A Start Can Be Made

Some people are beyond help. In his second go at being Business Secretary, the fake solicitor Jonathan Reynolds says that, “I would like the steel industry to be in private hands. That is my preference.” On the Today programme, he refused to assure Sharon Graham that publicly funded infrastructure projects would be required to buy British steel. Trade union money is the only financial contribution to a British political party that buys absolutely nothing at best, and worse than nothing a lot of time. But if the triple lock did take the state pension over the income tax threshold, then politically that threshold would have to be raised. Splendid. Now also raise the savings limits for Universal Credit claimants, two in five of whom were in work, since those limits had been carried over from the previous benefits system and had not changed since 2006. 20 years ago. Twenty. £6000 in 2006 is hardly £6000 today. Never mind next year. And Professor Prem Sikka, Lord Sikka writes:

Prime Minister Andy Burnham faces a difficult task in changing the UK’s economic fortunes. The decline is due to the obsession with neoliberalism, which has failed to improve the quality of life for millions. Chancellor John Healey’s first budget offers a chance to improve the purchasing power of the bottom 50% of the population, which in turn will increase people’s disposable incomes, invigorate local economy and fuel economic growth.

Neoliberal Destruction 

The evidence of neoliberal destruction is all around us. Workers’ share of gross value added has declined from 71.9% in 1975, to 59.7% in 2026. 1.23m workers are on zero-hour contracts. 4.4m jobs pay less than the real living wage. 6.3m workers are in insecure jobs with no guarantees of when they will work, how much they will earn, and whether they will have enough hours or even if they will have a job in future. The insecurity is compounded by a tax system in which the poorest 20% pay a higher proportion of their income in direct and indirect taxes than the richest 20%. 

Unsurprisingly, 25.3m people, including 14.9m working adults and 7.7m children, live below minimum income standards, and have little capacity to boost economic growth. At the same time, the richest 1% has more wealth than the bottom 70% of the population combined. 50 families hold more wealth than the poorest half of the population, comprising more than 34m people. Due to concentration of wealth in relatively fewer hands governments rely upon fewer people to stimulate the economy and are easily held to ransom. 

Public infrastructure has been dismantled. 6.16m individuals await 7.28m hospital appointments. 1.3m households (about 4m people) are on a waiting list for a social home; but only 12,198 social homes a year are being built. Social care is in disarray. Universities are in financial crisis. Rivers are polluted with raw sewage. Roads are potholed. Half of England’s schools are unfit for use. The court system is creaking and prisons are overflowing. The economy is vulnerable as manufacturing has declined from 30.1% of economic output in 1970 to 8.5% by 2026. 

Neoliberals have restructured the state. Instead of directly investing in infrastructure and new industries, it guarantees corporate profits through privatisations, outsourcing of public services, private finance initiative (PFI) and public private partnership (PPP). Profiteering by corporations has depleted the public purse, leaving less for frontline services. Neoliberals demand cuts in wages, benefits, state pension and public investment, but are silent on the social cost of corporate welfare and tax perks of the super-rich. 

Big banks have been bailed out and are now bankruptcy proof. The finance industry has turned town centres into economic deserts. Private equity has no long-term interest in the wellbeing of workers, customers and communities. It extracts cash through asset-stripping, cuts in wages and staffing, and tax abuses. It has devoured names such as Bernard Matthews, Body Shop, Byron Burger, Casual Dining, Cath Kidson, Claire’s, Comet, Debenhams, Flybe, Four Seasons Health Care, Homebase, HMV, Maplin, Monarch Airlines, The Original Factory Shop, Payless Shoes, Poundworld, Silentnight, Southern Cross, Thomas Cook, TM Lewin, Toys “R” Us and more. It owns supermarkets, hospitals, care homes, GP surgeries, water companies, vets and receives government contracts. 

China invests over 41% of its GDP in productive assets, and India 34.3%. The UK spends around 17.9%, with about 50% provided by the private sector. Due to low investment state the UK has languished at or near the bottom of the G7 and OECD league of investment in productive assets for over thirty years, resulting in low productivity.

Reviving the UK 

There is an urgent need to tackle social problems. What could the Chancellor do? The government could embrace the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and create new money for economic revival, but MMT has no political traction [then give it some]. It could increase tax rates but has pledged not to increase rates of national Insurance, income tax, VAT and corporation tax. The post-war prosperity we had was built on government debt of 270% of GDP. The public debt is currently around 95% of GDP and the government can borrow more for social investment, but it fears big corporations and the City of London who demand more privatisations. 

Despite the self-imposed constraints, the government can access billions for tackling poverty and social investment by eliminating tax, legal and fiscal anomalies .Here are some examples. Wages are taxed at marginal rates of 20%-45%. Earners also pay national insurance. Capital gains above £3,000 are taxed at marginal rates of 18% to 24%. By taxing capital gains at the same rates as wages, around £12bn to £14bn could be raised. More, if national insurance is levied. Dividends above £500 are taxed at marginal rates of 8.75%, 33.75%, and 39.35%. Bringing dividend taxes in line with income tax rates could raise £6 billion a year. Higher if national insurance is also charged. 

Gross tax relief on pension contributions to employers and employees in 2024- 2025 was £83.9bn. 14% of the tax relief benefited 1.1m additional rate (45%) taxpayers, 57% benefited 6.6m higher rate (40%) taxpayers and 29% went to 30.4m basic rate (20%) tax payers. By restricting tax relief at the rate 20% to all, the government could have £14.5bn spare. A 2% tax on wealth above £10m could raise £24bn a year. A modest Financial Transactions Tax (FTT) on the purchase and sale of financial instruments like shares, bonds, and derivatives could raise £5bn a year. VAT at the standard rate on private healthcare insurance premiums could raise around £2bn a year. A home worth £320,000 falls into the same council tax band as a property worth £32m. Additional council tax bands can raise revenues. 

The rules for curbing tax avoidance don’t apply to business rate avoidance. Promoters of one scheme boasted that they have deprived local councils of £500m of revenue. Millions can be raised by ending abusive schemes. In 2024-25, HMRC failed to collect taxes of £59.2bn; totalling nearly £500bn since 2010. Another £12.8bn is lost through profit shifting by multinationals. Billions can be raised by tackling tax abuse and its enablers. Lawyers, accountants, dentists, surveyors and architects trade through limited liability partnership (LLP) structure. As partners, they receive share of profit instead of wages. Their self-employed status means that the LLP does not pay employer national insurance on the profit shared by partners, saving the firms £150,000 for every £1m of profit shared. Big four law firms alone reportedly avoided paying £4bn of employer national insurance. Billions can be collected by ending the employer national insurance dodge. 

Dividends to foreign investors are paid without deducting tax at source. Countries such as the USA, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden have a dividend withholding tax for foreign investors. The UK should follow suit. Each £100bn dividend paid to foreign investors could yield £20bn or more in tax revenues. Research shows that since the pandemic corporations have increased their profit margins by an average of 30%. Electricity and Gas supply companies increased their profit margins by 363%, often without additional investment or risks. Governments can raise large amounts through windfall taxes. For example, a windfall tax on the UK’s four biggest banks could raise £19bn. A small windfall tax is already levied on energy companies and there is scope for much higher rates. Their 2025 profit of £23.1bn is further boosted by the Iran war. 

HMRC is an unsecured creditor for taxes specifically relating to a business (such as corporation tax and capital gains tax). It recovers little from bankrupt businesses. Phoenixing also robs the public purse. HMRC wrote-off £5.6bn in 2023-24, £7.2bn in 2024-25 and £12.8bn in 2025-26. Restoration of the preferential creditor status for HMRC can raise billions. Since 2006, the Bank of England has paid interest on central bank reserve deposits to commercial banks. Central bank reserves are deposits held by commercial banks at the Bank of England (BoE) and are used to settle payments between banks. They are also used by the BoE to manage interest rates through tools such as quantitative easing. The interest payments accelerated in 2009 as quantitative easing took hold. As interest rates rose, payments to commercial banks increased. The EU had similar arrangements but in 2023 virtually eliminated the practice. The Swiss central bank also stopped paying interest on central bank reserves. The UK continues to pay massive amounts; £38.23bn in 2023, £36.33in 2024 and £25.9bn in 2025. Billions can be freed by ending hidden subsidies to banks. 

The above is a small sample of the anomalies that need to be addressed to boost the public purse. The tax base needs to be broadened. Billions can be raised without increasing the basic rates of national Insurance, VAT, income and corporation tax. It won’t immediately dismantle neoliberalism but a start can be made by reducing inequalities, alleviating poverty, raising personal allowance and removing millions for paying income tax, bringing essential services into public ownership and by making much needed social investment. Does the government have the political will to act?

Misinformation About Misinformation

Yet another Government that does not understand that empowering itself means empowering its successors, who are currently its opponents. They never learn. David Rose writes:

The title of this article is not mine. The term “misinformation about misinformation” was coined by five academics, led by Ceren Budak of the University of Michigan, in a paper published in Nature in June 2024. It describes the gap between what public figures say about falsehood online and what the research shows. I borrowed it as the title of a briefing for the Free Speech Union, published this week, because it also describes the evidential foundations of what Andy Burnham’s Labour Government now proposes: the most far-reaching machinery for controlling public speech that this country has seen in peacetime since the seventeenth century.

