Welsh Water — the company that supplies your water and takes away your sewage — describes itself as a not-for-profit organisation. No shareholders. No dividends. Run for the benefit of customers.
So why is the average household in Wales now paying £639 a year for water and sewerage — the second highest bill in England and Wales — with a further rise to £683 already confirmed for next April?
And why, when you look across the border to Northern Ireland, do households there pay nothing at all on a separate water bill?
The answers reveal a great deal about how Welsh Water really works, who is really benefiting, and why residents in Rhondda Cynon Taf and across South Wales are being asked to foot a bill that keeps rising year after year.
The “Non-Profit” That Costs as Much as Thames Water to Run
When Glas Cymru — the company that owns Welsh Water — was set up in 2001, it was presented as a bold new model. No shareholders. Any profits reinvested. Bills kept down. It was, in the words of its founders, a company run purely for the benefit of its customers.
What is rarely explained to those customers is how Glas Cymru actually bought Welsh Water in the first place.
In January 2001, Glas Cymru purchased Welsh Water for £1.9 billion. To do so, it immediately borrowed £1.9 billion on the bond markets — the largest non-government sterling bond issue of its time. The debt has been refinancing, growing, and accruing interest ever since. Welsh Water is now planning to raise a further £3 billion in new bonds over the next four years to fund its investment programme.
And those bonds have to be paid back — with interest.
A 2025 academic study by economist David Hall at the University of Greenwich analysed the finances of every water company in England and Wales. Its finding on Welsh Water was striking:
“Despite being owned by a ‘non-profit’ company, Welsh Water loses 41% of bills to finance costs — the same as Thames Water.”
In the financial year 2023-24, Welsh Water’s total revenue from customer bills was £924 million. Of that, £378 million — more than a third of every penny paid by every household and business — went straight out of the door in interest payments to bondholders. Pension funds. Institutional investors. People and organisations with no connection to Wales whatsoever.
For comparison: publicly owned Scottish Water, funded through government rather than bond markets, spent just 8% of revenue on finance costs. The difference is not operational efficiency. It is the cost of private finance.
There are no shareholders at Welsh Water. But there are very definitely creditors — and they come first.
From Rates to Bills: What Changed, and What Northern Ireland Kept
Many older residents in Wales will remember when water was simply part of the rates you paid — one bill, to the council, covering local services including your water. That system ended in England and Wales when water was privatised in 1989. Within a decade, separate water bills had replaced the old rates-based system entirely.
Northern Ireland never went down that path.
To this day, domestic households in Northern Ireland receive no water bill. Water and sewerage services are funded by the government through a subsidy of over £300 million a year from the Stormont Executive, drawn from the rates system that households there already pay. The average Northern Ireland household pays £0 in direct water charges.
The average Welsh household pays £639 this year. Next year, £683.
Northern Ireland Water — a publicly owned company — serves its customers through public funding. Welsh Water — notionally a not-for-profit — serves its customers through bond market debt that costs 41p in every pound.
The contrast is one that Welsh Water’s executives and their regulators at Ofwat are not keen to draw.
The Bill Rise: 20 Years in Numbers
The scale of the increase over the past two decades is considerable. Based on Ofwat and Water UK data, the average Welsh Water combined household bill (water and sewerage together) has risen as follows:
| Year | Average Annual Bill |
|---|---|
| 2004-05 | ~£286 |
| 2010-11 | ~£370 |
| 2022-23 | £485 |
| 2023-24 | £499 |
| 2024-25 | £503 |
| 2025-26 | £639 (+27% in one year) |
| 2026-27 | £683 (confirmed) |
| 2029-30 | ~£645 projected |
From £286 in 2004-05 to £683 in 2026-27 represents an increase of around 139% in nominal terms over 22 years. The water industry argues that in real, inflation-adjusted terms bills have been broadly flat since 2010. Critics point out that “broadly flat in real terms” means very little to households already struggling with the cost of living.
The 27% single-year rise in 2025-26 — adding £136 to the average bill in one go — was the largest in recent memory. Ofwat’s five-year price review, accepted by Welsh Water in January 2025, permits a total rise of 42% between 2024 and 2030. The company’s investment programme for this period is valued at £6 billion.
That investment is being paid for by you, through your bill. Much of it is being paid for because the company failed to maintain its infrastructure properly in the first place — something addressed below.
The Executives Earning Near £900,000 at a “Not-for-Profit”
There are no shareholders at Welsh Water. There are, however, executives.
Peter Perry, who stepped down as Chief Executive in spring 2026, received total remuneration of £892,000 in 2021, made up of a fixed pay package of £652,000 (including £337,000 in pension accrual) and a bonus of £240,000. In 2025-26 his base salary was £460,000, with total target remuneration of £894,000.
The non-executive Chair of Glas Cymru, Alastair Lyons — a part-time role — received £237,315 in 2024 and is set to receive £247,282 in 2025.
For context: the Chief Executive of Cardiff Council, running a workforce of 14,757 people with a budget of £1.9 billion, was paid £229,440 in 2022-23.
Former Welsh Government Economy Minister Andrew Davies, who published a detailed report on Welsh Water’s governance in December 2024, described the executive pay as “excessive and undeserved,” and said it demonstrated that “the light touch regulation of the industry isn’t working.” He concluded that both Ofwat and Natural Resources Wales had “seriously let down the Welsh public.”
In November 2024, Ofwat stepped in to block Welsh Water from using customer money to fund £163,000 in bonuses for executives — bonuses awarded in a year when the company had been fined £40 million for misleading regulators, and rated as “lagging” — the lowest category — in environmental performance.
Welsh Water’s response was to plan a significant salary increase for the CEO in advance of new laws restricting bonuses — a move described by Andrew Davies as an attempt to evade the crackdown.
What You Are Actually Paying For
Welsh Water’s own bill breakdown for 2025-30 shows where the money is supposed to go:
- £4.2 billion in capital investment over five years, including fixing leaks and upgrading sewage works
- £2.5 billion specifically for environmental improvement
- Reducing leakage by 25% against the 2019-20 baseline
Much of this investment is remedial work — fixing failures that accumulated under the company’s watch. Welsh Water’s actual leakage in 2021-22 was found to be 240 million litres per day, compared to the 157 million litres it had reported to regulators. The company was fined £40 million for that misreporting in 2024.
In other words, customers are paying for infrastructure failures that the company concealed while simultaneously collecting bills and bonuses.
The Bottom Line
Welsh Water is not a shareholder-owned company extracting profits for investors. That is genuinely true, and it is genuinely better than the situation at Thames Water or Southern Water.
But “better than Thames Water” is a very low bar.
Forty-one pence of every pound you pay goes in interest to bond investors. Senior executives earn close to £900,000 a year at a company rated as “lagging” by its own regulator. Bills have risen by 139% over 22 years and are heading for a further 42% rise by 2030. And households in Northern Ireland — served by a genuinely public water company — pay nothing directly for the same service.
The question is not whether Welsh Water is the worst water company in Britain. The question is whether the people of Wales are getting a fair deal. Based on the evidence, the answer is no.
Sources: University of Greenwich (David Hall, 2025); Nation.Cymru (Andrew Davies report, December 2024); Water UK historical bill data; Ofwat price review determinations 2025; BBC News Wales; The Guardian; Consumer Council for Water (CCW); Senedd committee evidence (November 2025); NRW Annual Performance Report 2024.
Related Posts
Another election year and RCT Council only increasing Council Tax by1% Why dont they have an election every year?
Water Bills Rise Again as Welsh Households Pay the Price for Decades of Failure
Welsh water bills soar as CEO takes home huge salary