Thanks to consistent pressure from the public, campaigners, and local communities across the country, last year the Labour government rightly committed to the most significant review of the water sector since privatisation, the Independent Water Commission, chaired by Sir Jon Cunliffe.

Upon the publication of its final report and recommendations we write as a broad coalition of organisations, trade unions, individuals, and campaigners who believe in a water system that serves people, workers, and the environment to say one thing clearly and with unity: we have no confidence that the recommendations of the Cunliffe Review will deliver the systemic change we need to fix our broken water system.

This review was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to confront the reality that the privatisation experiment of the water industry has failed. Instead, the review has sidestepped the central issue: is the system serving the people, workers, and environment, or financiers and hedge funds?

Rather than rise to the crisis our water system is in from rampant sewage pollution, unaffordable bills and debt-ridden companies teetering on the edge of collapse, and take note from successful international examples of similar situations, the review hemmed themselves in and refused to examine who owns and controls our water. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Water Pollution [1], the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (EFRA) Committee [2], hundreds of thousands of members of the public [3], the trade unions representing the majority of workers in the industry and the regulators [4], anti-sewage campaigners [5], and the People’s Commission on the Water Sector [6] all pointed to this same limitation of the review: its lack of serious investigation into governance and ownership. The review’s terms of reference were designed to avoid the fundamental question – who is the system really working for?

And now we see the result: a set of recommendations that tinker at the edges while the system continues to collapse. The final recommendations rest on the dangerous assumption that stronger regulation and more empowered regulators alone can fix a model that is structurally broken. This ignores the decades-long record of regulatory failure leaving the public, and our environment, to pay the price.

By insisting on an approach that seeks investment rather than public good, the review has not reformed the system – it has merely suggested that we rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic. This is not an honest diagnosis of current failures; it is a roadmap to maintain the status quo and attract new investors to a failing system. This approach is not just misguided – it is fundamentally anti-democratic and economically illiterate.

We regret that this report is a missed opportunity and a capitulation to private interests. It has been shaped by lobbying from the very companies responsible for the crisis [7]. It accepts fabricated economic assumptions about the alternative ownership and governance models as fact and it shows no vision for the bold, democratic, sustainable future we so urgently need.

Given the environmental, electoral, and economic stakes of getting this right, we now urge the government to realise this report is the work of an unelected commission. There is no democratic mandate behind this.

What happens next for the water industry is a political choice – and it is Labour’s choice to make.

Labour cannot hide behind the Cunliffe Review. The Government has the power and the responsibility to choose a different path. This is the moment to stand with the public, with communities, with workers, and with the environment.

The Cunliffe Review failed to do so. But the Government still can.

Signatures:

Ambleside Action for a Future water group

Compass

Charlbury Wildlife Society

Clean River Kent Campaign

Evenlode Catchment Partnership

End Sewage Convoys And Pollution Exmouth (ESCAPE)

Fire Brigades Union

Friends of the Thames

The GMB Union

Henley Mermaids

Ilkley Clean River Group

MP Watch

River Action

Hayling Sewage Watch

Sewage Campaign Network 

Save Windermere

Save the River Usk

Surfers Against Sewage

Unite the Union

Up Sewage Creek 

Welsh Rivers Union

We Own It

Windrush Against Sewage Pollution

Zero Hour

 

Individuals:

Angela Jones, Chair, Save the River Usk, Wild Woman of Wye

Antony Melville, Thames Headwaters Bioregion

Paul Cawthorne, Convener of Save Our Severn

Rosie Pearson, West Oxon District Councillor

References:

1. All-Party Parliamentary Group on Water Pollution Briefing – https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6717ba7d1cb5f218826e9b7c/t/6846147e7451ff21ee937d58/1749423231231/Water+Commission+MP+Briefing-+June+2025.pdf
2. Page 8, “Priorities for water sector reform”, Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, 9 June 2025 
3. “Put Public Ownership Back on the Table” Petition signed by 114, 850 people. https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/put-public-ownership-of-water-back-on-the-table
4. UNISON, Unite, and GMB all support and routinely call for public ownership of water as evidenced by reports, and media releases. Interacting with Cunliffe, UNISON specifically argued for an overhaul, including renationalisation, of the industry in England to deliver improvements for workers and consumers – while GMB and Unite have long advocated for water to be brought back into public ownership.
5. Anti-sewage campaigners – https://www.windrushwasp.org/single-post/the-watered-down-commission
6. https://www.thepeoplescommissiononthewatersector.co.uk/reports
7. Evidence of lobbying of the Treasury and DEFRA.