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy’s Green Paper, Watch this Space, suggests that the algorithms governing social media and video-sharing platforms be compelled by law to give prominence to “regulated public service media”, so that outlets such as the BBC are “seen and heard in the fierce battle against mis and disinformation”. This is a zero-sum game: privileging the Beeb will demote everything else. Lucy Powell, Labour’s Deputy Leader, wants the Representation of the People Bill amended so that platforms come under “some of the same requirements” of accuracy and balance as licensed broadcasters during election campaigns – a plan that would require a vast, and as yet non-existent apparatus of surveillance and censorship. Meanwhile, following amendments earlier this year to the Online Safety Act, the media regulator Ofcom has instructed platforms to draw up protocols for restricting content during a “crisis”, defined as an “extraordinary situation in which there is a serious threat to public safety”.

Beneath all of this sits a single document: a 136-page “evidence review” of mis- and disinformation and their impact, commissioned by the Government Office for Science (GO-Science) from a seven-person team at Sheffield University and published in May. It was commissioned to supply the “full evidence base” ministers admitted they previously lacked. Its tone was apocalyptic, concluding that online fake news “is now widely recognised as a systemic national risk”, that “algorithms and business models contribute to [its] amplification and impact”, and that “system-level interventions are needed”. It went on to recommend statutory “quality signals” in the ranking of content, a state-linked “database of false and misleading narratives”, and official “prebunking” across education and public communications. Debates about what misinformation actually is, it added, “should not become a distraction from action”.

Two often repeated claims underpin this programme. The first is that mis- and disinformation saturate the internet and inflict grave harm: riots, vaccine refusal, subverted elections. The second is that platform algorithms are the engine of the crisis, pushing inflammatory content at innocent, vulnerable users because outrage maximises engagement and engagement maximises revenue, and that this radicalises them permanently. Yet tested against the primary sources and the peer-reviewed literature, neither proposition holds.

Somewhat surprisingly, the review’s authors made no attempt to establish the extent of what was true or false on the internet. Instead, by their own account, they relied on summaries generated by large language AI models of 228 academic papers they had not read, and on the monthly bulletins of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), a body that coordinates fact-checkers across the EU. Those bulletins record replies to questionnaires asking fact-checkers what subjects they have dealt with. Hence, the review’s claim that health misinformation was “detected” every month means only that this was something that fact-checkers chose to check. It does not record the number of misleading posts, the size of their audience, by what standard they were judged false, or how many people believed them.

Nor were the authors and their eleven “expert” reviewers equipped to make such judgements. They included no climate scientist, no economist, no clinician, immunologist or epidemiologist, and no scholar of migration, though inter alia the report pronounces on misinformation about climate, “EU financial policy”, transgender sportspeople and “migrant entitlement”. However, they did include longstanding members of what has been termed the censorship industrial complex, such as Clare Melford, chief executive of the Global Disinformation Index; Chris Morris of the self-appointed fact-checking organisation, Full Fact; Paula Gori, the head of EDMO itself; and Bob Ward, the London School of Economics communications officer whose output largely consists of complaints against journalists who question climate and energy policy. All are partisans in the contest the review was supposed to adjudicate, and their own work is cited repeatedly in its text. They were literally marking their own homework.

Melford’s record shows what that means in practice. The Global Disinformation Index, which she co-founded in 2018, does not correct falsehoods but tries to defund publishers by pressurising advertisers. It rates news websites for “disinformation risk”, compiles a “dynamic exclusion list”, and supplies it to ad agencies and their clients, so that those of which it disapproves are starved of revenue. In 2020, in the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, the GDI rebuked Senator Tom Cotton for suggesting on Fox News that it might have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. According to the GDI, through the broadcast of his words, a “debunked conspiracy theory” was being given “authority, validation and amplification”. It went on to insist that the lab leak hypothesis had been “fact checked and proven untrue” and that advertisers must withdraw from sites that echoed it. Its position has not aged well, for many experts, governments and intelligence agencies have come to believe that far from being a conspiracy theory, the likelihood is the virus did escape from the poorly-shielded Wuhan lab.

The GDI did not confine itself to origins. For example, in 2021 it denounced a Spanish-language site that had reported that a third of British deaths from the Delta variant were among the vaccinated, describing this as “clearly untrue”, and persuaded the restaurant chain Chipotle, whose advertisement sat beside the article, to withdraw support. Public Health England’s Technical Briefing 16, published on 18 June 2021, recorded 73 deaths in England among people confirmed to have the Delta variant. Of these, 34 were unvaccinated, ten had received one dose, and 26 – 36 per cent – had been fully vaccinated for more than a fortnight; more than half of the dead had received at least one dose.

Meanwhile the GDI and its allies have been redefining what constitutes dis- and misinformation, applying the terms not only to falsehoods but “adversarial narratives”: content that may be accurate but which, in the GDI’s judgement, sets people against an individual, an institution or “the science”. In 2024 it told UnHerd that the site would stay on its advertiser exclusion list because it published gender-critical writers such as Kathleen Stock, whose views are protected under British law. For UnHerd, the consequences were severe: it estimated that it was receiving between 2 and 6 per cent of the advertising revenue its audience would normally command.

Another leading component of the censorship lobby, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which was co-founded by Morgan McSweeney, now campaigns against the “new climate denialism” – a category that includes dissent not from the laws of physics but from Britain’s Net Zero energy policy, and voicing concern over the drawbacks of heat pumps and electric vehicles. It is a matter of record that between 2019 and 2023 the Foreign Office paid the GDI grants worth £2.6 million.

It is not therefore difficult to see why the GO-Science review reached the conclusions it did. Its proposed “database of false and misleading narratives”, refreshed monthly and linked to the state, is the GDI’s bank of disagreeable “narratives” with a government seal of approval. Having commissioned an evidence base, ministers were given a predetermined manifesto.

Maybe its authors should have used a different AI, but the fact remains that their sweeping assertion that “the governance of online platform algorithms is exclusively profit- and engagement-driven” and so fosters hatred and division rests on a single citation: a 2025 paper from staff at the Universitas Muhammadiyah Buton, a small private institution in the province of Southeast Sulawesi, which the UniRank directory says is the 433rd best of the 562 universities in Indonesia, and the 10,370th best in the world. I filed a freedom of information request to Sheffield University to elicit the cost of the review to the taxpayer. The answer: £496,355.

More significant is what the review missed: a body of research in the world’s leading journals, none of it cited, which contradicts its every finding. In the words of the Nature paper by Budak and her colleagues, “public intellectuals and journalists frequently make sweeping claims about the effects of exposure to false content online that are inconsistent with much of the current empirical evidence”. Their own review documented “a pattern of low exposure to false and inflammatory content that is concentrated among a narrow fringe with strong motivations to seek out such information”. They noted that visits to 490 websites deemed “untrustworthy” on the basis of fact-checkers’ lists made up just 5.9 per cent of Americans’ clicks on news sites, and when television is added to the denominator, “fake news” accounts for roughly 0.15 per cent of the average media diet. “This reality,” the Nature authors observed, “is not reflected in public discourse about social media.” The GO-Science review appeared two years later, but left this paper unmentioned.

On algorithms, the evidence is if anything more awkward for ministers. The largest study of the question was conducted by researchers at Twitter itself and published in PNAS in 2022, covering seven countries and millions of accounts. It found the algorithm amplified right-of-centre legislators somewhat more than those on the left, but as for extremism, “contrary to prevailing public belief, we did not find evidence to support this hypothesis”: far-right and far-left parties in France, Spain and Germany were amplified less than moderate ones. A landmark experiment published in Science in 2023 switched tens of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users from an algorithmic feed to a simple chronological one for three months. Their political attitudes did not measurably change, and the algorithmic feed turned out to have served them less content from untrustworthy sources, not more. Studies of YouTube found that consumers of extremist videos were overwhelmingly subscribers who went looking for them, not ingenues led astray by recommendations.

Budak and her colleagues drew the obvious conclusion: “Although algorithms indisputably shape the content people see, we interpret recent empirical evidence as suggesting that, on average, these algorithms tend to push users to more moderate content and to offer extreme content predominantly to those who have sought it out.”

The GO-Science review infers that misinformation may have caused “societal harms” such as Covid vaccine hesitancy. The most substantial study of that question was published in Science in 2024. Combining survey experiments with Facebook exposure data covering 233 million American users, it found that content flagged as false by fact-checkers had almost no aggregate effect on vaccination intentions, for the simple reason that hardly anyone saw it: such material attracted 0.3 per cent of the 2.7 billion views of the vaccine stories in the dataset. What did depress intentions was unflagged “vaccine-sceptical” content that contained no falsehoods at all, which had 46 times the aggregate impact of the material flagged as false. The single most influential item was an accurate report in the Chicago Tribune headlined “A healthy doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID vaccine; CDC is investigating why”. It was seen by more than 50 million people – over six times the views of all flagged vaccine misinformation put together.

