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At first glance, there is nothing altogether unusual about the train.

Sitting on the platform at Spandau station in the suburbs of Berlin, it looks much the same as every other one.

But do not be fooled, for this train, manufactured by French group Alstom, is very special indeed. It runs not on electricity or diesel but on what many think is the fuel of the future: hydrogen.

Indeed, the train is something of a record-breaker, having travelled more than a thousand kilometres on a single tank of hydrogen only a few weeks earlier. To travel on, though, it feels just like any other regional locomotive.

There is no engine noise, no whiff of diesel fumes as it pulls away. Indeed, it feels a lot like one of the countless other electric trains you find around Europe.

Which begs the question: what is the point of a hydrogen train?

Hydrogen train
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A hydrogen train looks and feels like its electric and diesel predecessors

The short answer is that not every part of the rail network is electrified. In Germany, about 40% of the tracks aren’t connected to power; in the UK the proportion is even higher: around 60%.

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At the moment trains running on those lines tend to use diesel power, which of course means carbon emissions. And since connecting those tracks to electricity would be fiendishly expensive, hydrogen is seen as one of the most compelling options to eliminate emissions from rail transport.

How you make hydrogen matters

Electrolysis plant tubes at Inovyn for Conway online
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Electrolysis in action

And that brings us to the first thing you need to know about hydrogen. It is a wonder element: incredibly useful for its chemical properties but also capable of being used as a fuel. It can be burnt in much the same way as natural gas is burnt; and it can be run through a fuel cell, where it behaves a little like a battery.

But, even more importantly, hydrogen can be created without any carbon emissions. I say ‘can’ because actually it turns out there are all sorts of ways of making hydrogen, some of which are clean and others are considerably more dirty.

Hydrogen aficionados have come up with a palette of colours to describe the various different methods used to make it which is, on the one hand, slightly ridiculous given hydrogen itself is a colourless gas; but it does at least underline that there are many different routes to making it.

The main way hydrogen is made today (there is nothing especially new about the gas, even if everyone is going on about it a lot more these days) is from natural gas – the methane we get out of the ground and pipe into our boilers. Remove the carbon atom from methane through a process called “steam reforming” and you are left with hydrogen gas.

Shell refinery Cologne for Conway online.
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Shell’s plant near Cologne

This – grey hydrogen as it’s known – is something that already gets produced on a grand scale in refineries and plants around the world. The hydrogen is used as a feedstock for all sorts of chemical processes, it helps us make plastics as well as other petrochemicals, but arguably its most important function is in the manufacture of fertilisers.

Without all those molecules of grey hydrogen produced and turned into ammonia in recent decades, millions of us would have starved. So hydrogen is already quite a big deal.

The problem, as you’ll have noticed, is that grey hydrogen involves quite a lot of carbon emissions. Now, one solution to this is to try to capture those carbon emissions out of the chimney and store the CO2 away underground. Do this and you have a low carbon form of hydrogen (you can’t capture every single carbon atom) commonly known as blue hydrogen.

The colour palette only grows from thereon. There is black hydrogen (made from coal), pink hydrogen (made from nuclear power), turquoise hydrogen (produced by pyrolysis of methane) and on and on. But the holy grail of hydrogen these days is “green hydrogen”.

Green hydrogen is made by passing water through an electrolysis cell, powered with electricity generated by a renewable source, be it wind, solar or hydropower.

The electricity rips apart the hydrogen atoms from the oxygen atoms in the water, creating hydrogen gas at one electrode and oxygen at the other. Voila, you have a truly green source of hydrogen.

Cleaner hydrogen is more expensive to make

A general view of hydrogen electrolysis plant called 'REFHYNE', one of the world's first green hydrogen plants, during a launch event at Shell's Rhineland refinery
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Shell’s hydrogen electroysis plant in Rhineland

Now, there is nothing especially new about electrolysis. We have been using it to create important chemicals in this country and elsewhere besides for more than a century. Indeed there is nothing new about the idea of using hydrogen as the fuel of the future.

People have been driving prototype hydrogen cars for decades; they have been talking about this fuel changing the world for even longer. But it hasn’t happened yet. Why? Well, this brings us to the second thing you need to know about hydrogen: it is really quite expensive to make – at least in its green form.

