Check your water company yourself

Nearly everything people argue about — what the chief executive was paid, how much the company owes, who ultimately owns it, how often it has polluted a river — is published. Not leaked, not estimated. Filed, and free to read.

1. The accounts and the owners

Companies House, the statutory register, free and requiring no account. Search the company's name and you get its filing history, its annual accounts as filed, its directors, and the chain of ownership above it.

find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk

What to look at, in order:

• Filing history → the latest annual accounts. Directors' remuneration is a required disclosure, so the pay figure people quote is in there, in the company's own words.
• The balance sheet for what the company owes. Water companies are unusually heavily borrowed by the standards of most businesses, and the figure is stated rather than inferred.
• People → persons with significant control, and the parent company named in the accounts. Follow it upwards. Several operating companies sit beneath holding structures that lead abroad, and each step is its own register entry.

The one trap worth naming: the operating company is not the group. A regional water company usually has holding companies and finance companies stacked above it with near-identical names. Money and debt can sit at a different level from the entity that supplies the water, which is exactly why reading only the operating company can mislead in either direction.

2. The performance

Ofwat is the economic regulator and publishes how each company performed against the commitments it was funded to deliver — leakage, supply interruptions, pollution incidents, complaints — along with the price determinations that set what it may charge.

ofwat.gov.uk

3. The environment and the water itself

The Environment Agency regulates discharges and abstraction in England and publishes its assessment of company environmental performance. The Drinking Water Inspectorate covers the quality of what comes out of the tap and publishes its findings by supplier.

gov.uk/government/organisations/environment-agency  ·  dwi.gov.uk

For rainfall and river levels near a specific postcode, Water Pages reads the Agency's own live data on this page.

4. The comparisons, and your complaint

Discover Water is the industry's own comparison site and puts the companies side by side on a common set of measures — useful precisely because it is theirs, so a poor showing there is an admission rather than an accusation. The Consumer Council for Water is the independent consumer body and the route for a complaint a company has failed to resolve.

discoverwater.co.uk  ·  ccwater.org.uk

Reading a pay figure fairly

Executive pay is the number that travels furthest and gets mangled most, usually because two different things are being compared. Three checks before repeating one:

• Which entity? The operating company and the group above it file separately and can report different figures for the same person.
• Which components? Salary, bonus, long-term incentives and pension are usually disclosed separately. A headline is often the total; a rebuttal is often the salary alone. Both can be honest and they are not the same number.
• Which year? Accounts run to the company's own year end, not the calendar. Two figures a year apart may not be comparing consecutive periods.

None of that makes a large figure smaller. It makes the comparison honest, which is the only way an argument about it survives contact with someone who has read the accounts.