Advocates of regulation cite this study as proof that moderation must go further. It proves the reverse. The material with the measurable effect was truthful reporting by an established metropolitan newspaper: precisely the “trustworthy” journalism Nandy’s Green Paper proposes to amplify. A regime aimed at misinformation would have missed it. A regime capable of suppressing it would have crossed a baleful line: from correcting falsehood into suppressing accurate news that officials found inconvenient. That is a choice the censorship lobby usually leaves unsaid, although Melford of the GDI came close in 2021, explaining that her organisation had moved beyond merely checking facts because “something can be factually accurate but still extremely harmful”.

If misinformation really were the threat ministers describe, one would expect its footprint to be visible in what people believe. A study published in PLOS ONE in 2022 went looking for it. The team examined national US surveys of 46 separate conspiracist beliefs, repeated with identical wording since 1966, alongside polling on six theories in six European countries, including Britain, and repeated measures of generalised “conspiracy thinking”. “In no instance,” they reported, “do we observe systematic evidence for an increase in conspiracism.” Of the 46 American beliefs, significant declines outnumbered increases by 15 to six. In Europe, just one theory had gained ground in a single country. Yet another belief that had grown was the assertion that conspiracy theories themselves were out of control: 73 per cent of Americans thought so, a conviction the authors attributed to alarmist statements by politicians and the press. Online conspiracy content, they concluded, “might not persuade as much as reinforce existing views.”

Britain has been here before. In July 1637 the Star Chamber of Charles I decreed that nothing might be published without a licence from approved authorities, with enforcement delegated to a private body, the Stationers’ Company. The categories of the forbidden – “seditious”, “scandalous”, “offensive” – meant whatever the licensers wished. The proposals of 2026 are not an exact echo. But exalted legal status for approved publishers, emergency powers over content, and official programmes to instruct children and adults in which voices to trust are that regime’s closest peacetime relatives in nearly four centuries. Of course they failed, and Charles was beheaded twelve years later.

Seven years after the King’s measures took effect, John Milton inaugurated England’s free speech tradition with Areopagitica, and his answer to the licensers still stands. If we believe in truth, “we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

The Government’s case rests on a review that read nothing, measured nothing and ignored the research that contradicted it. On the evidence, the case for the most far-reaching apparatus to restrict peacetime speech since the ousted Stuart king indeed amounts to misinformation about misinformation.

The Movement’s Moral Authority

Paul Knaggs writes:

Read TUC Motion 17 as many times as you like. Count every line, every clause, every one of its two hundred-odd words. You will not find the word “woman” anywhere in it. Not once. Not “women,” not “sex,” not “female,” not “girls.” A motion built entirely around reversing the practical effect of a Supreme Court judgment about the meaning of sex under British equality law manages, across five resolutions and four sub-clauses of condemnation, never to mention the people that judgment was about. That is not an oversight. It is the whole story.

On Monday 14 September, delegates at the TUC Congress in Brighton carried Motion 17, “Oppose the EHRC Code of Practice (Services, Public Functions and Associations),” without a recorded opposing speaker and without, as far as any published account shows, a card vote. It came from the TUC’s LGBT+ Conference, was moved on the floor by Maria Exall of the Communication Workers’ Union [and civil partner of Angela Eagle], and was endorsed for the General Council by the TUC’s Assistant General Secretary, Kate Bell. It commits the entire trade union movement, nearly five and a half million working people, to campaign for the reintroduction of gender self-declaration into UK law. And it does so while treating the women whose legal protections are actually at stake as a subject too awkward to name.

The text itself is worth reading closely, because the ambiguity is built into its architecture. Conference “unequivocally condemns” the EHRC’s Code as “a direct attack on LGBT+ equality.” It resolves that “the law must be changed.” It calls on the TUC “to campaign to introduce a process of gender self-declaration in the UK.” Every one of these is a direct, practical challenge to the effect of For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers, the April 2025 Supreme Court ruling that “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 means biological sex. Self-declaration would make legal recognition of acquired gender easier, but the Supreme Court held that even possession of a Gender Recognition Certificate does not alter a person’s sex for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010.

Campaigning to make self-declared gender determine who counts as a woman or man under that Act is therefore not a question of better guidance or a fairer interpretation: it would require Parliament to change the law the Court interpreted. That is a legitimate position for a trade union conference to hold. What is not legitimate is holding it while pretending the other half of the equation, the women whose sex-based rights the ruling upheld, simply do not exist as a relevant consideration. Kate Bell’s own words on the floor gave the game away. “While challenging this guidance,” she told Congress, “the TUC will comply with the law.” Sit with that sentence. It is an admission, dressed as reassurance, that the TUC knows exactly what the law currently says and intends to spend its political capital getting it changed. It is the trade union equivalent of a company that tells you it will obey the speed limit while lobbying furiously to have it raised. You are not meant to notice that the lobbying is the point.

The union movement women built

There is a bitter irony in a movement that owes so much of its modern legitimacy to women workers now organising to legislate around their protections without saying so out loud. It was women sewing machinists at Ford’s Dagenham plant who walked out in 1968 over unequal pay and forced the Equal Pay Act through Parliament two years later. It was women cleaners, care workers, dinner ladies and shop staff who built the base of unions like UNISON and USDAW into the mass movements they are today. Nearly half of TUC-affiliated unions are led by women. And yet when it came to a motion that touches directly on whether women can rely on single-sex spaces, services and sport being defined by sex rather than declaration, the platform found room for dignity, humiliation and exclusion, but not for the word describing the class of people the ruling was actually about.

This is worth being fair about, because the argument the TUC is not making explicitly deserves to be made explicitly. Trans people do face real hostility, and a trade union movement that ignored that would be failing a vulnerable group of its members. The EHRC’s own past research found that six in ten trans people report having experienced transphobic harassment from strangers in public. It is also true, though less convenient for either side of this argument, that the Home Office’s most recent figures show police-recorded transgender hate crime falling for the second year running, down 11 per cent to 3,809 offences in the year to March 2025, albeit still well above the 2,510 recorded five years earlier. Maria Exall’s charge that the guidance is impractical in places, and that its application to workplace facilities remains genuinely unresolved, is not a frivolous complaint. Even Community, one of the more cautious unions on this question, has said the EHRC needs to be “clear, legally sound” in how it applies the Code. These are real problems, honestly held.

Set that against the same period’s figures for women. Police-recorded sexual offences in England and Wales reached 209,079 in the year to March 2025, part of what the Office for National Statistics itself describes as a decade-long upward trend, one driven in part by improved recording and a greater willingness among victims to come forward, but a trend nonetheless. If the instinct behind Motion 17 is that rising figures demand a union response, it is fair to ask why that instinct did not extend, anywhere in its text, to the women whose safety in single-sex spaces this Code was written to address. But none of that requires erasing women from the sentence. You can defend trans dignity at work without pretending the Supreme Court ruled on nothing in particular. You can call for better, clearer guidance on how single-sex provision works in practice without resolving to campaign for the return of the very mechanism, self-declaration, that the court found incompatible with the Act as written. The TUC chose not to do this. It chose instead a motion that names its enemy (the EHRC), names its remedy (self-ID), and simply skips past the question of whose existing legal protections that remedy would unwind.

What “the law must be changed” would actually mean

Motion 17 never mentions a toilet. It does not need to. The single-sex exceptions in the Equality Act that a restored self-declaration test would swallow are not a toilet law. They cover women-only domestic violence refuges. Single-sex hospital wards and intimate personal care. Female prison wings. Women-only associations and support groups that exist because some spaces have to be run by women, for women, without qualification. Competitive sport. The right to organise politically as women. If the campaign Motion 17 commits the TUC to actually succeeds, every one of those exceptions loses the sex-based footing the Supreme Court confirmed it still has. That is what “the law must be changed” means once you follow it past the door of a public lavatory. Not a different sign. A different legal test for who counts as a woman everywhere the law currently protects one.

The last of those exceptions, the right to organise as women, is not hypothetical. It is the same right that UNISON, ASLEF, USDAW and the Musicians’ Union tested in July, when they boycotted Labour’s Women’s Conference sooner than accept a conference floor reserved for women defined by sex rather than by identity. Four TUC-affiliated unions had already shown, months before Motion 17, exactly how far they would go rather than let a women’s conference remain a women’s conference. Motion 17 is that same instinct, generalised and put into a campaign platform.