Models show off Honda's Kiwami fuel-cell concept car, which is making its Australian debut, at the Australian Motor Show in Sydney October 7, 2004.
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Honda’s hydrogen fuel-cell concept car in 2004

This comes back to thermodynamics. Hydrogen gas does not exist in a natural form. Unlike natural gas or oil, this is not a fuel that nature has provided us. The reason we have all those different colours of hydrogen is that we need to make it and there are all sorts of ways of doing that. But the laws of thermodynamics are such that in order to make hydrogen you need to put in more energy than you can get out by burning the gas.

And the amount of energy you need to put in goes up the greener the type of hydrogen. Consider: making a kilogram of grey hydrogen costs roughly $1, or did before gas prices spiked to extraordinary levels. Making a kilo of green hydrogen, on the other hand, costs roughly $5.

This is worth pondering for a moment. Many of its boosters suggest hydrogen is the obvious solution for space heating. Most of the UK’s homes currently have gas boilers.

Tearing out entire radiator systems and replacing them with air source heat pumps, powered by electricity, will involve significant costs for home renovation; some homes will need to be better insulated. It seems intuitively smart to retain your existing radiators and switch them over to hydrogen, right?

Except that a) Hydrogen is expensive: many multiples more expensive than natural gas. And b) because it is such a small molecule, it is far more prone to leaks than methane, meaning houses are significantly more vulnerable to explosions (hydrogen is also extremely combustible).

The country’s gas infrastructure would have to be renewed – an incredibly expensive exercise – and this is all assuming people will want to pay the running cost of the hydrogen itself.

You see the issue here. In theory, there are lots of use cases for hydrogen but in practice, there are many areas where it’s not obvious hydrogen is the answer. Heating is one of those areas: heat pumps are getting better by the year, and the momentum seems to be shifting towards them.

A man looks at Nissan Motor Co's prototype fuel cell car Nissan FCV on display in Tokyo January 28, 2002. Nissan's ultimate environment-friendly clean car, running on hydrogen with speeds of up to 120km/hour, is expected to be a part of test runs around fall of 2002 with hopes to go on the market in 2005, the carmaker said.
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Nissan’s 2002 prototype hydrogen car was expected to go into production in 2005

Something similar has already happened with cars. Back in the 1970s and 80s, many saw hydrogen as the answer for greening automobiles. Jack Nicholson wowed onlookers in the 1970s with a car fuelled by what we would today call “green hydrogen” (see, I told you none of this is very new).

But in the intervening period battery technology has improved so dramatically that most experts now agree that batteries have won that race.

Just because hydrogen can be used, should it be used?

The brings us to the third thing you need to know about hydrogen. There is an awful lot of hype about this gas, but while it could be used in all sorts of applications, it’s not altogether clear it should be used in all those applications.

Hydrogen cars work great, but they are more expensive than their battery electric counterparts and have roughly similar range. It is, of course, much quicker to refuel a hydrogen car than to charge a battery, but then that assumes you can find a hydrogen fuelling station.

There are not many – far, far fewer than battery charging points (let alone simple three-pin plugs).

According to Meredith Annex, head of heating and hydrogen at BloombergNEF – which specialises in energy research – there are some obvious places where hydrogen will be all-important, starting with those areas where it’s already used – for instance, in making fertilisers and as a chemical feedstock.

It will almost certainly play a role in making green steel, where it could be even cheaper than some of today’s blast furnaces.

“And then you start looking at things like shipping fuel, where it looks likely that ammonia and methanol, which are both produced from hydrogen, are both looking like really good solutions,” she says.

“And then you come to the areas where the jury is still out. Those are things like power generation, aviation fuel, where there are a lot of competing technologies.”

And, it turns out, that jury-still-out section also includes trains, which brings us back to that Alstom locomotive in Berlin. Why use a hydrogen train instead of, say, a battery train? The short answer is that batteries are very heavy and bulky.

If you wanted a battery-powered train to cover 1,000 kilometres, as this train did recently, you would need so many batteries stacked up inside the train that there wouldn’t be enough room for any passengers.

