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The week in brief · Week 44 · 26 October – 1 November
How well do existing wastewater systems actually perform? That was the question this week. In England, the Environment Agency's annual assessment gave the nine water and sewerage companies their weakest collective rating since it began scoring them in 2011, on the same day that the four regulators of England and Wales published their first joint view of the industry. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency launched a strategy to bring PFAS destruction technologies to wastewater plants and other sites, while Chicago's storms and a large rebuild in Chattanooga showed the pressure on ageing American systems.
The Environment Agency's environmental performance assessment for 2025, published on 29 October, awarded the sector 16 stars out of a possible 36, down from 19 in 2024 (Environment Agency, 2026). The agency attributes the fall partly to declining performance and partly to its own tighter thresholds. Severn Trent was the only company rated four stars; Southern Water, South West Water, Thames Water and Yorkshire Water received one. Across all six metrics and nine companies, only 46% of ratings were on target.
The detail is more telling than the headline. Serious pollution incidents stayed at 74, against 75 in 2024 and 47 in 2023, and 82% of them came from four companies, led by Thames Water with 24. Total incidents fell slightly to 2,666 from 2,801, but remain 40% above the 2016 level. Compliance with numeric discharge permit conditions slipped from 98.8% to 97.4%; Thames Water alone failed new or tightened phosphorus limits at 43 treatment works. Most striking for investors, only 80.2% of schemes in the Water Industry National Environment Programme (502 of 626) were delivered by their deadlines, the lowest rate since 2011, with Thames Water accounting for 105 missed schemes. Storm overflows spilled 292,119 times in 2025, for a total of 1,878,240 hours, an average of 20.5 spills per overflow.
