Thames Water hit with £8.55m fine after failing to reduce leakages

Ofwat chief executive Cathryn Ross described the company’s inability to meet its leakage commitments as ‘unacceptable’

A ‘cluster of significant bursts’ meant leakages increased by 5 per cent since last year (PA Wire)

Thames Water has been hit with a £8.55m penalty for failing to reduce leakages, regulator Ofwat said on Wednesday.

A “cluster of significant bursts” meant that Thames Water’s leakages increased by five per cent since last year, according to the company’s annual report. This brought the leakages up to 677 million litres per day, exceeding the 630 million target.

The £8.55m fine is the maximum automatic penalty that Ofwat can impose, and the regulator has opened an investigation to consider whether enforcement action is also needed.

Ofwat chief executive Cathryn Ross described Thames Water’s failure to meet its leakage commitments as “unacceptable”.

Thames Water chairman Sir Peter Mason said in a statement: “Although there was a series of high-profile bursts in a short space of time, the number in 2016/17 didn’t differ hugely from previous years.

“Nevertheless, we take each incident and its impact on our customers very seriously and there’s a lot of work going on to understand why they happened.”

He promised that next year’s target would be “tighter”, adding that the company was “committed to a recovery plan aimed at bringing us back on track with our leakage targets”.

In December last year, around 100 people were evacuated from their flooded homes after a Thames Water pipe burst in north London.

At the time, the company admitted that it had been too slow to react to the bursts and that its overall response had been inadequate. It said that it would be investing in devices that could provide warnings before bursts occurred.