Andy Burnham says Yorkshire Water mutualisation 'can be looked at' under industry reform plans

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said the idea of mutualising Yorkshire Water to bring it under greater public control could be considered as part of wider industry reform.

Yorkshire’s three Labour mayors have urged the Prime Minister to bring Yorkshire Water under greater public control through mutualisation as they backed a recent report by the Good Growth Foundation thinktank which suggested the idea.

Yorkshire Water is currently owned by overseas investors from Sweden, Singapore and Australia and has been increasing consumer bills to pay for an £8.3 billion investment programme to improve ageing infrastructure.

Mutualisation could potentially see Yorkshire Water come under greater public control by following the mutualisation model deployed by building societies.

But the company has said the proposal “has no credible answers to the central questions of where regions would find the money to buy water companies, nor how they would fund the many billions of pounds of investment needed to deliver better outcomes for customers and the environment over the years ahead”.

When asked about the idea by The Yorkshire Post, Mr Burnham said: “The water industry, it is plain to see from anyone’s perspective, is in need of some quite significant reform.

"We’ve just gone through a summer where we can see that in terms of disruption to supplies, the leaks we see across the country, bills potentially having to rise and a lot of profit being extracted all the while this is happening. The industry is in need of significant reform. All ideas can be looked at as part of that reform.”

Environment Secretary Angela Eagle added: “We’ve got a system that isn’t really working for the future.

"We’ve got a lot of investment we need to make, a lot of very old infrastructure. For example, we haven’t seen a reservoir built in the 40 years of the privatised water system and yet it is clear we need a lot more reservoir infrastructure so we can keep water in our increasingly wet winters and deploy it during our increasingly dry summers.

"We have to think of a way that we can have structures that enable us as a country to marshal our water resources in a more effective way. We’re clearly not there at the moment and obviously the government will be considering the way forwards. All ideas are welcome and you’ll hear in due course what path we decide to take.”