‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation | Nils Pratley

Published 1 July 2026 · finance

Track record of Welsh Water shows public ownership is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector Good news for Andy Burnham

Track record of Welsh Water shows public ownership is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector Good news for Andy Burnham: one of the original 10 water privatisations from the Thatcher-era has returned to public ownership already.

Thanks to a complicated turn-of-the-century corporate saga, Welsh Water, serving 3 million people, converted to not-for-profit status in 2001. It has no shareholders. Financial surpluses go “straight back into keeping bills down and looking after your water and beautiful environment”, as the website blurb puts it.

How’s it going? After a quarter of a century without dividend-hungry shareholders to feed, has the model proved its superiority? Not exactly. Welsh Water usually has high scores on customer trust metrics but its performance on bills and spills tends to be middle of the pack.

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