Like every country, Scotland faces huge challenges when it comes to managing drinking water and sewage.
But our starting point is different from England’s.
Scottish Water is publicly owned – but English water was privatised in 1989.
Scotland’s publicly owned model consistently delivers better outcomes. Here, the basics are run for the public good, not for payouts.
The UK’s Independent Water Commission, led by Sir Jon Cunliffe, found that:
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66% of Scotland’s water bodies are of good ecological status,
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16.1% in England
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29.9% in Wales.
Customer satisfaction is also far higher — 81% in Scotland, compared with 55% in England.
Water usage per person is higher in Scotland too – perhaps reflecting the lower charges north of the border. and the fact that it is usually not metered (We may need to consider how we use our natural resources).
Water Charges Are Diverging
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The average annual charge in Scotland this year is around £450.
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In England, it’s over £600,
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In London, around £640.
But the extra cost to English households will not be spent on improving the system, but simply on servicing huge mountains of debt. The private firms used the guaranteed revenue from customers’ water charges to borrow money, which they then paid out in dividends instead of investing.
In England, shareholders have “invested less than nothing.”
“Since privatisation, shareholders have literally invested less than nothing,” wrote David Hall of the University of Greenwich in a report for the trade union Unison.
That calculation goes like this: by 2023, England’s ten privatised water companies collectively owed more than £64 billion in debt, having extracted dividends of over £77 billion. In other words, they paid themselves not only every penny they borrowed since privatisation, but much of what they owned beforehand too.
Those numbers come from a fascinating investigation by Oliver Bullough in Prospect magazine (perhaps the basis of his next book?), where he argues that “investors” is hardly the right word for companies that have sucked out every penny they could.
The English model is so uniquely bad that no other developed country has fully privatised its water supply.
Investment in Scottish Water
Challenges are many :
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Climate change is bringing unpredictable weather patterns, increased rainfall and flood risk.
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Conventional sewage techniques don’t remove pollutants like forever chemicals, nano-plastics and medication residues from the water that goes into the sea.
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New housing puts pressure on water and sewage infrastructure.
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Scotland is a country with a low population density – that makes infrastructure investment relatively more expensive per head – so every penny has to go literally further.
There is always a need for more money – however there is funding going into the system here.
There’s a huge tranche of investment coming down the pipeline for Scottish Water — up to £9 billion will be spent from 2027–33 to improve wastewater management and climate-change resilience.
How come some politicians say Scottish Water Is “Just as Bad” – or “Worse”?
Unionist politicians sometimes claim Scotland’s performance is on a par or even “worse than England’s.”
Even Labour figures do this now, which is odd given that Labour once championed public ownership of water. Steve Reed – until recently Labour Secretary of State for the Environment said this recently on TV. This is not true – he was either ill informed or he said it for political reasons.
The main basis for the claim is the allegation that Scottish Water doesn’t monitor combined sewer overflows (CSOs) – so the argument goes that it could be as bad but nobody knows.
What Are CSOs?
Victorian cities built combined sewers that carry both wastewater and rainwater. When heavy rain falls in a short period – something that’s happening more often with climate change – the network can’t swallow the surge.
Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) act as safety valves: they spill highly diluted, screened stormwater into rivers to stop homes and streets flooding. That’s not “dumping by design” – it’s the last resort of a 19th-century system dealing with 21st-century rain.
The fix involves a mix of storage tanks, smarter pipes, and blue-green infrastructure that keeps rain out of the sewers in the first place.
Does Scotland Fail to Monitor Its CSOs?
Initially, Scotland made a strategic decision to target spending where risk was highest. That meant monitoring only a proportion of CSOs – perhaps one per area instead of every single one. The figure that is often quoted is 4%.
That’s changed fast over the last couple of years – the percentage being monitored is now about a third. Scottish Water has installed more than 1,000 monitors across its network, with more being added every year. There’s a live public map here showing what’s happening at these outlets in near real time.
(Scottish Water is also working with the Scottish Environmentla Protection Agency on a £500 million programme to identify and improve problem areas.)
Scotland’s CSO monitoring is extensive and intentional. It is not credible to argue that it is not picking up vast amounts of overflow.
Breaches that incur a low fine are commercial no brainers for the private firms
Scotland doesn’t have private companies gaming the system for profit, which you can see in England’s repeated breaches and the multi-million-pound fines regulators are dishing out in a last-ditch effort to make wrongdoing less of a profit/loss no brainer.
By contrast, Scottish Water incurred just one fine of £6,000 last year — and that was for taking too long to locate the source of a problem it was already trying to fix.
Only 30 swimming beaches are monitored
SEPA monitors bathing quality at 30 beaches where people swim, every day in the summer and publishes the data. Clearly they could monitor more, and some people are angry that their local beach isn’t on the list. But there is a cost to doing this, so it is a balance.
Perhaps SEPA could set a bar – eg – to monitor every beach where more than 4 people swim on an average day.
Also, when bacteria levels spike in bathing water after heavy rain, it’s not always the sewer. Dog shit, gulls, farm runoff, and road wash all contribute. Investigators can use DNA testing techniques to find out what it is.
For example, at Portobello last summer, the bathing water briefly failed tests. SEPA investigated and found that it wasn’t coming from the sewage system.
Why Is Scotland’s Water Still in Public Hands?
In the 1980s and 1990s, Governments that Scotland didn’t vote for privatised: electricity, gas, the national grid, railways, harbours, the Post Office, and more.
After the 1992 general election, there was rising anger in Scotland about yet another Westminster government the country hadn’t voted for taking high-handed decisions on Scotland’s behalf with no democratic legitimacy.
When that government — with only 11 of 72 Scottish MPs — tried to privatise water, there was unified resistance.
The opposition was demonstrated in a referendum held by Strathclyde Regional Authority, where 97 per cent voted No to privatisation – on a 71% turnout.
I love this quote from Hansard, recording the debate at Westminster. Then-Labour MP for East Lothian John Home Robertson said:
“The Secretary of State for Scotland prefaced his remarks by saying that we had to return to the issues of state in Scotland today and consider this controversial issue.
“I have news for the Secretary of State for Scotland: this is not a remotely controversial issue. It is one of very few issues about which it would be impossible to start an argument in the streets, households, pubs, clubs or anywhere else in Scotland today. There is no support anywhere in Scotland for the proposal to take the water and sewerage industries out of the control of democratically accountable local authorities.”
Home Robertson was right. Steve Reed is wrong. Scotland runs water for service and the environment; England’s companies run it for profit.
Scotland Still Faces Challenges
I am not arguing for complacency. Scotland has to modernise Victorian infrastructure, adapt to climate-driven downpours, and increase transparency. A major block to building more housing is a lack of capacity in the sewage and water systems.
And we need to reexamine the habit we’ve formed of just swishing our treated waste out to sea — along with nanoplastics, forever chemicals, and medication residues.
We need greater awareness of our impact on the natural world. We can’t keep on using the sea as a dustbin.
But instead of unhelpful comparisons with England, Scotland should look elsewhere for inspiration.
Sewage tourism? That’s a new one
Take this architect-designed water treatment plant in Zeeland, Denmark. It’s described as “fit for a picnic”. Its mission statement is to put “the community face-to-face with its use of resources.”
Rather than being hidden away behind a fence, it’s woven into a recreational landscape with a birdwatching tower, walking paths, and skylights on the roof where visitors can watch the plant treating 15,000 cubic metres of wastewater a day — encouraging people to think and talk about what they used to flush and forget, and to recognise the need for new approaches.
