote.

This difficulty had already caused one important tactical site, StoptheTories.vote, to pull a Labour recommendation for Exmouth based partly on MRP projections.

This might not have mattered too much – none of the other projections agree that Reform is ahead in Exmouth and some like Electoral Calculus suggest that the Lib Dems, not Labour, are the challenger.

However, Best for Britain’s Get Voting, the most heavily promoted tactical voting site, is using Survation’s projection and using it to urge Labour voting in Exmouth – which may have the effect of helping the Conservatives cling on. This case therefore brings to the fore some major concerns about how MRPs, which are widely publicised both by their producers and the TV sites, could perversely skew tactical voting.

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MRPs and tactical voting advice

The problem with using MRPs for tactical voting is not only that they are routinely described as ‘polling’ on Get Voting and other tactical sites, when they are not polls but statistical projections. It is also that their primary purpose is not to guide tactical voting, but to provide more accurate overall projections of the overall arithmetic in the next parliament. 

MRPs have gained prominence because of the increasing fragmentation of the British political scene, with greater regional and local variation in how swings in public opinion affect constituency results and hence the parties’ national tallies.

The various MRPs use different models, and although their claims for greater precision than traditional polling might seem suspect – they currently offer a huge range of possible Labour majorities – they can claim modest successes in their first major outings, the 2017 and 2019 elections, and they are at least an attempt to deal with the reality that British elections are decided by 650 separate constituency contests.

The problem with MRPs is that while in the aggregate, they could improve predictions of the electoral outcome – although by how much is debatable – they may not be especially reliable in predicting individual constituencies, especially where something that doesn’t figure in their models has happened. They use impressively large national samples: Survation’s most recent had 42,000 respondents, but that works out at only 65 people per seat, and the raw local data is not published, but processed via the model.

A senior pollster at one of the major firms pointed out to me that their MRPs aren’t designed to provide constituency-level advice and are published with health warnings. Another quickly admitted that his MRP could produce “surprising” results in what he called “idiosyncratic” seats.

Yet while tactical sites are ultimately responsible for how they use the data and voters for how they interpret it, pollsters can’t shrug off their responsibilities here – they produce projections in the knowledge of how tactical voting sites and voters, who will mostly understand little about them, could use them. Indeed some polls, like Survation’s for Best for Britain, are even commissioned with this in mind. 

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When local knowledge is an ‘anomaly’

The irony is that while MRPs work by producing local projections, many don’t appear to use much local political knowledge apart from the result of the last general election. Indeed many MRPs are even allergic to local knowledge, since it complicates their models.

In the current campaign, many have failed to adequately incorporate – or at all – obviously relevant political data which is far more recent than the 2019 election, like the results of the by-elections which have upended politics in dozens of local areas, and of council elections. Rather, they seem bent on forcing tactical sites and voters alike to somehow compute the significance of such new information for themselves. 

I know this because the constituency I live in, Honiton & Sidmouth, is mostly the old Tiverton & Honiton seat where the Lib Dems famously overturned a huge Conservative majority in 2022’s ‘porngate’ by-election.

Labour had been a poor second in the 2019 election, but were squeezed to a tiny 3.7% in the by-election, while the winning Lib Dem came from third to get 53%. Yet many MRPs and TV sites, basing their projections on the 2019 result despite the startling more recent data from 2022, were still calling Honiton and Sidmouth for Labour at the start of the general election campaign. 

Indeed even on 15 June, Survation projected Labour to get more votes than the Lib Dems in Honiton & Sidmouth, which flies in the face of what everyone on the ground knows – even Labour themselves, who are not campaigning in the seat and have sent their activists off to Plymouth.

When I talked to a pollster about MRPs not taking account of by-election results, the response was that it would introduce an “anomaly” into the model because not all seats had by-elections. Yet this “anomaly” is a crucial political reality in so many seats – how can the data it has created not even be acknowledged?

Survation’s Honiton & Sidmouth projection obviously posed a problem for Best for Britain’s Get Voting, its tactical voting partner site, which they solved by manually overriding the projection and recommending a Lib Dem vote on the ground of the new MP’s ‘incumbency’.

Yet Get Voting still publishes the Survation projection with its frankly absurd figures, alongside this recommendation, potentially confusing any voter who looks at it.

The reductio ad absurdum of this approach is how many MRPs and tactical sites are treating Exmouth and Exeter East. In this case, they are not merely disregarding the fact that a party got a deposit-losing vote, as Labour did in the Tiverton and Honiton by-election.

Rather, since they have difficulty in factoring the Independent’s 40% vote in 2019 into their predictions, many have actually used the tiny Labour vote of 4.5% in 2019 to help project Labour as ahead of the Lib Dems (who had an even tinier 2.8%) in 2024.

