The chairman of the UK’s biggest water company has apologised to customers but defended staff bonus payments.

Sir Adrian Montague, of Thames Water, told MPs on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs select committee that the utility firm, which supplies 16 million customers in London and parts of south England, was sorry.

He said: “We know the supply interruptions cause inconvenience and sometimes real hardship, and so I think the right thing to do is to start the discussion of the [company’s] turnaround plan by acknowledging we haven’t always served our customers as well as we should, and through the committee, apologising to them.”

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Customers faced significant service disruption in recent years, including a boil water notice in Bramley, near Guildford, last summer and a 40% rise in sewage spills in 2024.

It’s also struggled to raise investment, repay its debt pile, which now stands at £19bn after an emergency loan prevented it from running out of money and entering state control.

Despite the massive debt pile, Sir Adrian defended paying bonuses, saying the company was in “a competitive marketplace” and “we have to keep staff”.

“It’s true that this business, like many businesses, needs to reward its staff effectively”, he told committee members. “We do need to reward [staff] competitively.”

If bonuses were not paid, “people will come knocking, they’ll try to pick out of us the best staff we’ve got”, Sir Adrian added.

“But the amounts of bonuses paid to staff is very small compared with the capital cost of the works that we were considering,” he said.

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In the first three months of his tenure, which began in January 2024, Thames Water’s chief executive Chris Weston accepted a bonus of £195,000 as part of his £2.3m pay package.

His bonus can be up to 156% of his salary as a bonus, while frontline workers can only earn between 3% and 6%, he said.

When approached by Sky News on Tuesday, Mr Weston said he was sorry for the service that the customers received and “it’s not where we would like it to be, everyone is very committed in terms of trying and sorting it out”.

Customer bills are to rise 35% to about £588 annually per household by 2030, a figure which Thames Water is seeking to increase.

Nissan is set to announce a leap in its cost-cutting plans that will see 20,000 jobs go globally, according to reports in Japan.

The carmaker, which employs around 6,000 workers at its sprawling manufacturing operations in Sunderland, had already let it be known last November that 9,000 roles would be going amid weak sales and rising costs.

But Japanese broadcaster NHK said on Monday it expected that total to more than double.

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Nissan, which was yet to comment on the claim, is due to reveal full year results covering the 12 months to March on Tuesday morning.

They are expected to show a net loss of up to £3.8bn due to a series of writedowns on the value of its operations.

They will be the first results Nissan has declared since the appointment of a new chief executive last month.

Ivan Espinosa issued a “significant” downgrade to Nissan’s outlook just three weeks ago.

If the job cuts report is true, it would amount to a 15% reduction in the company’s worldwide workforce.

It is not known if the Sunderland production facilities form part of any planned job cuts or production reductions, of up to 20%, that were reported.

Nissan has, on several occasions since Brexit, called the plant’s future into question before proceeding with investment plans.

It has invested £2bn in Sunderland since 2023 alone.

The company secured UK government money this year for a new electric powertrain manufacturing facility in Sunderland.

But a senior Nissan executive, Alan Johnson, warned more aid was needed just last month, arguing that the UK was “not a competitive place” to build cars.

Nissan, like rivals, is facing challenges on many fronts.

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US trade tariffs of 25% on all car imports has exacerbated pressure on its supply chain and sales.

The latter has been struggling due to weaker-than-anticipated electric car uptake.

But the vast majority of its cars made in the UK will be subject to a tariff of just 10% after the UK-US trade deal agreed last week.

It does not currently send Sunderland-made cars to the United States. Most are for export to Europe and the domestic UK market.

The US and China have agreed to slash trade tariffs on each other, a move Donald Trump has said was part of a “total reset” in relations.

The president said the 90-day truce followed “very friendly” talks between the two sides in Switzerland over the weekend and those discussions would continue..

“China was being hurt very badly. They were closing up factories they were having a lot of unrest and they were very happy to do something with us”, he told reporters at the White House.

The breakthrough was announced early on Monday – to the delight of fincial markets – by the leader of the US delegation, treasury secretary Scott Bessent.

US trade representative Jamieson Greer confirmed so-called reciprocal tariffs were now at 10% each.

In real terms, it meant the US is reducing its 145% tariff to 30% on Chinese goods. A tariff of 20% had been implemented on China when President Donald Trump took office, over what his administration said was a failure to stop illegal drugs entering the US.

China has agreed to reduce its 125% retaliatory tariffs to 10% on US goods.

Sector-specific tariffs, such as the 25% tax on cars, aluminium and steel, remain in place.

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Tariffs, taxes on imports of more than 100%, had been imposed on both sides. China was the only country exempt from a 90-day pause on the “retaliatory” tariffs above the base 10% levies applied by America.

Major retailers had been warning Mr Trump of empty shelves as US importers pause shipments.

Mr Bessent said after a weekend of negotiations in Switzerland, the countries had a mechanism for continued talks.

It’s the second major trade announcement made by the US in the last week, after a deal was secured with the UK on Thursday.

The move signals a willingness from the Americans to make deals on tariffs.

Why Trump blinked in US-China trade war

Ed Conway

Economics and data editor

@EdConwaySky

Of all the fronts in Donald Trump’s trade war, none was as dramatic and economically threatening as the sky-high tariffs he imposed on China.

There are a couple of reasons: first, because China is and was the single biggest importer of goods into the US and, second, because of the sheer height of the tariffs imposed by the White House in recent months.

In short, tariffs of over 100% were tantamount to a total embargo on goods coming from the United States’ main trading partner.

That would have had enormous economic implications, not just for the US but every other country around the world (these are the world’s biggest and second-biggest economies, after all).

So the truce announced on Monday by treasury secretary Scott Bessent is undoubtedly a very big deal indeed.

Read more from Ed Conway here

Welcomed news

The news was received positively by Asian stock markets on Monday as major indexes were up.

In China, the Shanghai Composite stock index rose 0.8%, the Shenzhen Component gained 1.7%, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index was up nearly 3%.

In countries across Asia, benchmark stock indexes also rose. Korea’s Kospi grew 1.1%, Japan’s Nikkei was up 0.8%, while India’s Nifty 50 index of most valuable companies gained more than 3%.

US stocks rose sharply at the open.

The S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq saw their biggest leaps in more than a month, rising almost 3% and 4% respectively.

The market rally was visible in Europe too.

The dollar – hit in recent weeks by US recession speculation – was up more than a cent versus the pound while oil prices also rallied. Brent crude, the international benchmark, was 3.5% higher at $66 a barrel.

What next?

When asked by journalists about what the US wanted to see from China in the 90s, Mr Bessent said, “As long as there is good faith effort, engagement and constructive dialogue, then we will keep moving forward.”

The UK came to the front of the line for deals, Mr Bessent added, “as our oldest ally”.

Switzerland had also moved to the “front of the queue”, he said, while the EU has been slower.

As with the other counties subject to 90-day pauses, a permanent deal will need to be reached, but confidence across the world is likely to have been boosted.

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Businesses now need a clear timetable and roadmap for future negotiations under the newly announced economic and trade consultation mechanism, said Andrew Wilson, the deputy secretary general of the International Chamber of Commerce.

“The credibility of that process for resolving underlying frictions in the Sino-US economic relationship will be mission-critical in terms of restoring business confidence.”