On 5 February 2003, a pipe organ in a 14th-century church in the town of Halberstadt in central Germany began sounding the first notes of a work by the American composer John Cage called Organ2/As Slow As Possible. The piece, as the name suggests, is written to be played very slowly indeed; the current record for a completed performance was broken last month at just over 25 hours. The Halberstadt rendition is played by placing sandbags on the pedals of a specially designed organ, so that notes are sounded continuously for months or years at a time (the piece actually began in 2001, with a rest that lasted until 2003). The first of the piece’s nine movements will not be completed until 2072, and if it is played to completion it will last for 639 years, ending in 2640.
Another 85 years after that, a full seven centuries in the future, an even more glacial performance will come to an end: according to a report published this morning by the National Audit Office (NAO), we can expect the UK’s water network to be fully replaced by the year 2725, if work continues at the current replacement rate of 0.14 per cent per year.
Exciting as it is to live in a country in which infrastructure upgrades are used as avant-garde reflections on our own insignificance against the deep centuries, it would also be nice if everyone had enough water. But by 2050, according to the NAO, the UK will be facing a shortfall of nearly 5 billion litres per day (the UK currently uses about 14 billion litres per day). Britain has not built a major reservoir for more than 30 years, the last one having been completed in 1992; nine more are planned, but such projects can remain on paper for decades. The NAO concludes that over the next 25 years, £290bn of investment will be needed to modernise the water supply and sewage systems, and Ofwat projects that £52bn on top of that will be needed to deliver the new reservoirs and other major projects.
Anyone familiar with the UK’s privatised water sector may be sceptical that such a huge sum will be forthcoming from an industry that has historically done a much better job of extracting dividends from bills than it has of extracting sewage from wastewater. The NAO is clear that the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs and the industry’s three regulators (Ofwat, the Environment Agency and the Drinking Water Inspectorate) have “failed to drive sufficient investment in the water sector” and have “not managed the rising tide of risk associated with the sector”.
The government has its own news lines out this morning to help make it appear as if drastic action is being taken. As of today, thanks to the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025, the regulators have new powers to send water company executives who cover up illegal sewage spills to prison for up to two years. The people who have spent decades hosing our rivers and beaches with chunky brown soup now face the fury of the Environment Secretary, Steve Reed, who says he will leave “no more hiding places” for water company bosses, who “must face consequences if they commit crimes”.
Again, this is a view of the future that doesn’t quite tally with the past, given than obstructing investigations was already a criminal offence, for which a grand total of five people have previously been prosecuted; two successfully appealed and the other three were never actually issued with a fine. When I interviewed the CEO of Ofwat, David Black, in 2023 he told me he didn’t like the sound of “demonising individuals” in this way. And to be fair, when you look at the mess that Thames Water’s finances are in, the people who extracted the most in dividends are now long gone.
While the new powers reduce the bar for evidence, it’s going to be tricky to say when an illegal sewage spill has been covered up because, as the New Statesman reported exclusively last year, there is good evidence that the monitors used on sewage outflows don’t work, delivering results that appear impossible when compared to rainfall data.
The NAO’s report today is a picture of a badly coordinated regulatory system riddled with “gaps in oversight”, inconsistencies and the failure to balance contradictions between imperatives such as cost and environmental considerations. The NAO warns that a major failing of the current system is that “none of the regulators have a duty to ensure there is a coherent national plan for the water sector”, and so “there is no coherent national system where integrated decision making can take place”. Collectively, it warns, “The regulators do not have a shared understanding of the condition of water and wastewater assets, and the level of funding needed to maintain them.”
In an interview with the New Statesman this week, Reed told George Eaton that regulation had been the problem, in that in a system which will probably have to remain privatised given the very high cost of bringing it back into public ownership, it is regulatory failure that has allowed the long-running crisis of underinvestment to develop. It’s satisfying to imagine a few suits going to jail, but that is very unlikely to actually happen and it would not help attract the private investment needed. Perhaps the most important warning from the NAO today is that “the regulatory framework has contributed to worsening investor perception of the [water] sector”; this is a crisis that we hope to fix with other people’s money, and they are only going to make that available if they are assured it will be well spent. For that to happen, an overhaul of the water regulators appears to be needed.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Anarchy in the “yookay”]
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