Both parties had been almost completely squeezed, but these miserable results are still steering flawed MRP projections and tactical advice almost five years later.

Get Voting actually has a ‘local factors’ option for override Survation’s projection, but they haven’t used it for Exmouth & Exeter East despite its obvious idiosyncrasy.

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What should be done?

Tactical voting is an essential way for voters to ensure, under Britain’s flawed electoral system, that they get the result they want – in this election, so many people in every seat want to take their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ensure that they no longer have a Conservative MP.

Tactical voting sites rightly put a lot of money and effort into producing advice, but they need to get it right, since if they don’t, they could help split the anti-Conservative vote and help some undeserving Conservatives cling on. 

In the end, it is difficult to know how far the problem of skewed advice extends, although it probably affects a large swathe of the South where, even without by-elections, the Lib Dems have re-emerged in the last three years, making weak Labour second places in 2019 doubtful guides to 2024 voting.

It will also be a particular concern in the seats in which significant Independents are standing, such as Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North, Faiza Shaheen in Chingford and Woodford Green – who is given a notional 0.06% by one polling site – and pro-Palestinian candidates.

At this late stage of the game, when postal votes are already being cast on the basis of inadequate information and advice, tactical voting sites should go into damage limitation mode – and the pollsters should help them to do this.

WRITTEN BY

Martin Shaw

The Labour party has been drawing up options for how it could raise money through extra wealth taxes to help rebuild Britain’s public services if it wins the general election, according to sources who have spoken to the Guardian.

Anna Isaac www.theguardian.com

The proposals under consideration include increases in capital gains tax (CGT), first revealed by the Guardian two weeks ago, that could raise £8bn.

Another option under discussion could lead to significant changes to inheritance tax. The measure would make it more difficult to “gift” money and assets, such as farmland, tax free. Together with CGT increases it could raise up to £10bn in revenue, according to one document seen by the Guardian.

A senior Labour source said: “We are starting from ground zero with our public services and infrastructure. We have to show we are serious about borrowing and raising revenue from taxes if investors are going to walk in step with us. These measures are part of unlocking wealth and putting it to work.”

A second senior party source said: “We have to show we are credible when it comes to transforming the country. Fiscal credibility means reforming tax as well as prudent borrowing.”

Before making any decisions, Labour intends to present a range of options to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) for analysis, after gathering costings on individual measures from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

Labour has been under pressure to explain how it will fund its plans for government, and sources admit there is frustration among some senior members of the party about the cautious approach it has taken during the election campaign.

So far, Labour has said it will not raise income tax, national insurance or VAT – and it has ruled out applying CGT to primary residences. It denied that it has arrived at any final decisions over any other measures.

A Labour spokesperson said: “Keir and Rachel have made clear that our priority is growing the economy, not increasing taxes. We have set out fully costed, fully funded plans, with very specific tax loopholes we would close. Nothing in our plans requires any additional tax to be increased.”

In an interview with the Guardian this week, the shadow chancellor denied there were any plans for new revenue-raising in a budget due this autumn. Rachel Reeves said she was focusing on efforts to drive growth rather than “tinkering around with taxes”.

However, sources have made clear that work is already under way to scope new ways of raising money if Keir Starmer becomes the prime minister.

They said a series of draft documents and expert analyses had been worked on throughout the election campaign and circulated among senior officials and shadow ministers.

One Labour memo, seen by the Guardian, was a briefing note that estimated increases to rates of CGT alone could generate £8bn for the Treasury in the long term.

There are also proposals to overhaul inheritance tax, with plans for a consultation that could launch in autumn. These could include radical changes, such as scrapping or updating the rules on agricultural land and business relief.

HMRC could be instructed to prepare figures on a range of options next month, sources said. They would then go to the OBR, which would need 10 weeks to crunch the numbers and share its findings with the Treasury.

The preparatory work suggests a budget could come in early October, as soon as party conferences are complete.

Under the current CGT regime, profits from the sales of second homes or shares in businesses are taxed at a much lower rate than wages.

Some senior figures believe that being more open about plans to raise wealth taxes to transform public services would improve turnout among traditional Labour voters.

The tax options under consideration come amid growing criticism from experts about a “conspiracy of silence” over how the two main parties will afford to fund public services.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said Labour and the Conservatives had not been clear about how they planned to address the “very tight fiscal situation” facing the next government.

The inheritance tax option being looked at involves changes in the rules for the tax on agricultural land and other family businesses, which industry experts regard as “very significant”.

At present, a person can claim up to 100% relief on the inheritance of agricultural land if it is being actively farmed. That has led to concerns that farmland is being snapped up by wealthy people keen to avoid inheritance taxes, and this is driving up prices and shutting out small businesses and farmers.

Some in Labour want to scrap this as well as business relief, which allows a person to pass on a company or shares if it is unlisted with 100% tax relief.

