Twenty-seven Labour MPs representing constituencies served by Thames Water have urged the company to recover £2.5m in bonuses paid to executives in April. In a letter to Thames Water’s director of corporate finance, Fred Maroudas, they described it as “disgusting” that the company was hiking water bills while executives received multimillion-pound bonuses.
The MPs, coordinated by Yuan Yang, MP for Earley and Woodley, called for the scrapping of the next planned round of bonuses in September and for the money to be reinvested in water infrastructure. The letter also demanded that Thames Water resolve the most severe cases of pollution and failure highlighted by constituents, drop its request to regulator Ofwat for leniency over sewage fines, and commit to meeting MPs by the end of the year.
Yang and fellow MPs Will Stone and Peter Lamb presented the letter to Maroudas at a meeting in Reading on Friday. Yang said Thames had agreed to “a scrutiny meeting” with MPs in September. A Thames Water spokesperson described the meeting as “very constructive” and noted that no executive directors had received performance-related pay this year.
The company, which supplies 16 million customers in London and the South East, is struggling to stabilise its finances. It posted annual losses of £1.65bn for the year to March, with debt reaching £16.8bn. In May, Ofwat issued a record £122.7m fine for breaches on sewage spills and shareholder payouts.
Yang highlighted that more than 140 of her constituents had complained of unresolved leaks, water problems and spiralling bills, which have risen from £488 to £639 a year. Calvin Bailey, MP for Leyton and Wanstead, said his constituents had dealt with repeated sewage overflows near homes and a nursery, raising pollution concerns.
