00:00So today we've announced we've imposed £168 million pounds of fines on three water companies
00:06Thames Water, Northumbrian Water and Yorkshire Water and the fines have been imposed because
00:12of failures by companies to comply with their wastewater obligations. In summary these
00:17obligations are to maintain a minimum level of capacity at sewage treatment works and to only
00:22discharge wastewater to the environment in exceptional circumstances. We've found companies
00:28have failed to do so and we've also found they failed to have sufficient oversight over their
00:32processes. We've found a range of failures so for example some Thames Water had a significant
00:39number of wastewater treatment works where they were not operating at the required levels of
00:43capacity. All companies had overuse of sewage storm overflow sewage discharges and then for
00:52example Thames also found that during the investigation so when they started the when
00:56we started the enforcement case Thames considered they had around 250 storm overflows they then
01:03uncovered they had a further 300 overflows which were not permitted so it's a range of failures
01:09and then the final point I'll make is the boards have a responsibility to oversee and to have
01:13sufficient management oversight over the operations and we've found they had insufficient understanding
01:19insufficient data about what was going on in the sewage treatment works so it is a catalogue of
01:23failures and these are serious issues. So Thames had a greater scale of the problem so as I said
01:29they had around two-thirds of their wastewater treatment works were not operating at the
01:33required levels of capacity. For other firms it was a much smaller number and so we see differences
01:39between Thames, between Yorkshire and Northumbrian with Northumbrian being the least severe offender
01:45and followed by Yorkshire and then by Thames. So that's a question I think for Thames Water
01:51but it is I guess it reflects the level of concerns that we've had about Thames Water's
01:57poor operational performance. They've been clear that they need to do much better as a company
02:02and I think the findings reflect that. We've been very clear that companies need to pay chief
02:07executives and pay bonuses demonstratively linked to performance for customers in the environment.
02:13We've taken new powers to mean that we can ensure that customers
02:17will not pay for any chief executive bonus which is not demonstrated to be linked to
02:22performance for customers in the environment. We'll be examining the chief executive of Thames'
02:27bonus along with other chief executive bonuses later this year and if we think it's if we think
02:33steps need to be taken we'll step in to stop customers paying that. We're also talking to
02:37the government about new powers to block executive bonuses where companies fail to comply with the
02:42law and so that may be a new power that we get over this coming year.
Comments