Plans being considered contain a sliding scale of options to weigh up the likely gain for the exchequer, including capping the benefit from agricultural and business relief at £500,000 for each person, rather than scrapping it. In some instances, both forms of relief could be claimed, allowing for a cap of £1m for each person in effect.

This would still raise about £2.3bn by 2029-30, which would be at the end of the OBR’s forecast period if it was introduced in March next year, according to a paper published by the IFS in 2023. The same figure appears in one of the internal Labour documents seen by the Guardian.

Sources said wider changes were also being considered on gifts and inheritance tax. Currently, no inheritance tax is due on gifts if they are made by a person who lives for more than seven years after the gifts are made.

Despite the evident pressures facing councils, the main parties’ manifestos were almost silent on English local government funding (local government funding is a devolved matter in the rest of the UK). This means there is significant uncertainty about exactly how funding for councils will change over the next parliament.

Institute for Fiscal Studies

But new analysis by IFS researchers shows that if demand and above-inflation cost pressures continue to grow in line with recent history, councils could be forced to cut back some areas of service provision. This would be true even if funding from central government was frozen in real terms (rather than being cut alongside other ‘unprotected’ areas) and council tax was increased at 5% per year – equivalent to over 3% a year above inflation, its fastest real-terms rate since the 2001–05 parliament. More deprived areas, which rely more on central government funding relative to council tax, will face the biggest squeeze unless there is a significant redistribution of central government grants towards them. A combination of statutory duties to vulnerable residents and big cuts to more discretionary services during the 2010s means some councils, at least, would struggle to cut back services further – putting them at risk of severe financial distress.

The new report, funded by the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust and the Nuffield Foundation, sets out scenarios for English councils’ funding and spending. Findings include:

• Existing overall spending plans imply that ‘unprotected’ services could be cut by 1.9–3.5% a year in real terms between now and 2028–29. Manifestos give no indication of whether the next government would prioritise council funding (as has been the case since 2019) or cut it by more than average (as was the case in the 2010s).
• The scale of increases in council tax will matter more for councils’ funding given that it makes up a much larger share of their funding (57%) than grants from central government (15%). If council tax increases by around 5% a year in the next parliament – in line with the maximum allowed over the last two years without a referendum – the average Band D rate would be around £600 higher per year in April 2029 than now. After accounting for household inflation, the real-terms increase in council tax bills (averaging just over 3% a year) would be the highest since the 2001–05 parliament (when they averaged 6% a year).
• If grant funding were cut by 2.7% a year in real terms (the mid-point of the range for unprotected services) and council tax increased by 5% per year, English councils’ overall funding would increase by an average of 2.1% a year in real terms, after adjusting for whole-economy inflation. Even under a relatively optimistic scenario where grant funding was frozen in real terms, English councils’ overall funding would increase by an average of 2.5% a year in real terms. The average real-terms increase in overall funding from 2019 to 2024 has been 2.9% a year.
• If demand and cost pressures continue to increase at the same rate as in recent years, analysis by the Local Government Association suggests that real-terms funding increases of around 4.5% a year would be needed to maintain service provision. This means growth in demand and cost pressures would need to almost halve for the change in overall funding to keep pace with these pressures across England as a whole, even with no real-terms cuts to central government grants and with council tax increasing by 5% a year. It is likely that recent high growth in demand and cost pressures will eventually slow down, but when and by how much is far from certain.
• Councils in the most deprived areas are likely to face the most difficult funding situation. For example, if all councils’ grant funding were cut by 2.7% a year in real terms and council tax increased by 5% a year, councils covering the most deprived tenth of areas would see their overall funding increase by just 1.3% a year in real terms, compared with 3.0% a year in the least deprived tenth of areas. To avoid this, there would need to be significant redistribution of grant funding from less deprived to more deprived areas, which may be difficult to implement, especially if overall grant funding is constrained.

Kate Ogden, a Senior Research Economist at IFS and an author of the report, said:

‘Many councils are under clear financial strain. They are struggling to meet the surging demand and cost for services such as children’s and adults’ social care residential placements, special educational needs support and temporary accommodation for the homeless. Unless these pressures slow down significantly and quickly, or the next government gives a big injection of funding to local government, councils will likely need to make cutbacks to some areas of provision. Given that more discretionary services have often seen cuts of 40% or more since 2010, councils may struggle to do this. More could be pushed to the financial brink, like Birmingham, Thurrock and Woking. It is remarkable that the main parties have been silent on how they would address these challenges.’

David Phillips, an Associate Director at IFS and another author of the report, said:

‘With many councils struggling to fund their existing responsibilities, the next government should be particularly careful in ensuring plans are in place for funding any additional responsibilities they are given. This is particularly true for adult social care services, where the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat manifestos made commitments to expand service provision. However, none has identified sufficient funding to fully cover the costs of their proposals. Without additional funding, these reforms would intensify the pressures on councils’ budgets – potentially seeing some existing social care recipients losing support to help pay for expansions of provision to other, typically wealthier individuals, as financial means-tests are relaxed or abolished.’

