Privatisation, as it appears on the public register

Water and sewerage in England and Wales were transferred to private ownership under the Water Act 1989. The ten regional authorities became ten companies, and those companies were floated on the stock market that December. Scotland and Northern Ireland were not part of it, and their water remains in public hands to this day.

All ten were born on the same morning

That is the sort of sentence a reader ought to be sceptical of, so here it is as a thing anyone can check. Every one of these companies was incorporated on 1 April 1989, and their registered numbers fall inside a single block — 02366648 to 02366777. Nothing else in the British corporate register looks like this, because nothing else was created this way.

Read from the Companies House public register, 13 August 2026. Each number links to that company's own page on the free service — the incorporation date is on it.

What that structure decided

Ten companies, ten regions, and no overlap between them. That single design choice is the source of nearly everything households find strange about water:

• No switching. A household's supplier is determined by where the house is. Business customers in England can choose a retailer; households cannot, anywhere.
• Different prices for the same service. Tariffs are set company by company, so identical houses in different regions pay differently.
• Different rules. Metering policy, leak allowances and assistance schemes are set regionally, which is why an answer that is true in one county is wrong in the next.
• Restrictions arrive as a patchwork — see hosepipe bans.

Who watches them

Because competition cannot do the job a market normally does, regulation stands in for it. Four bodies, with genuinely different remits, and knowing which is which is the difference between a complaint that goes somewhere and one that does not: