Labour caught having off-the-record meetings with scandal-laden water company bosses

Ministers are regularly holding off-the-record meetings with the CEOs and senior staff of England and Wales’ scandal-riddled privatised water and sewage sector.

As the Labour government introduces a new bill anti-privatisation campaigners brand a “gift to shareholders”, the Canary can reveal how water bosses are schmoozing with cabinet ministers behind closed doors.

Water companies schmoozing with Labour in unminuted meetings

Official data from the Department of Food, Environment, and Rural Affairs (Defra) shows that government ministers met with CEOs and representatives of water companies across at least nine separate meetings in the final three months of 2025.

Now, a Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) request the Canary submitted to the department has revealed how ministers attended these meetings entirely unminuted and without formal agendas.

The quarterly release gives a limited description of the purpose of these meetings, as required by the Ministerial Code and further set out in Cabinet Office guidance.

But the lack of documentation raises serious questions over the nature and content of what essentially amounts to secret discussions between the government and the millionaire CEOs of privatised water corporations.

Secretary of state discussions behind closed doors

The off-record meetings included a meeting between secretary of state Emma Reynolds and Thames Water chair Adrian Montague at the end of November.

The department recorded this simply with the description “Discussion on Thames Water”.

Of course, the government has so far actively refused to bring Thames Water into special administration. It has repeatedly fallen back on water industry spin to justify pursuing a ‘market-led’ – privatised – solution. Now, ministers and Ofwat are poised to sign a deal that would allow it to dodge fines for the next four years.

Another meeting Reynolds hosted at the end of October included a “Discussion on water operations” with Severn Trent CEO Liv Garfield.

Days earlier, Severn Trent was one of just two major water suppliers that regulator Ofwat did not order to make ‘underperformance’ payments to its customers. This is where the regulator forces companies failing to meet certain pollution targets to pay up. As a result, this is meant to reduce customer bills.

In practice, however, it doesn’t actually mean customers see a reduction in their water bills. This is because parasitic private suppliers have been simultaneously hiking these. In reality, then, underperformance payments simply mean Ofwat forces companies to reduce an already raised bill. Nonetheless, Severn Trent’s supposed ‘overperformance’ meant it evaded these payments.

However, fast-forward to April 2026, and the Environment Agency revealed that the company had wracked up the highest bill for fines over pollution incidents. These totalled £4.6m – the highest total of any provider within the 2025-26 financial year.

Rubbing shoulders with water privatisation lobbyists

On 9 December, the environment secretary also held a ‘Water Investor Roundtable’ to discuss “water sector investability”. But the register entry fails to disclose attendees. And of course, according to Defra’s response to the Canary’s EIR request, Reynolds held the roundtable entirely unminuted.

As such, there’s no public record of the companies involved in these conversations. Of course, it’s likely that discussions on ‘investability’ concern the water sector’s and corporate capitalist creditors’ vested interests in maintaining the privatised status quo.

Defra minister Emma Hardy also held a number of meetings with CEOs of major water companies off-the-record. This included two meetings with South East Water boss David Hinton in December.

At the beginning of May, Hinton stepped down from his role after scathing criticism from the EFRA parliamentary committee. The committee had issued a damning report documenting the company’s routine failures. This included a two-week water outage in Tonbridge Wells during November 2025 that left 24,000 properties without water. It declared no confidence in SEW’s leadership team.

Hardy also held an unminuted meeting with industry trade group Water UK that same month. The lobby body has been a staunch defender of privatised interests in the sector.

Dodging public scrutiny over water privatisation: a feature of this Labour government

The Canary’s recent EIR request also wasn’t the first time Defra ministers hosted unminuted meetings with the water sector.

We previously submitted an EIR request concerning ministerial meetings with Water UK. This revealed that Defra ministers had hosted four separate off-the-record discussions between October and December 2024.

Previously, the Good Law Project also found that ministers had taken no minutes in nine meetings with water companies. The meetings took place between July and September that same year.

The Canary hasn’t (yet) obtained minutes and agendas for all the meetings Labour ministers have held with water companies. Nevertheless, a clear pattern is emerging that points to dodging public scrutiny as a shameful feature of this government.

Separately, the Canary also discovered that former environment secretary and shady Labour Together-linked MP Steve Reed had failed to publish a record of his meetings in the ministerial register. This was for the first quarter of 2025 – and to this day, there’s still no entries. As such, not only would meetings Reed held with water companies be off-the-record – currently, they’re entirely scrubbed from it.

Room to ‘bend and break the rules for profit’

Given all this, anyone might think the government has something to hide. Its continued failure to even temporarily nationalise Thames Water could have something to do with it. Instead, the government continues to tinker around at the edges of the glaring problems of privatised water.

And this Labour administration full-well knows that sewage pollution is a hot button issue for the electorate. If meetings were to show ministers getting chummy with the privatised water racket, that might just blow an irreparable hole in their – already dire and plummeting – popularity.

On the Canary’s findings, Sophie Conquest, lead campaigner at anti-privatisation campaign group We Own It, said:

Water is one of our most vital resources. We are dependent upon it, and we pay increasingly high bills for it. So it is insulting that fundamental decisions about our water system are being made without us, behind closed doors – without even a public record of what was said.

It is hardly surprising that – following these conversations – the government produced a water White Paper which is a gift to shareholders, with new measures which will give water companies even more room to bend and break the rules for profit.

A single regulator will be ripe for corporate capture. Plans for a ‘tailored approach’ for each water company will even further reduce consistency and transparency.To make these reforms into law would be a dangerous step in the wrong direction – favouring faraway shareholders over the people that use and pay for our water system.

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Instead, this government should be bringing water into public ownership, starting with the collapsing Thames Water. Under public ownership, we can make water truly democratic, with decisions being made on Boards where Environmental Groups, Households and Workers are represented.

Ultimately, ministers rubbing shoulders with the corporate criminal bosses of England and Wales’ sewage scandal-laden water industry in clandestine conversations may make people legitimately wonder whose interests this government serves.

But of course, the answer to that has long been obvious with this shower of corporate-captured ministers.

Featured image via Dan Kitwood / Getty Images

By Hannah Sharland

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