Anvar Sarygulov, a Research Grants and Programmes Manager at the Nuffield Foundation, said:

‘With increasing demand for social care and other services, the next government needs to think carefully about how it enables councils to meet this demand. Any future funding plans need to consider that councils in more deprived areas are more dependent on central government funding, and that there are already significant inequalities in provision of local services across the country.’

The UK faces the prospect of more polluting US-style “megafarms” under a Labour government, after the party failed to make any manifesto pledges to restrict their growth.

Lucie Heath, Andrew Wasley inews.co.uk

Environmental campaigners have voiced concerns that the main political parties have stayed largely silent on the topic of intensive farming ahead of the election on 4 July. Only the Green Party has a clear pledge to ban factory farming in its manifesto.

The lack of strong policies means the UK is likely to see the continued development of megafarms, which have increased 20 per cent in number since 2016 under successive Conservative governments. They have been associated with river pollution, poor animal welfare and public health problems.

Many are concentrated in a number of small areas, leading to calls for a moratorium on new intensive farms, including from former Tory environment minister Lord Goldsmith.

In April, i and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) revealed how emissions of ammonia – a potentially deadly pollutant – were surging across the UK’s megafarming hotspots, emanating from industrial-scale poultry production.

The silence from Labour – which is on course for a large majority according to the polls – is in contrast to 2018, when it made a pre-election pledge to consult on the expansion of megafarms.

Its manifesto also makes no mention of the farming budget: support for farmers that the industry says is vital if they are to increase sustainable production.

The Conservative Party manifesto vows to increase the farming budget by £1bn over the next parliament, a boost described as “modest” by wildlife charities. However, it makes no mention of restricting megafarms or farm animal welfare.

The Liberal Democrat manifesto does include a number of pledges to maintain animal welfare standards and reduce pollution in farming, but stops short of calling for an end to the expansion of factory farms.

Only the Green Party said it would introduce a ban on new factory farms. It also pledged to enforce regulations on how densely animals can be housed and to forbid the routine use of antibiotics on farm animals – which have both fuelled the spread of drug-resistant diseases.

Clare Oxborrow, food campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “If we are to stop the worst climate change impacts and restore nature, we will need to shift to less meat-intensive, healthier diets and stop the expansion of these damaging mega-farms.

“Elections should be when we grapple with these big issues, not avoid them.”

Claire Palmer, director of Animal Justice Project, told i and TBIJ that the lack of political commitment to reducing the expansion of megafarms was “deeply disappointing”.

She added: “Politicians must use their authority to halt the spread of megafarms immediately and demonstrate their support for public concerns – many of which vehemently oppose factory farming.”

However, Richard Griffiths, chief executive of the British Poultry Council, said large-scale farming is needed to meet the UK’s demand for food: “The UK has 65 million people needing three meals every day, so all production has to be, by definition, large-scale.”

He said small-scale farming is not necessarily more sustainable than large-scale farming, which is permitted, controlled and regulated to feed a lot of people to good standards in a short space of time. “To unfairly label it as a bad thing overlooks the essential role it plays in our food security and economic stability,” he said.

In the UK, there is no legal classification of what constitutes a megafarm. In the US, a megafarm is defined as an operation that houses 125,000 broiler chickens, 82,000 laying hens, 2,500 pigs or 700 dairy or 1,000 beef cattle.

The Environment Agency and its devolved counterparts classify livestock farms as “intensive” if they hold at least 40,000 poultry, 2,000 pigs or 750 breeding sows.

Gareth Morgan, head of farming policy at the Soil Association, said: “The next UK government must act to curb the boom of livestock megafarms or we’ll see more dead zones in our rivers and more of them facing the same desperate fate as the River Wye.

“The millions of chickens being housed in factory farms in the UK produce a quantity of muck that is proving impossible to manage sustainably.”

He also highlighted the need for a level playing field for nature-friendly farmers, and a system that does not grant permits to huge intensive livestock farms.

“Farmers operating these units are often doing so out of financial necessity and need a viable alternative. Urgent government action is needed to solve this crisis and create a pathway for farmers to move to a more resilient and sustainable future,” Mr Morgan said.

A recent investigation by i and TBIJ found that intensive livestock farms in England had breached environmental regulations thousands of times in recent years.

Among more than 3,000 incidents were the “routine” discharge of slurry and dirty water, maggot-infested carcass bins, and the illegal incineration of pigs.

As part of its campaign to Save Britain’s Rivers, i has called on the next Government to boost agricultural funding to help farmers manage their land in a more sustainable manner.