Ask, too, what happens to a woman who finds herself where the Darlington nurses stood. Eight nurses at Darlington Memorial Hospital were required to share their female changing room with a male colleague who identified as a woman. A tribunal found in January that the trust had prioritised his perceived rights over theirs, and that the arrangement created a hostile, humiliating and degrading environment for the women. Seven of them later received a combined £187,000 in damages. Their union was not the organisation that won that case for them. One of the nurses raised a complaint and was met with silence, then discovered her union was representing the man she had complained about. The women ended up founding their own organisation, the Darlington Nursing Union, because the one they already paid into would not do the job. Set that history against a TUC that has now voted, on the public record, to campaign for the very legal change that produced the Darlington dispute in the first place. If it happens again, and a reinstated self-declaration test gives no reason to expect otherwise, the question is not rhetorical: will these unions defend the woman, or will they need time to consider the judgment?

Weigh that against the scale of what is actually being contested. The number of people holding a Gender Recognition Certificate, the legal instrument the Supreme Court ruling actually turned on, is not in dispute: 8,464 full certificates have been granted across the entire United Kingdom in the twenty-plus years since the scheme began. Not per year. In total, over two decades. Motion 17 commits a movement of 5.3 million members, well over half of them women, to campaign for a change in the law on behalf of a certificated population smaller than the crowd at a lower-league football match, and does so without once naming the many millions of women whose existing legal protections that change would unwind.

Darlington nurses, TUC Motion 17 and the question every union must answer 

The TUC’s own site records Motion 17 only as “carried.” It does not publish how many hands went up against it, nor which affiliated unions, if any, held back. That opacity should not survive scrutiny. Every general secretary who backed this motion, or let it pass without a recorded objection, owes their women members a plain answer to a plain question: do you believe the Equality Act’s protection of sex-based rights for women is a settled matter, or a temporary inconvenience to be campaigned away? There is no third option that respects both groups of members honestly, and the attempt to sound as though there is, is precisely what makes this motion dishonest rather than merely one-sided. 

Women in these unions pay the same subscriptions, staff the same picket lines, and built no small part of the movement’s moral authority. They are owed more than a motion that discusses their rights without ever naming them. If the TUC wants to campaign for trans self-declaration, it should have the courage to say so plainly, and the honesty to say plainly what that campaign would cost the women whose legal protections it is designed to reverse. Anything less is not solidarity. It is a movement that has learned to talk about half its members by pretending not to see them. A trade union movement that cannot say the word “women” while legislating over their rights has not found a diplomatic form of words. It has found a way to stop being honest with itself.

Power To The People

Sam Richards writes:

Ten years ago, on 15 September 2016, ministers gave final approval to Hinkley Point C, then an £18 billion project expected to mark the revival of British nuclear energy. The anniversary is a useful moment to ask how a country that once led the world in nuclear became so bad at building reactors. By the time Hinkley Point C finally starts generating electricity, it will have taken at least 13 years to build and cost roughly £17 billion more than originally budgeted.

At Britain Remade, we reviewed every nuclear power station built since 2000. Hinkley was the world’s most expensive. Per kilowatt of capacity, it costs around six times as much as a modern South Korean reactor. It wasn’t always like this. Between 1956 and 1971, Britain built 26 nuclear reactors, some at less than half of Hinkley’s cost per kilowatt. By 1965, we had more nuclear power stations than the United States, the Soviet Union and France combined. Projects were routinely approved within months and generally connected to the grid within four or five years of construction beginning.

The contrast, as set out in Alex Chalmers’s recent account of Britain’s nuclear history, is extraordinary. When the Government proposed building Trawsfynydd nuclear power station in Snowdonia, concerns about its effect on the landscape were considered at a three-day public inquiry. The inspectors’ final report, including appendices, ran to 50 pages. Hinkley’s environmental assessment ran to more than 44,000. In 1959, Britain’s Nuclear Installations Inspectorate employed 13 inspectors. Its modern successor, the Office for Nuclear Regulation, has more than 400 specialist technical staff.

Britain’s nuclear failure is a story about power in both senses of the word. We have lost the ability to generate cheap electrical power in no small part because political power has been dispersed among institutions that can obstruct development, but none of which is ultimately responsible for ensuring that anything gets built.

Some of Hinkley’s spiralling cost reflects the simple fact that we allowed our nuclear construction industry to disappear. After nearly 30 years without building a new reactor, our skills and supply chains had atrophied to the point that, when construction started, there was reportedly only one nuclear-qualified welder left in the country. Yet instead of ordering a fleet of standardised reactors, we tried to rebuild an entire industry around one enormous project with thousands of bespoke changes.

Building anything, including nuclear power, becomes cheaper through repetition. A credible pipeline gives suppliers the confidence to invest in apprenticeships and equipment, while allowing skilled workers to move directly from one project to the next. Each reactor incorporates the lessons of the last. Welding on Hinkley’s second reactor is already being completed four times faster than on the first, helping to make it an estimated 30 per cent cheaper.

Yet not only were we trying to sprint to the end of one mega-project from a standing start, but we took an existing French design and improved it in the modern British manner: by making it considerably more complicated and expensive. UK regulatory requirements produced around 7,000 design modifications. As a result, Hinkley requires 35 per cent more steel and 25 per cent more concrete than it otherwise would have done. Rather than learning from the costly mistakes made overseas, we made entirely new mistakes of our own.

During Britain’s early nuclear programme, the Ministry of Power was responsible for both regulating and delivering new generating capacity. This system was perhaps insufficiently transparent, but it did contain something today’s system lacks: an actor with both the authority and the incentive to reach a decision. Today, projects must satisfy an ever-expanding constellation of regulators, statutory consultees and arm’s-length bodies, each pursuing its own limited objective. Each of these can impose new costs or cause delay, but none are responsible for balancing those costs against the country’s need for economic growth or energy security.

A prime example: EDF has spent or committed around £700 million on protecting fish at Hinkley. The breakdown is roughly £500 million on low-velocity water intakes, £150 million on a fish recovery and return system and £50 million on an acoustic fish deterrent — the now infamous “fish disco”. A reasonable person might conclude that this is a disproportionate amount to spend on fish. Natural England’s position is that even this may not be enough.

Recent trials suggest that the disco works, with the number of protected twaite shad boogying within 30 metres of the intake reportedly falling by 93 per cent when it was switched on. Nevertheless, the environmental quango’s advice is that if any impacts on protected fish remain, they must be fully mitigated or additional compensation secured. The most developed proposal involves creating up to 900 acres of salt marsh around the Bristol Channel, potentially requiring land to be acquired from unwilling farmers.

Natural England denies that it is demanding a salt marsh. It says it merely provides scientific advice to bodies including the Marine Management Organisation; it does not “sign off” nuclear power stations and is unaware of any delay caused by its position. While Natural England is technically right that it is not the decision-maker, without its support the Marine Management Organisation is highly unlikely to issue the permit EDF needs to switch on Hinkley Point C. This is a veto in all but name.

It is worth saying at this point that I do not think protecting fish is unimportant. I do, however, think that after £700 million has been committed, and a trial has shown the deterrent reducing nearby twaite shad by 93 per cent, an elected minister should be able to say: that’s enough, let’s get this thing switched on. Whether any remaining benefit to fish justifies delaying low-carbon electricity for six million homes is ultimately a political judgement. It involves balancing the rights of fish against our nation’s energy security, our household bills, our carbon emissions and the rights of farmers who do not want their land turned into salt marsh. It should be taken by someone whom voters can boot out if they disagree.

This is in fact what is missing from our new Prime Minister’s analysis of power in Britain. Power is not simply concentrated in Westminster; it has been squirrelled away inside hundreds of arm’s-length bodies with little or no democratic accountability. Ministers can fire out press releases about building new infrastructure, but effective decisions belong to the institutions that operate as veto players in the system. Voters cannot remove them, and they bear no responsibility for outcomes beyond their own narrow sectoral interests.

This matters to any credible strategy for cheaper electricity. Onward’s excellent report Firm Foundations envisages 20GW of nuclear capacity and estimates that a system with more firm generation could save consumers £320 billion by 2050. But its authors acknowledge that our current nuclear costs are a major barrier. The closer Britain gets to French or South Korean construction costs, the more real those bill savings become.

If Andy Burnham wants to give power back to the people, he should deliver on his Chancellor’s recent pledge and implement the Fingleton review of nuclear regulation in full as quickly as possible. Designs accepted by trusted overseas regulators like France or South Korea should be recognised by default. Planning permission should settle the main questions once, rather than, as has happened with Sizewell C, allowing them to be reopened across more than 160 permits, licences and consents. Statutory consultees should advise within firm deadlines, but elected politicians must make the ultimate trade-offs. For Hinkley, ministers should declare that £700 million of effective fish protection is enough. If the law does not let them reach that judgement, Parliament should change it.

Setting up a No10 branch office in Manchester will not return power to the people. That requires elected governments having the power to take decisions, and voters having the power to punish them when they decide badly. Hinkley’s reactors will eventually produce electricity. The salient question is whether Britain’s democracy is still capable of producing decisions.

