Overhaul of utilities companies without public ownership will be ‘worse than useless’, say MPs.
At the heart of the row now engulfing Andy Burnham’s water policy is a single, brutal number: more than £100 billion.
That is roughly what taking England and Wales’s water companies into full public ownership would cost the state, and it is the figure ministers keep citing to explain why they have settled on a lesser fix, one that is now provoking open rebellion among their own MPs.
The idea itself is not new. It grew out of a review of the water sector led by Sir Jon Cunliffe, a former Bank of England deputy governor, published last year. Steve Reed picked it up as environment secretary under Sir Keir Starmer and has remained a champion of it since, telling The Telegraph this week that regional oversight boards are the best available tool for holding water companies accountable and for tackling river pollution on a basin-by-basin footing. He has never made any secret of why he stopped short of nationalisation: the cost, in his words, was simply unaffordable.
Burnham inherits that logic, but with more political baggage attached. During the Makerfield by-election campaign, he rattled investors by appearing to back nationalising several water firms outright, Thames Water included. In office, he has walked that back considerably, now speaking instead of achieving “greater public control”, a formulation that stops well short of the state actually buying the companies.
That softer language is now taking shape as policy. Nine new regional bodies would be created across England and Wales, each with mayoral representation, empowered to set objectives for water firms and to hold their bosses to account over bills, supply shortages and sewage discharges. What they would not do is take any company into public hands: ownership, and with it ultimate control, would remain private.
It is that gap between oversight and ownership that has Labour backbenchers up in arms. Emma Lewell, the MP for South Shields, has warned that building new regulatory structures will itself be expensive, and argues the party should simply do what she says the public already wants: nationalise the industry outright. Clive Lewis, the Norwich South MP and a veteran campaigner for public ownership, has been blunter still, branding the plan “worse than useless” unless it comes with a genuine mechanism for ending privatisation. He has asked ministers directly whether the new regional bodies would have the power to take water services back into public hands — and warned that, if the answer is no, handing local leaders influence without that power would be a wasted opportunity, not a reform.
For now, the government’s position rests on affordability rather than ambition. Whether that argument holds is likely to be tested repeatedly as the plan makes its way through a party clearly divided over how far devolution can substitute for ownership.
Worth reading in full: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/09/16/backlash-andy-burnham-mayors-water-labour-mps-revolt/