Ed Conway on a hydrogen train in Germany.
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Ed Conway on a hydrogen train in Germany

So battery trains might make sense for rural lines of 100 kilometres or so, but for longer journeys there’s a stronger case for hydrogen.

But the problem is that all of this remains somewhat fantastical until you have the necessary infrastructure: the pipes and terminals to refill those hydrogen tanks, not to mention the facilities themselves which can produce the hydrogen.

Germany is one of the most proactive countries in Europe on this front. These hydrogen trains are already running in the north of the country (albeit powered by grey hydrogen rather than the green stuff).

The UK, on the other hand, has no hydrogen trains or indeed the facilities on which to run them – whatever the colour of the hydrogen.

Hydrogen needs big investment – and the UK’s strategy is uncertain

That brings us to the fourth thing you need to know about hydrogen: it won’t happen without significant government intervention.

That intervention might mean setting a price for carbon, it might mean providing the infrastructure – the national grid for hydrogen (a non-trivial exercise given that you can’t just run it in most of the existing gas pipelines). It means being clearer about whether you want homes to be heated with hydrogen or by heat pumps.

Yet so far no one is entirely sure where the UK government (this one or for that matter the last two of them) stands on hydrogen. There have been documents about a hydrogen strategy but most of them have looked more like thought exercises than clear signals of a direction of travel.

Little money has been set aside for the sector and the constant chaos in Westminster in recent years has only compounded the uncertainty.

Read one of those documents and you will see that the UK is poised to be a “world leader in low carbon hydrogen production and use”.

Wind turbines from Vattenfall are seen at the North Sea in Scheveningen, Netherlands August

And there are lots of reasons to be optimistic about the UK. We have plentiful renewable power capacity coming on stream in the North Sea. We have decades of expertise in working with fuels and engineering the projects necessary to make hydrogen.

Yet if anything, the UK is a laggard in this race rather than a leader.

It also seems to have chosen the wrong horse in the race, putting much of its investment towards “blue hydrogen” – the kind you get from natural gas, squirrelling away the excess carbon – instead of green hydrogen.

That seemed like a prudent move when blue hydrogen was considerably cheaper than green but today, with gas prices so high, green hydrogen looks cost competitive with blue – a stunning change.

How will the UK adapt to this changing landscape? The short answer is no one has a clue; there have been so many changes in strategy, not to mention personnel in government, that it’s no longer especially clear.

That’s causing frustration among businesses which are vying to be part of the hydrogen economy. Inovyn, a part of Ineos which produces chemicals from its Runcorn base, has long used electrolysis to produce chlorine and hydrogen.

Electrolysis plant Inovyn on river Mersea for Conway online
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Inovyn’s Electrolysis plant in the North West

Its cells are currently plugged into the national grid, but were they powered by wind or solar, the hydrogen produced there would be green hydrogen. The company has expertise in making those cells and could be producing them for markets around the world – but the lack of a market in the UK represents a challenge.

ITM Power, a company based in Sheffield, is among the world leaders in a slightly different type of electrolysis cell (proton-exchange membranes rather than the alkaline cells Inovyn uses at Runcorn).

They already sell their units all over Europe, including at a Shell project in Cologne which promises to be the biggest green hydrogen site on the continent.

That these cells are wending their way across the Channel is not without significance.

China is bossing the race

The reality is that Britain is already a laggard in the race to create a European battery industry. There is a risk it ends up missing out on the race to create a hydrogen industry too.

In any case, the global race is already being bossed by China, which is dominant in almost every node of the hydrogen supply chain – much as it is for solar power and is shaping up to be for batteries. Britain, with its equivocal attitude towards industrial strategy, is currently an also-ran.

Electrolysis tubes close up at Inovyn for Conway online
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The electrolysis process happening here could revolutionise the energy industry – if it’s applied properly

Given there are still so many question marks about the use cases of hydrogen, you are perhaps asking yourself: who cares? Is there really so much to be gained from investing in something which could end up being another bubble?

The short answer is that while there is certainly a lot of froth in the hydrogen sector, there is also one, big compelling reason why this time might be different for H2.

If we are going to eliminate carbon emissions altogether, that means eliminating or seriously curtailing all sources of pollution. So we will still need a way of making fertiliser which doesn’t involve burning natural gas. That means hydrogen.

If we are going to make steel without burning coal, that will almost certainly mean using hydrogen instead. If we are going to make certain critical petrochemicals – the kind of things without which we are all in big trouble – we need hydrogen.

But, most of all, if we are going to have green power, then we will need lots and lots of hydrogen.

Hydrogen’s killer app

Electrolysis plant Inovyn for Conway online
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Inside Inovyn’s electrolysis plant

And this, ultimately, is the killer app for this fuel. Renewable energy is inherently intermittent. The sun only shines for so many hours a day; the wind does not blow every day.

So we need some sort of backup to store power for those times when it’s not being generated by renewables. At the moment that backup is provided by natural gas and (to a lesser extent) by nuclear. We have a few pump storage reservoirs which can store some power, but only so much.

And while batteries can store certain amounts of power, you would need staggering numbers of them to provide the terawatts of power storage we would need to keep the grid replenished for hours or for that matter days.

So this is where hydrogen comes in. When the wind is blowing hard, we send that power to electrolysis cells where it creates lots and lots of hydrogen, which then acts as a mammoth national battery: when we need backup power we burn it in power stations or run it through fuel cells.

Squint a little bit and you can envisage a future where, with enough wind turbines and enough green hydrogen facilities, Britain (and for that matter the world) could have a truly green electricity system.

Yet getting there will take an awful lot of investment. It will take vision and commitment.

Neither of these things are in limitless supply in Whitehall right now. Which is why you have to travel much further afield to find exciting new hydrogen projects these days.

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Ofwat could be scrapped in water reforms

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Ofwat could be scrapped in water reforms

An independent review of the water industry is to recommend sweeping changes to the way the sector is managed, including the potential replacement of Ofwat with a strengthened body combining economic and environmental regulation.

Former Bank of England governor Sir Jon Cunliffe will publish the findings of the Independent Water Commission on Monday, with stakeholders across the industry expecting significant changes to regulation to be at its heart.

The existing regulator Ofwat has been under fire from all sides in recent years amid rising public anger at levels of pollution and the financial management of water companies.

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Campaigners and politicians have accused Ofwat of failing to hold water operators to account, while the companies complain that its focus on keeping bills down has prevented appropriate investment in infrastructure.

In an interim report, published in June, Sir Jon identified the presence of multiple regulators with overlapping responsibilities as a key issue facing the industry.

While Ofwat is the economic regulator, the Environment Agency has responsibility for setting pollution standards, alongside the Drinking Water Inspectorate.

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Sir Jon’s final report is expected to include a recommendation that the government consider a new regulator that combines Ofwat’s economic regulatory powers with the water-facing responsibilities currently managed by the EA.

In his interim report, Sir Jon said options for reform ranged from “rationalising” existing regulation to “fundamental, structural options for integrating regulatory remits and functions”.

He is understood to have discussed the implications of fundamental reform with senior figures in industry and government in the last week as he finalised his report.

Environment Secretary Steve Reed is expected to launch a consultation on the proposals following publication of the commission report.

The commission is also expected to recommend a “major shift” in the model of economic regulation, which currently relies on econometric modelling, to a supervisory approach that takes more account of individual company circumstances.

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How water can teach Labour a much-needed lesson


Liz Bates

Liz Bates

Political correspondent

@wizbates

On Monday, the government’s long-awaited review into the UK’s water industry will finally report.

The expectation is that it will recommend sweeping changes – including the abolition of the regulator, Ofwat.

But frustrated customers of the water companies could rightly complain that the process of taking on this failing sector and its regulator has been slow and ineffective.

They may be forgiven for going further and suggesting that how Labour has dealt with water is symbolic of their inability to make an impact across many areas of public life, leaving many of their voters disappointed.

This is an industry that has been visibly and rapidly declining for decades, with the illegal sewage dumping and rotting pipes in stark contrast with the vast salaries and bonuses paid out to their executives.

It doesn’t take a review to see what’s gone wrong. Most informed members of the public could explain what has happened in a matter of minutes.