Unhealthy Signs

Andy Burnham was the only Health Secretary ever to privatise a hospital, and he is heavily dependent on Alan Milburn, who with Tony Blair and Paul Corrigan brought the concept of NHS privatisation from fringe of the think tank circuit to the heart of government. Therefore, Maria Ward-Brennan writes:

Private equity firms are circling the UK’s healthcare market as NHS backlogs push a wave of patients towards private providers, experts have said. Britain’s biggest private hospital operator, Spire Healthcare, which operates 38 private hospitals, on Sunday agreed to a £1bn takeover by Toscafund Asset Management. Earlier this year, private healthcare property firm Assura agreed a tie-up with listed rival Primary Health Properties following a bidding war with private equity giants KKR and Stonepeak. 

City lawyers said they expect investors’ appetite for private healthcare to continue in the UK with no immediate end in sight to the issues plaguing the NHS. “Private healthcare is a resilient market, and comprises a mix of private pay, insured patients and, in the case of Spire Healthcare, NHS work, so [they are] generally good payers,” said Tom Whelan, partner at law firm Reed Smith. An ageing UK population and the persistent issues facing the NHS were driving investment from private capital investors into the private healthcare market, he added.

Problems facing the NHS

Activity in the UK private health market has surged as a result of rising NHS waiting lists after the Covid pandemic. As of June, the total NHS waiting list in England stands at approximately 7.27m cases. The backlog in access to state healthcare has also had a knock-on effect on rising employee sickness, as almost two-thirds of employees find it difficult to book a doctor’s appointment. A spokesperson for the Independent Healthcare Provider Network (IHPN), said: “Private healthcare providers are now delivering care to record numbers of both NHS and private patients, with IHPN’s latest Going Private research finding that four in ten people now expect to use private healthcare in the coming year, while almost half of 25–34-year-olds have already used it.”

Uptick in insurance policies

City businesses are also increasingly offering private healthcare insurance as an employee benefit when trying to recruit new staff, recruiters and insurers have told City AM, with younger generations in particular valuing a work-sponsored workaround. The IHPN spokesperson said the group has seen record numbers of policies being issued by employers to new staff, a trend it expects to continue. As health secretary, Wes Streeting said the government should use the private healthcare sector to help slash NHS waiting lists. Whelan said: “It’s hard to see how the NHS will be ‘fixed’ in the short term, which reinforces the resilience of the private healthcare model.” “[This] should also mean that the NHS will continue to lean on private healthcare providers to plug the gap in delivery of its own healthcare services as it strives to improve services and being down waiting times, adding further to private healthcare provider revenues,” he added.

The rise in patients, both those who can afford to pay for treatments and those who have insurance, is resulting in greater revenues and profits for private healthcare providers, making the businesses attractive to private equity. Spire Healthcare reported total group revenue of £1.5bn for the 2025 financial year, a 4.5 per cent increase from the previous year, with 43 per cent of its revenue coming from private medical insurance. For health-focused insurers, Vitality’s revenue passed the £1bn mark in its 2025 financial year after falling to a pre-tax loss of £168,000 in the prior year.

Lauren Almeida writes:

Britain’s biggest private hospital operator has agreed to a £1bn takeover by a hedge fund manager known as “the Rottweiler” for his aggressive business tactics. Spire Healthcare, which owns the Claremont hospital in Sheffield and St Anthony’s hospital in south London, has agreed to a 250p a share offer by an investor group led by Toscafund Asset Management, which values the business at £1.03bn. Toscafund was founded in 2000 by Martin Hughes, a City investor nicknamed “the Rottweiler” for his vocal activist approach.

The takeover follows a lengthy period of negotiation between Spire and Toscafund, which was already the second biggest shareholder in the business. The company operates 38 private hospitals and more than 60 clinics across England, Wales and Scotland, which together provided care to 1.36 million patients in 2025. The deal comes despite concerns about the creeping privatisation of the health service. A study in April found that private companies providing services to the NHS, including healthcare and consultancy, have together made £1.6bn in profit over the past two years. Spire had previously been in talks with the private equity companies Bridgepoint and Triton, although they fell through when both pulled out in March.

Spire had announced a strategic review last September, telling investors that it was in discussions with several parties to explore a potential sale of the business. Hughes said in a statement that his fund “has a track record of backing successful healthcare businesses to grow and improve”. “As a private company, Spire would have the freedom to plan for the long term and the agility to move faster: investing in its hospitals and people, putting the latest technology to work and setting new standards in patient care,” he said.

Debbie White, Spire’s chair designate, said the company, squeezed by rising costs such as national insurance contributions and a higher minimum wage, had faced “much volatility” in its trajectory without a buyer. “As an experienced healthcare investor and the company’s second largest shareholder, Toscafund has deep knowledge and experience of the business and its operations, and Toscafund has assured the board of Spire that it is committed to providing the highest standards of care to patients,” she said. Shares in Spire, which is a member of London’s FTSE 250, rose by 3.2% in early trading on Monday to about 246p. The company’s biggest shareholder is Mediclinic, a private healthcare group founded in South Africa.

And Maddison Wheeldon writes:

Tory Kwasi Kwarteng has told Good Morning Britain (GMB) that private healthcare insurance will have to “play a part” in the future of the NHS. Kwarteng argued against using taxation to fund a service that “always needs more money just to stay still”. However, this has been the case since the NHS’s inception post-WWII. Funnily enough, decades after its founding, the Tories — aided by Kwarteng — have been chronically underfunding and under resourcing the NHS as official government policy, stripping its parts for the profits of the ultra-wealthy.

Privatisation is why it has grown more expensive with the taxpayer seeing less value for money — and now Kwarteng and his right-wing cronies want you to aid these profits further by giving up on a free healthcare service and paying for likely expensive insurance premiums. All the while, the UK has seen the rich get ever richer, whilst inequality widens. It won’t be the rich hurt by this policy — although they will fund the profits. But it will have very real and fatal consequences for ordinary people.

People need to wake up to the real enemy of the people

For months now, much of the threat of NHS privatisation has been laid at the feet of Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who has done little to conceal his enthusiasm for dismantling the NHS and opening it up to private profit. But the desire to dismantle and privatise our health service is not confined to any one political party. The Conservatives spent years expanding the role of private companies within the NHS following Labour introduction of PFIs under Blair — and Burnham. All the while, they introduced austerity measures to add insult to injury and compound the harm.

Labour has continued those policies that funnel public money towards private interests, taking lofty donations from private healthcare. Reform are simply determined to push that agenda even further and faster than its predecessors. No matter who holds power, the health of ordinary people remains under threat. The NHS belongs to all of us. It was built on the principle that healthcare should be provided according to need, not wealth – and generations of people have paid into that system with the expectation that it would be there when they needed it.

Turning healthcare into a vehicle for private profit means diverting public money away from patient care and towards greedy shareholders, executives and wealthy investors. In contrast, as so often happens in the class-war society we live in, it will be those without wealth and privilege who pay the highest price. When critical healthcare becomes a commodity, the people who cannot afford it are the ones left behind.

The rich are choking the NHS — and intend to cash in at the end

Once again, ordinary people are being sacrificed at the altar of profit. Those representing hard-working people in the NHS, informed by lived experience working in our healthcare services, have long called for quite the opposite — real solutions for the entire population and to finally say no to profiteers seeking to exploit our increasingly flailing health

It gets even more shady

Some of the super-rich are now openly contradicting their own supposed commitment to free-market principles. Lord Alan Sugar has attempted to argue that one of the world’s richest men should effectively become responsible for supplying the NHS, under the guise of creating a more “centralised” system. But centralisation does not automatically mean efficiency. After all, handing enormous purchasing power to Amazon risks creating precisely the kind of monopoly that free-market advocates supposedly oppose. We have seen the impacts of these monopolies in the privatised water industry — it only benefits the shareholders, not the consumers.

If the argument is genuinely about efficiency and saving taxpayers money, then competition should matter. NHS services should be able to compare suppliers, negotiate prices and choose the products that offer the best combination of cost and quality. Currently, they do not have that freedom. Otherwise, “centralisation” risks becoming little more than a convenient way of concentrating vast amounts of public money and purchasing power into fewer private hands. Likewise with private health insurance companies. It is difficult to square that with the supposed principles of the free market. However, the NHS is not breaking under its own weight — politicians and profiteers are deliberately piling that weight onto it. We can all see now that we cannot afford the greed of the richest in our society any longer.

Rinse And Don’t Repeat

There are rumours as there often are, but with his concern for universal access to clean water, the Pope cannot visit this country too soon. Lucie Heath, Erin Donnelly and Matthew Bailey write:

Water company bosses are quick to pat themselves on the back over “excellent” and “thriving” bathing spots in their area. But when The i Paper invited the chief executives from England’s nine main water firms to join us swimming in one – every single one of them declined the offer. In fact, many have become mysteriously difficult to get hold of. We were flexible about timing and location. Surely the water execs weren’t worried about the idea of swimming in their firm’s own sewage? As part of our Save Britain’s Rivers campaign, The i Paper has been calling on the government to create 100 clean river bathing spots across the country by 2030 – with stricter water quality testing to clean up waterways for swimmers. Progress is being made: there are now 22 official bathing spots in rivers in Britain. However, most of these sites are still not safe for swimming. Of the 15 undergoing regular monitoring, just three have passed water quality testing.

