Privatisation, as it appears on the public register
All ten water and sewerage companies of England and Wales were incorporated on the same morning in 1989, in one unbroken block of company numbers. Every entry linked, so you can check it.
Read → MethodCheck your water company yourself
Executive pay, debt, ownership and pollution records are all published. The four free sources, what each holds, and the three checks that stop a pay figure being quoted wrongly.
Read →The rule this section is written under
Every claim here about a named company carries the record it came from and the date it was read. Not a summary of what is generally said, not a figure recalled from a headline — the filing, linked, so a reader can go and check whether Water Pages read it correctly.
Where the record has not been read, this site says so instead of repeating what everybody knows. That is a slower way to build a section and it is the only way it is worth anything: the value of an independent voice on a monopoly industry rests entirely on being right, and a single confidently wrong figure would spend more credibility than a year of careful ones earns.
It is also the reason the commercial pages on this site can be trusted. The same discipline runs through both.
What this section is not
It is not a campaign, and it takes no position on whether water should be in public or private hands — that is a political question, and people who have studied it far longer disagree in good faith. What is not in dispute is the structure that exists, what it costs a household, and where the evidence about it is kept.