Submitted 12 hours ago by okwithmydecay@leminal.space to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
https://novaramedia.com/2026/06/22/water-boss-handed-270k-bonus-despite-parasite-outbreak/
South West Water. Must be next in the queue for nationalisation after Thames?
Davy’s payouts were reinstated after guidance from regulator Ofwat over how the new rules would be applied.
Will the environment minister fire the regulator’s CEO, or are they basically OK with this?
You know, you could do a perfect job and still have accidents happen. CEOs typically have a low base pay to bonus ratio, i.e. their bonus is their wage. This means that this headline means nothing and is written to create outrage without factual basis.
Executive officers get large compensation because they have responsibility over the organisation.
That means that when “accidents happen”, they bear responsibility, and should not receive their bonuses and possibly should be fired.
If a potable water company is unable to deliver potable water to their customers, it’s a gross failure of the leadership to take all measures to ensure that the company does what it exists to do.
You clearly misunderstood what I was saying.
It’s a charged topic so it makes sense. Frustrating nonetheless.
Let me guess, you also think that billionaires get where they are because they work reeeeeeeally hard?
No. I didn’t even defend their pay. But people’s reading comprehension is extremely limited.
A car sales person who sells a single car in a year and still gets their commission for that one car is perfectly fine in my ears. Some jobs just work like that.
Where are any of them doing a “perfect job”? It would be good for you to present some factual evidence - bearing in mind it’s a lack if facts you berate in others who are rightly outraged by CEOs’ salaries.
The base pay of the CEOs of the 25 water companies range from lowest Ruth Jefferson (Wessex) on £440k to highest Liv Garfield (Severn) on £3.3 million. From what I can see there’s no relationship between pay and the size or operational situation of the company. So those “low base pay” you claim are nothing of the sort. Many now have their bonuses rightly paused. Here’s your outrage WITH factual basis.
I didn’t claim that they were doing a perfect job. My criticism is on the phrasing of the headline and how CEO pay consists of a base pay and bonus with the bonus being large.
This means even a middling performance would expect a bonus payment.
This is independent of the amount of basepay. I didn’t claim they were poor or underpaid. I only claimed that their wage structure enables polarizing headlines independent of facts.
The general public will not be satisfied until water companies have no-one in charge of them because everyone in charge has been publicly executed.
I would be satisfied if I didn’t need to do research every time I want to go for a swim to see if they have filled it with sewage recently or not.
Or that we receive a decent water supply for the incredibly high prices we pay. Five years ago I was paying £33 a month for water. I now pay £72 a month. In the last 12 months we’ve had a leak at the end of the road that wasn’t fixed, a major leak (that was), three periods of not having water and now a ban on using hose pipes and filling up paddling pools in the heat.
You might sneer at people being fed up with this but things DO need to change and a good first step would be calling the bosses and owners of these companies to account.
Eternal192@anarchist.nexus 11 hours ago
Terrific another “hardworking” CEO gets a fat bonus at our expense.