‘He absolutely would… but he’s too busy’

There are more than 600 official bathing sites in the UK, although the vast majority of them are coastal. Two-thirds (66 per cent) are rated excellent, while 21 per cent are good, 6 per cent sufficient and 7 per cent poor. Of those 32 “poor” sites, 12 are in rivers. This is despite CEOs publicly praising the state of their own bathing waters. In response to criticism of sewage spills in Lake Windermere, Louise Beardmore, CEO of United Utilities (£870,000 salary), told MPs last year that the lake has four “excellent” swim spots and a “thriving bathing community”. But when we asked if Beardmore fancied a swim herself, we were told she “is not available”. A week after our original deadline, the water firm’s publicity team eventually offered to send “another senior member” of the company in her place. This unfortunate colleague’s identity remains unknown.

Lawrence Gosden, CEO of Southern Water (£518,000 salary), told the same environment committee hearing that bathing waters in his area have improved “drastically” over the past 30 years. However, when we offered Gosden the chance to join us for a dip, a member of Southern Water’s media relations team said we should speak to the Environment Agency (EA), which is responsible for testing bathing sites, instead. Other CEOs were equally reticent about our invitation. “He can’t accommodate time for this,” a Thames Water representative said on behalf of CEO Chris Weston, who received a £1m pay package in 2024-25 despite overseeing a 34 per cent rise in pollution. “He’s too busy with day-to-day work of the company,” they added. Severn Trent insisted CEO James Jesic (£740,000 salary) “absolutely would take part in river activities”, and is a regular kayaker. “However… ” – yes, the timing just wasn’t quite right. “He’s focused right now on running the business.”

It was a similar story with South West Water’s newly-appointed CEO Keith Haslett. After repeated calls we were eventually told: “Unfortunately Keith will be unable to join for the swim.” Others seemed not to want to discuss our invitation at all. After several days of unanswered calls, Northumbrian Water finally told us: “I can certainly have a look into that for you.” Like the customers of UK water firms who are sick of sewage being illegally dumped in our waterways, we are still waiting. After repeated calls, Yorkshire Water and Anglian Water – whose CEOs Nicola Shaw and Mark Thurston each command pay packets of more than £1m – insisted we would need to send emails and they could consider the request. Despite repeated emails, we never received a reply.

The CEOs of water companies have faced intense scrutiny over large pay packets while overseeing firms that pollute UK waterways with illegal sewage dumping. The regulator Ofwat has moved to block bonuses being paid to CEOs of polluting firms. However water companies have often worked around this by giving “retention payments”. For example, Thurston, of Anglian Water, received a £500,000 retention payment last year in addition to his salary of £593,000 and over £700,000 in payments from Anglian Water’s parent company, bringing his total payment last year to £1.9m.

The bathing spot downstream from six sewage pipes

Many organisations bear responsibility for the poor state of our wild swimming spots. The Environment Agency (EA) is charged with monitoring water quality and the farming industry is also a source of pollution. However, water companies were responsible for more than 145,000 sewage spills at bathing sites in 2025. In last month’s heatwave, firms discharged untreated sewage at 43 different bathing sites for a total of 99 hours, according to Surfers Against Sewage, at a time when thousands flocked to their local beach or rivers.

Community groups that have obtained bathing water status agreed it was helping to clean up their rivers, but that progress is “frustratingly” slow. In December 2020, a stretch of the River Wharfe in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, became the first official river bathing spot in Britain. A stretch of the River Nidd at Knaresborough, North Yorkshire, was designated as an official bathing spot two years ago, but currently has a rating of “poor”. Testing over the past two bathing seasons has found high levels of bacteria such as E. coli and intestinal enterococci, which are present in human and animal faeces. David Clayden, chair of the Nidd Action Group, said there are six combined sewer overflows (CSOs) upstream from the site that discharge untreated sewage into the water. He said gaining bathing water status has pressured Yorkshire Water to take some action. “They have done a lot of work, and they are in the process of planning further work, but it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s a five- or 10-year project to get it improved,” he said.

Despite the pollution, the site remains popular for swimming. “They’re in there most days, especially in the summer. They’re trying to keep their mouth shut, they’re trying to wash their hands, but of course some people get ill,” Clayden said. Miles Cameron, bathing water manager at Yorkshire Water, said it was investing £10m across all storm overflows within 5km of the bathing spot and £7.5m to reduce the amount of phosphorous going into the river. “These are complicated infrastructure projects which take time to deliver, but will greatly improve our impact on the river once complete,” he said.

Bathing site in summer, sewage dumping site in winter

Louise Tonkin is part of a group of residents living around Fordingbridge in the New Forest that gained bathing water status for a stretch of the River Avon. “This is the way we can get the river cleaned up, because once it’s tested, then you’ve got the data a) to keep people safer and b) to hit the water companies with,” Tonkin said. Since gaining bathing status in 2024, the EA and Wessex Water have identified that high levels of E. coli at the site are largely down to animal waste, rather than human sewage. However, Tonkin is frustrated that water quality is only being assessed during the official bathing season that runs from May to September, despite people swimming there year-round. She said another major source of pollution is a combined sewer overflow 200 metres upstream that “operated continuously” between the end of January and start of March this year.

The problem is worse in winter, when groundwater levels are high, which means it doesn’t emerge in the bathing water testing. Tonkin said she thinks gaining bathing water status for the site has put “pressure” on Wessex Water to bring forward its investment plans, but reducing sewage is a “mammoth problem”. A spokesperson for Wessex Water said: “Our licensed storm overflow operated as designed during the wet winter to prevent flooding in Fordingbridge. We’re upgrading our sewer network in the area to help prevent groundwater infiltration and delivering near real-time river water quality information.” A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “We are undertaking targeted action at all ‘poor’ bathing waters and joining forces with local partners to improve the water quality.”

How water companies responded 

After only two firms – Southern Water and Wessex Water – responded to our original email invitation, we followed up with phone calls to each company … in some cases repeatedly over several fruitless weeks. Here’s what they said:

Anglian Water CEO Mark Thurston, £593,000 salary plus £1.27m for retention and other payment. The firm has described rivers as “the lifeblood of our communities” and vowed to “create more opportunities for everyone to enjoy our region’s rivers”. Did they accept our invitation? No response to numerous calls.

Northumbrian Water CEO Heidi Mottram, £768,457 salary, plus £300,000 retention payment. Mottram previously praised the North East as “having some of the highest standards for water bathing quality”. Did they accept our invitation? “I can certainly have a look into that for you,” said a representative following repeated calls. We are still waiting.

Severn Trent Water CEO James Jesic, joined in January 2026 and still received £740,700 in 2025-26. The firm says its rivers are “already wonderful places to be” and that “people and wildlife can both benefit from the work we’ve done”. Did they accept our invitation? We were told Jesic “absolutely would take part in river activities”, but “he’s focused right now on running the business”.

South West Water CEO Keith Haslett, salary unavailable because new to role. The firm has described “the beautiful blue waters of the South West” as “the region’s pride and joy”. Did they accept our invitation? “Unfortunately Keith will be unable to join for the swim,” we were told. Southern Water CEO Lawrence Gosden, £518,162 salary. The firm says its region is “home to the South East’s most loved coastal destinations” and it is helping to “protect and improve your bathing waters”. Did they accept our invitation? Told us to speak to the Environment Agency.

Thames Water CEO Chris Weston, £875,500 salary plus £99,210 deferred bonus. The firm says it wants the region’s rivers to be “wonderful places… running clear and teeming with life – natural beauty spots for people to relax and enjoy”. Did they accept our invitation? “He can’t accommodate time for this,” a spokesperson said on Weston’s behalf. United Utilities CEO Louise Beardmore, £870,000 salary plus £1.53m in bonus and retention payments. Beardmore said her region has “excellent” swimming spots and a “thriving bathing community”. Did they accept our invitation? We were told Beardmore “is not available”, before later being offered an unnamed colleague to join us in her place.

Wessex Water CEO Ruth Jefferson, £670,000 salary. “Enjoy your river, it’s cleaner than it’s ever been, it’s going to get cleaner,” said Matt Wheeldon, Wessex Water’s director of infrastructure, last month. Did they accept our offer? Told us to speak to speak to the Environment Agency.

Yorkshire Water CEO Nicola Shaw, £642,000 salary plus £660,000 payment from shareholders. The firm says it has “bathing water to boast about”, adding: “Thriving coastal resorts and local communities rely on clean bathing water.” Did they accept our invitation? No response to numerous calls.

*Salary figures for 2025-26 and does not include pension or benefit payments.

And Kiran Stacey and Sandra Laville write:

Britain’s insolvency laws cannot deal with the aggressive behaviour shown by the companies that control Thames Water, the environment secretary has said, as she confirmed ministers were prepared to take it into public ownership. Angela Eagle told The Guardian she was determined to reform the water industry after being told by Andy Burnham to make it her top priority. But she warned that could mean a change in law to factor in the way in which the US hedge funds that own much of Thames Water have kept it running while seeking a deal to renegotiate its debts.