And yet, despite 14 years in opposition with plenty of time to put together a radical plan, a review is exactly what the government decided on before taking on Ofwat.

Month after month, they were asked if they believed the water industry regulator was fit for purpose despite the obvious disintegration on their watch. Every time the answer was ‘yes’.

As in so many areas of government, Labour, instead of acting, needed someone else to make the decision for them, meaning that it has taken over a year to come to the simple conclusion that the regulator is in fact, not fit for purpose.

As they enter their second year in office, maybe this can provide a lesson they desperately need to learn if they want to turn around their fortunes.

That bold decisions do not require months of review, endless consultations, or outside experts to endlessly analyse the problem.

They just need to get on with it. Voters will thank them.

Sir Jon has said the water industry requires long-term strategic planning and stability in order to make it attractive to “low-risk, low-return investors”.

The water industry has long complained that the current model, in which companies are benchmarked against a notional model operator, and penalised for failing to hit financial and environmental standards, risks a “doom loop”.

Thames Water, currently battling to complete an equity process to avoid falling into special administration, has said the imposition of huge fines for failing to meet pollution standards is one of the reasons it is in financial distress.

Publication of the Independent Commission report comes after the Environment Agency published figures showing that serious pollution incidents increased by 60% in 2024, and as Thames Water imposes a hosepipe ban on 15m customers.

Ofwat, Water UK and the Department for the Environment all declined to comment.

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Post Office Capture IT system conviction referred to Court of Appeal for first time

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Post Office Capture IT system conviction referred to Court of Appeal for first time

The first Post Office Capture conviction is to be sent to the Court of Appeal, Sky News understands, in a “breakthrough” moment in the IT scandal.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has decided to refer the case of sub-postmistress Patricia Owen, who was convicted in 1998 of theft.

Mrs Owen was found guilty by a jury based on evidence from the faulty IT software Capture, which was used in 2,500 branches between 1992 and 1999, before the Horizon Post Office scandal.

Pat Owen and husband David
Screengrabs from Adele Robinson i/vs with case study. Family of Pat Owen from Kent who was convicted of 1998 from stealing from her post office branch. Now the Capture IT system is suspected of adding errors to the accounts. 
Source P 175500FR POST OFFICE CAPTURE CASES ROBINSON 0600 VT V2 JJ1
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Pat Owen, pictured here with her husband David, always maintained her innocence but died in 2003 with a criminal record

Pat Owen always maintained her innocence but died in 2003 with a criminal record before the wider Post Office scandal came to light.

It comes after Sky News revealed that a damning report into Capture, which could help overturn criminal convictions, had been unearthed after nearly 30 years.

The decision to refer the first-ever Capture case to the Court of Appeal has been made on the grounds that Mrs Owen’s prosecution was an “abuse of process”.

The development has been described by victims’ lawyer Neil Hudgell as “hugely pivotal”.

“The Court of Appeal don’t receive that many referrals that start at the CCRC, and most get turned away, so it’s a very high bar to even get cases from the CCRC to the Court of Appeal…”

“I think it will be a real shot in the arm to all the other Capture victims who are waiting for their cases to be determined by the CCRC.”

Mr Hudgell described the report found earlier this year – written by computer experts in 1998 and highly critical of Capture – as “significantly tipping the balance”.

Screengrabs from Adele Robinson i/v with lawyer for victims of the Capture IT system, Neil Hudgell from Hudgell Solicitors
Source P 175500FR POST OFFICE CAPTURE CASES ROBINSON 0600 VT V2 JJ1
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Lawyer Neil Hudgell says development is ‘hugely pivotal’

Sky News found that the Post Office knew about the report at the time and continued to prosecute sub-postmasters based on Capture evidence.

Pat Owen always maintained her innocence but died in 2003 with a criminal record before the wider Post Office scandal came to light.

Her daughter Juliet Shardlow said she cried when she heard the news that her mother’s case would be referred to the Court of Appeal.

“I feel angry that she is not here because she died before her time… we will be there – we will be sitting there in that front row.

“I can’t put it into words because it’s still all a shock that we are where we are and that later this year, or next year, we might have what we set out to get… justice for her.”

