The gains of the water industry have been privatised and costs socialised - Tracy Brabin

In the gothic auditorium of St George’s Church in Leeds, I sat alongside a hundred others in complete silence while a mother, Julie Maughan, spoke about her daughter. Heather Preen was just eight years old. Twelve days into a family holiday in Devon, the Preens went for a walk along the beach. Heather contracted the most aggressive strain of E. coli there is and, two weeks later, she was dead.

I’ve been to hundreds of events in my time as Mayor. Rarely have I been in a room that quiet.

We were all there for a screening of Dirty Business – Channel 4’s docudrama about the sewage scandal, organised by the Ilkley Clean River Group and the Sewage Campaign Network.

Those who joined me on the panel were not the actors involved in the series but the real-life people they portrayed. They were Professor Peter Hammond, the retired computational biologist, who alongside the retired detective superintendent Ash Smith spent a decade doing the forensic work the Environment Agency should have been doing after they noticed fish dying in their Oxfordshire river.

We were also joined by Rob Forrester, a former Environment Agency officer who blew the whistle on the organisation, and of course by Julie Maughan in a pre-recorded message, who has spent decades campaigning to stop the same tragedy that befell her family from ever happening again.

These are ordinary people who took on a powerful industry and a failing regulator because nobody else would.

And then there was the audience, which wasn’t just the local community, but people hailing from Kent in Cumbria, the Nidd in North Yorkshire, and the Swale in Kent; people who swim in these rivers, walk their dogs beside them, and take their grandchildren to paddle in them.

They came not only with fury about the ongoing scandal, but with the very reasonable demand to know what those of us who are privileged enough to serve our communities intend to do about it.

So let me be straight about the situation we are dealing with in Yorkshire.

The Ouse is the second most polluted river in England. The Calder is the third. The Aire is the fourth. All three sit within Yorkshire Water’s patch.

Last month, Yorkshire Water’s own annual report laid bare the results of a broken model: In the year to March, the company was responsible for 260 recorded pollution incidents – the equivalent of five per week, up 72 per cent on the year before, and nearly double the limit set by the regulator. They released raw sewage into our rivers for a total of 248,270 hours during 2025 – the equivalent of one pipe gushing effluent into our ecosystems continually for over 28 years.

Thirteen of these incidents were classed as ‘serious’, which represents no improvement on the previous year, where there were also 13. In October, the company expects to be downgraded by the Environment Agency to a one-star rating – the lowest score it is possible to hold.

Ofwat has hit Yorkshire Water with an £88.8m penalty. And the company leaks around 257 million litres of water every single day, all while asking Yorkshire households to use less, such as during last Summer’s drought when they wasted 21 per cent of clean water stocks on leakages.

Now hold these figures up next to the other half of Yorkshire Water’s accounts. Dividends to shareholders of £81.5m, up from £52.5m the previous year. A chief executive paid £732,000, plus a further £660,000 routed through the offshore parent company – Kelda Holdings – for a third year running. And customer bills rising by an average of 41 per cent by 2030.

The evidence is clear – as a country, we have privatised the gains and socialised the costs of our water industry.

The profits, the dividends and the executive pay are all private. The pollution, the illnesses and the bill are for the public. Because you cannot switch water companies, and because you cannot go without water, five and a half million people in Yorkshire have no way out. We are a captive market for a company that is failing, and we are charged more and more year on year for the privilege.

In March, I published West Yorkshire’s first Local Nature Recovery Strategy – the most ambitious plan for nature this region has ever had, with the backing of Sir David Attenborough. Running through every page of it is what we call the ‘big blue thread’. The idea is simple – nature recovery will succeed or fail on water. Rivers reconnected to their floodplains. Salmon and trout reaching their spawning grounds. Otters and kingfishers along the Aire and the Calder. Swimmable waterways in the heart of our towns and cities.

Yorkshire Water was a partner in developing that strategy, and contributed constructively to it. But you cannot restore aquatic habitats while pouring sewage into them. Every pound paid out in shareholder dividends and executive pay is a pound not spent on the pipes, the storage and the treatment works that would give our region’s rivers the breathing space to recover. We cannot build a greener, more affordable region while Yorkshire Water remains beyond the jurisdiction of public control.