Thames Water given lowest one star rating for repeated sewage spills
Thames Water was given a one-star rating for its poor environmental performance by the Environment Agency (EA) in 2024 as part of a harsh assessment of the UK’s water companies.
In a year when serious pollution is up 60% by 2023, all but one in nine British water and sewerage companies have been rated as “requiring improvement” – or worse – by the EA.
This is their worst overall score since the evaluation process began in 2011.
Industry body Water UK acknowledged that “some companies’ performance is not good enough” but said there were some signs of improvement.
A Thames Water spokesman said: “Transforming the Thames is a major program of work that will take time; it will take at least a decade to achieve the scale of change required.”
EA president Alan Lovell wrote: “Many companies tell us how focused they are on environmental improvement. But the results don’t show up in the data.”
2024’s aggregate rating dropped from 25 stars in 2023 to 19 stars. Never before has he received fewer than 22 stars.
Only Severn Trent received the highest rating of four stars. Except for Thames, the UK’s largest water company, all others received two stars.
EA said its evaluation criteria have been tightened over time, so its ratings “do not mean that performance has declined since 2011.”
The EA attributed last year’s poor performance to three factors: wet and stormy weather, long-standing underinvestment in infrastructure and increased monitoring and enforcement “bringing more failures to light”.