Juliet Shardlow whose mother sub-postmistress Patricia Owen who was convicted in 1998 of theft
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Juliet Shardlow is seeking justice for her mother

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The CCRC is currently investigating 30 cases potentially related to the Capture software system.

Twenty-seven of those cases are now assigned to case review managers and under “active review”, with a further three cases in the preparatory stages.

The CCRC has described a “challenge” over determining “whether cases involved the use of Capture at the time of the alleged offences”.

In a letter written to Liam Byrne, chair of the Business and Trade Committee, and seen by Sky News, it said that information the Post Office has provided “does not, in most cases, show whether it was installed and in operation at the time of the alleged offending”.

It also mentioned that the Post Office is reviewing “a significant amount of data which may contain further information”.

A Post Office spokesperson said: “While it is not appropriate for us to comment on specific cases, we have been very concerned about the reported problems relating to the use of the Capture software, and we are sincerely sorry for past failings that have caused suffering to postmasters.

“We are determined that past wrongs are put right and continue to support the government’s work in this area as well as fully co-operate with the Criminal Cases Review Commission.”

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Serious water pollution incidents in England up 60% last year – with three companies blamed for most

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Serious water pollution incidents in England up 60% last year - with three companies blamed for most

The number of most serious water pollution incidents rose by 60% last year, according to data covering England, with three companies responsible for the bulk of them.

The Environment Agency (EA) – under fire for its own oversight of water firms’ pollution performance – said that more than 80% of the 75 instances of pollution in its two most serious categories were the responsibility of Thames Water (33), Southern Water (15) and Yorkshire Water (13).

But the body added it had found “consistently poor performance” across all nine water and wastewater firms in the country – a similar summary to that of 2023.

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According to the report, reasons behind the 2024 results included persistent underinvestment in new infrastructure, poor asset maintenance, and reduced resilience due to the impacts of climate change.

The period was dominated by spells of intense rainfall, which overwhelmed storm overflows and resulted in sewage discharges.

The EA reported 2,801 pollution incidents in total during 2024 – a hike of almost a third.

Thames Water, which has almost 16 million households on its books and is struggling to shore up its very future, was fined a record £105m by the regulator Ofwat in May for breaching wastewater rules.

Fast-forward to 2025 and England is experiencing its driest start to the year since 1976.

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Drought in England explained

Hosepipe bans are expanding as drought conditions are declared.

The data was released as a committee of MPs called for regulation of water companies to face a “complete overhaul” amid a lack of public trust and anger over surging bills to pay for long overdue infrastructure improvements.

The Public Accounts Committee said that Ofwat and the EA had failed to secure industry compliance and warned that even the high bill settlements to 2030 would only result in 44% of sewage overflows being overhauled.

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‘Paddle-out’ protest against water pollution

The Independent Water Commission, established by the government last year and led by former Bank of England deputy governor Sir Jon Cunliffe, is due to make final recommendations on the regulatory framework next week.

He warned when the interim report was published last month: “There is no simple, single change, no matter how radical, that will deliver the fundamental reset that is needed for the water sector.”

Alan Lovell, the EA’s chair, said: “This report demonstrates continued systemic failure by some companies to meet their environmental targets.

“The water industry must act urgently to prevent pollution from occurring and to respond rapidly when it does.

“We have made significant changes to tighten our regulation of the water industry and ensure companies are held to account.

“With a dedicated larger workforce and increased funding, our officers are uncovering and acting on failures to comply with environmental law.”

A spokesperson for industry group Water UK responded: “While there have been some improvements it is clear that the performance of some companies is not good enough. The Environment Agency is right to highlight underinvestment in infrastructure and maintenance as the major causes of these results.

“Investment in the sector has been suppressed with Ofwat prioritising short -term cuts to people’s water bills over the long-term resilience of the network. This is finally being put right, with a record £104bn investment over the next 5-years to secure our water supplies, support economic growth and end sewage entering our rivers and seas.

“However, fundamental change to regulation is also needed. We hope that the recommendations of the Independent Water Commission next week will ensure the sector continues to get the investment it needs to drive down pollution incidents.”

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