The battle over Thames looks set to become the first test of the prime minister’s determination to bring Britain’s utilities into public control even in the face of concerted corporate lobbying and the threat of legal action. In her first big interview since becoming environment secretary, Eagle said putting Thames Water into special administration – a likely first step to deprivatisation – could prove more complicated than some activists think. “A lot of people think you can just choose [special administration] … [but] you either are, or you aren’t, insolvent. And whatever people think of Thames at the moment, it isn’t technically insolvent,” she said. “The Water Act didn’t really envisage this kind of behaviour and this kind of corporate presence behaving in particular ways. But we have a water bill coming along, and nothing is off the table. We’ve got a legislative vehicle coming along soon to enable us to do what we decide to do.”

Burnham has repeatedly promised to take public utilities into public control, focusing especially on energy and water. He told The Guardian before becoming MP for Makerfield that he intended to nationalise Thames. The prime minister’s focus on utilities puts Eagle at the centre of much of what he is trying to do in government, including reforming the water industry and cleaning up illegal dumping sites. She is taking part in weekly meetings of the National Drought Group, which is coordinating the response to the country’s fifth drought in three years.

Speaking from Havant Thicket in Hampshire, which is due to be the country’s first new reservoir since 1992, she said the country had become less resilient under previous governments and she would speed up the pace of new infrastructure. “The system has got more clogged up,” she said, comparing the situation with the one she faced as a minister in the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. “Trying to get anything done from start to finish is now much slower, much more difficult. It seems to somehow be that people always give you loads of reasons why you can’t do anything, rather than [saying] strategically, we need nine reservoirs or this reservoir, or whatever the infrastructure is.” One of her first tasks will be to decide what to do about Thames Water, which is struggling under a £20bn debt pile and has been given a record £122.7m fine for sewage spills and unlawful shareholder payouts.

But Helena Horton writes:

Labour’s new powers for customers to hold water companies to account are a “stitch-up”, campaigners have said, as utilities firms have been advising on how to implement it. The Consumer Council for Water (CCW) is creating what the government referred to as “powerful consumer panels” so the public can question the executives of their local water company and get redress for problems they face from sewage and water companies in England and Wales. But documents reveal that the CCW has asked water companies to advise on how they wish to be held to account by consumers.

Ministers promised last year to set up water boards for consumers that would allow them to air complaints such as about water shortages and sewage backing up into people’s homes. Large areas of south-east England have faced days on end without water due to faults at treatment centres. Meanwhile, there have been hosepipe bans across the country for months as water companies have failed to invest in reservoirs, and companies continue to dump sewage in waterways. Water bills also continue to rise. Water customers currently find it difficult to get companies to respond and properly compensate them when they are left without water. Signing up to the CCW is voluntary for water companies and it is often left to local MPs to solve complaints.

The new “Water Voice” panels have been established to give consumers a say on how their bills are spent and the problems they face at the hands of water companies. This is part of sweeping changes announced after the general election, aimed at fixing the broken water industry and giving more power to the customers of the monopolies who run the industry. Documents released under freedom of information laws reveal the CCW has been consulting water companies on how to set up the new consumer boards that would hold them to account. It said it had “set up an industry advisory group to get ideas, feedback and advice from water companies”.

Feargal Sharkey, the former Undertones frontman turned water campaigner, said: “This is a stitch-up. If water companies are involved in setting this up customers will not get any redress. The people who are important in all of this are the customers who have been extorted by these companies. The CCW is asking the extorters what should be happening to the victims, this is an outrage and a scandal.” He added: “It sounds like this scheme will be equally inept and dysfunctional.” The consumer group said complaints about water companies were rising. It received 80% more complaints in 2025-26 than the previous year, yet had no increase in resource.

Andy Burnham, the prime minister, is under pressure to take Thames Water under public control as the company is running out of money. However, this plan has faced delays as government officials fear a legal challenge by the company’s creditors if it is forced into administration, and the Treasury is concerned about the costs. He is also due to introduce a new water bill to parliament, which will include the regulatory changes that are supposed to give new powers to crack down on water companies. As part of this, Ofwat will be replaced by a regulator with supervisory powers, similar to the oversight of banks after the financial crash. Experts would be appointed to work inside water companies and ensure they are obeying the law and improving the environment.

A CCW spokesperson said: “It is a complete misrepresentation to suggest that CCW consulted water companies on how they would like to be held to account. CCW has engaged with water companies to work through the practicalities of how we could ensure their full engagement in the panels. For example, giving them enough lead time to ensure their chief executives were able to attend the accountability sessions and making sure action plans were produced in good time.” A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spokesperson said: “We know the water industry hasn’t been working in the public interest for far too long. That’s exactly why this government is looking at how to give the public more control and keep bills as low as possible. We’re not satisfied with the current system, so we’re also introducing a new, independent and impartial water ombudsman to strengthen customer protection and make sure complaints are taken seriously and resolved quickly. It’s the least the public can expect, and one of our first steps to building a water system that works.”

Mark Kleinman writes:

One of Britain's most troubled water suppliers has called off plans to raise hundreds of millions of pounds from investors amid the ongoing regulatory and political uncertainty engulfing the industry. Sky News has learnt that South East Water aborted immediate plans for a bond issue earlier this week after attracting insufficient demand from prospective backers. Industry sources said that South East Water, which over the last year has become a focus for public and political anger at the sector after leaving thousands of customers without running water, had intended to secure in the region of £200m to fortify its balance sheet.

The company, which recently parachuted in a new leadership team to rebuild its credibility and improve its operating performance, is understood to have told debt investors that the volatile political and regulatory backdrop had contributed to a lack of demand for the new financing. Earlier this year, South East Water was ordered by the industry regulator, Ofwat, to spend more than £30m on improvements in the wake of repeated supply failures. The company serves about 2.2 million customers in Kent. Partly owned by the NatWest Pension Fund, South East Water has debts of about £1.7bn. It is now likely to face questions about how it plans to fund its ongoing operations and infrastructure investment.

A source close to the company said South East Water had adequate liquidity with a backstop facility of several hundred million pounds in place. They added that this week's roadshow amounted to a market-sounding exercise and that the company continued to evaluate options for future debt-raising activity. One source said the abandoned bond issue had been assembled by bankers at NatWest and would have involved borrowing money over a five-year period. The deal, which was not formally launched when the company's board decided not to proceed, was designed to strengthen South East Water's finances two months after it secured £200m of new liquidity that was intended to support future bond issuance.

The chairman and chief executive of South East Water were axed earlier this year after facing incredulity and anger from MPs over their handling of the crisis at the company. It has now installed a new management team, including John Halsall, an experienced and respected water industry figure, as its chief executive. The disclosure of South East Water's proposed debt raise comes amid growing uncertainty about the privatised industry's future. Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, has spoken of his desire for "greater public control" over water companies but has yet to provide further details of his ambition.

The fog hanging over the sector has been most pronounced at Thames Water, which has been teetering on the brink of collapse for more than two years. One option for the government is to place Thames Water, which has more than 15 million customers, into a process called a special administration regime (SAR), a form of temporary state supervision which has never been used before at a water company. Despite reports that this could happen within days of Mr Burnham becoming prime minister, the immediate prospects of such a move have receded as new ministers and officials have digested the financial and operational implications of doing so.

Angela Eagle, the new environment secretary, suggested last week, that Britain's insolvency laws could be amended to make a Thames Water SAR more easily achievable. Although the abandonment of South East Water's bond issue hints at growing investor anxiety about the sector, a number of other water utilities have been able to attract new investment this year - albeit at bargain basement prices. In March, EQT, the Swedish-based investment giant, bought a big stake in the parent company of Yorkshire Water, although the Financial Times reported in July that the deal had taken place at a discount to the value of its regulated assets. The government has signalled plans to adopt the recommendations of a review conducted last year by Sir Jon Cunliffe, which called for the establishment of a powerful new water regulator. However, details of the overhaul, which will include the abolition of Ofwat, remain sparse. South East Water and NatWest both declined to comment on Thursday.

Judy Hobson and Lynette Horsburgh write:

A water company has been fined £900,000 for a sewage leak which led to swimming being banned on a stretch of coastline. United Utilities (UU) Water Ltd admitted five offences over the major pollution incident on Lancashire's Fylde coastline in June 2023. Preston Magistrates' Court heard a pipe collapse at Fleetwood Wastewater Treatment Works led to raw sewage being discharged into the Irish Sea for more than 35 hours. The Environment Agency (EA) said it was an "unacceptable pollution incident which had far-reaching consequences for residents and businesses".

UU said it had immediately accepted responsibility, apologised unreservedly and had taken steps to fix the problems as soon as possible. UU was fined £964,225 in fines and costs after pleading guilty to five environmental permit offences at an earlier hearing. The offences related to incidents between 11 and 22 June 2023 when raw sewage was discharged into the Irish Sea from three coastal pumping stations for more than 35 hours in total over several days. The court heard the pipe, which had only been installed 28 years ago, had been buried much too deeply - about 5m below ground level rather than 2.4m.

The EA said sewage was reported on beaches and in marine recreational facilities including Fleetwood baths. As a result, the EA issued "no bathing" advice across all eight designated bathing waters along the affected coastline, while sampling carried out during the incident by a trained citizen scientist was also indicative of the presence of E. coli. The EA said three shellfish beds were also temporarily closed by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) due to public health concerns. Communities and businesses along the coast were impacted significantly by the contamination, the EA said, with popular tourist destinations including Blackpool and St Annes among those badly affected. It said in Blackpool alone, summer visitor numbers fell by hundreds of thousands compared with the previous year. An EA investigation found the incident began following the partial collapse of a final effluent pipe at Fleetwood Wastewater Treatment Works, which reduced the amount of sewage the site could receive and caused sewage to back up through the wider system. Following periods of rainfall, sewage was subsequently discharged from three coastal pumping stations at Manchester Square, Anchorsholme and Chatsworth Avenue.

UU's environmental permits set strict conditions on when sewage could be discharged from pumping stations. Further investigation into flow and spill data provided by the company found those conditions had not been met when the spills took place, the EA said. Andy Brown, the Environment Agency's water regulation manager, told BBC North West Tonight the large fine "sent out an important message". He said: "This was an unacceptable pollution incident which had far-reaching consequences for residents and businesses along the Fylde coast. Our investigation found that United Utilities Water Limited discharged sewage outside the conditions of its environmental permits. The company admitted those breaches, and today's record fine reflects the seriousness of the offences and the harm caused."

The court heard UU accepted straight away it was its fault and apologised unreservedly and took steps to fix the problems as quickly as possible. Four hundred staff worked around the clock to repair the damage at a cost of £38m. Since then, UU said it had started to install a state-of-the-art new system in January. It also said it had donated to community projects. Chris Borradaile, from UU, told BBC North West Tonight: "We have committed to the full extent of the pipeline - 1.5km - and that is costing around £66m. Typically that would have taken three years to carry out that sort of construction but we are doing that in 12 months."

And Gill Plimmer writes:

Thames Water will have incurred almost £2bn in financing costs and advisory fees over the 18 months to the end of September, adding to concerns about the burden of keeping the UK’s largest water supplier in private hands. The utility — which is fighting the threat of renationalisation under Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s Labour government — will have incurred £1.6bn in gross financing costs between April 2025 and the end of this month, according to its last annual report and projections provided to the FT. The utility also had £235mn in exceptional expenses including advisory, legal and professional fees in the year to the end of March, with the projected cost for the following six months running to about £100mn.

The findings underscore the costs to the heavily indebted utility under its current ownership, with the issue of what to do with Thames likely to prove an early test for Burnham. Thames is in effect in the hands of creditors including US hedge fund Elliott Management and private capital group Silver Point, after its previous owners walked away from the business in 2024 declaring it “uninvestable”. Ministers must decide whether to allow the embattled utility to go ahead with an expensive private restructuring or place it into a Special Administration Regime (SAR) — a form of temporary renationalisation.

Under a SAR, an independent insolvency practitioner would ensure services keep running while the company’s massive debt stack and interest payments are frozen. This would allow cash from customer bills to be diverted straight into sewage and water infrastructure rather than servicing the debt. Ian McNuff, a former adviser to private equity firm Star Capital and water campaigner who provided the projections based on Thames’s accounts, said the figures helped to show the true cost of avoiding government intervention, arguing that creditors have a vested interest in overstating the disruption of a SAR.

The government’s next move has been complicated by legal debates. Angela Eagle, the environment secretary, has previously said that because the utility is not yet “technically insolvent”, triggering an SAR remains legally complex. Ewan McGaughey, professor of law at King’s College London, said that the state could intervene under the Water Industry Act 1991, citing breaches of statutory duties and neglect of infrastructure. “The government has solid legal grounds to take decisive action,” he said.

The cost of temporarily nationalising Thames under an SAR is disputed. Thames’s advisers had estimated that the process would cost the government about £4bn, while others have argued this is too high given the Treasury’s ability to recoup cash and divert interest payments. Thames’s creditors, who have been in talks with Whitehall for more than a year over their formal takeover plan, are working up a revised proposal for regulator Ofwat.

The former secretary of state Emma Reynolds had expressed concerns over a previous offer that involved the creditors injecting £3.35bn of new equity and providing up to £6.55bn in new loan facilities to Thames, while facing a 30 per cent writedown on the value of their debt. Investors had also asked Ofwat to shield the company from certain regulatory penalties for sewage pollution and leakage over the next four years in exchange for a commitment to deliver £800mn to £1bn in asset improvements. After approval by Ofwat, the agreement must undergo a three-month public consultation and receive final sign-off from the High Court.

Thames’s creditors, operating as London & Valley Water Consortium, have indicated they may be willing to offer an additional £2bn bridging loan to prevent the utility’s collapse if the deal is delayed. But they have added that they would need reassurance that the government remains committed to a “market solution”. Thames Water, which receives all its revenues from customer bills, said: “We are working to secure a multibillion-pound recapitalisation in one of the most complex restructurings in UK history. The costs of this are not borne by our customers but by our investors.” London & Valley Water Consortium said: “The costs of the restructuring will not impact customer bills. Creditors have stepped in to cover a significant revenue shortfall which has enabled Thames Water’s record capital investment programme to continue.”

Thankfully, though, Graham Hiscott writes:

Returning the water industry to public ownership could save £22billion five years, MPs have heard. Labour MP Paul Davies, who led a Westminster Hall debate, said ditching the “disastrous” privatised model would also go some way to restoring the public’s faith in the sector. It comes amid growing angry about the stare of the industry since it was sold off by Tory PM Margaret Thatcher, since when tens of billions have been dished out to investors and owners - most abroad. Yet over that time, customer bills have soared and the country has been left with a sewage scandal. The scale of the controversy was hammered home in hard-hitting Channel 4 factual drama Dirty Business earlier this year, which included the fight by campaigners Ash Smith and Peter Hammond to expose the truth about the scale of sewage pollution.

Mr Smith is behind a petition, which now has more than 200,000 signatures, to hold a binding national referendum on whether the water industry should be returned to public ownership. MPs lined up to debate the issue, and to highlight failures by water companies in their areas. Mr Davies, Labour MP for Colne Valley, said: “For too long, our water industry has been in the hands of shareholders, rather than the public who pay and rely on its delivery. There is huge frustration out there.” He went on: “The private model for water has been far from a success,. It has been an economic, environmental and public health failure. Private companies have paid out around £83billion in dividends, while loading the companies with debt. And crucial infrastructure has been left to fail. Not a single new reservoir has been built since 1992. And water companies have seen the waste of around three billion litres of water a day through leaky pipes.”

Mr Davies said he welcomed measures announced by the Labour government to tackle failures with the current model, he warned they did not go far enough. “I am concerned that the government has failed to address the fundamental error of the past four decades,” he told fellow MPs. A Yougov survey has found that 82% of Brits feel the water industry should be publicly owned. up from 59% in 2017. “Public ownership would mean that £22billion earmarked for shareholder returns and interest over next the five years goes instead to repairing our broken water infrastructure, paying off debts and letting water company staff do their job properly,” Mr Davies said. “It beggars belief to see the money is being siphoned off from the water sector into private hands, and many shareholders not even in the UK, whereas we see our citizens suffering really badly.” He highlighted examples from other countries where water has been brought back under public control including Paris in 2010, which led to a range of social subsidies being introduced.

It comes as private creditors for crisis hit Thames Water try to prevent the debt laden company coming under a form of temporary nationalisation. Fleur Anderson, Labour MP for Putney: “My constituents are very angry about Thames Water. They are paying more but getting less because of the model we have,” that the company needs to be put into special administration.” Martin Wrigley, Liberal Democrat MP for Newton Abbot, called for water companies to be mutually owned. He also warned regulator Ofwat “does not have the teeth” to tackle failures by the water companies. Mr Wrigley’s constituency covers Dawlish, which also featured in Dirty Business after the death of eight year-old Heather Preen in 1999. Her mother, Julie Maughan, believes she contracted E. coli after coming into contact with raw sewage on the beach. Clive Lewis, Labour MP for Norwich South, claimed the call for the return of water to public ownership crossed the political divide. "This taps into a deep. public anxiety about the future of this country and this planet," he said.

Water Minister Emma Hardy said: “All of the failures that people have mentioned are outrageous. All of the people who have become sick, the impact it's had on places that people love...it is horrific we have ended up in this situation." She said Andy Burnham becoming PM would "open up options that were previously not available - more things are on the table. We are working through things right now across government. "We are looking to bring forward a bill that really does meet that appetite for change. We are looking at all of the sector and what can be done across it." Ms Hardy said the industry needed "significant reform to give people and places greater control and make the water industry work for them again."

Get on with it, then. The shares are monetarily worthless (would you buy them?), so renationalise. Now. Just do it.