Are off-the-record meetings softening Labour policy on water companies?

When Steve Reed stood up in June, he declared it was “time for change” on the “Conservative sewage scandal”. But since the election, Labour policy on the water industry has gradually softened. And over the same period, Good Law Project can reveal that ministers have held a series of meetings with water bosses which have been kept off the record.

Senior officials at the environment department met with water companies nine times between July and September. But no minutes were taken.

Responding to our freedom of information request, the department told us that the environment secretary, ministers responsible for water and flooding and other officials have attended these meetings. The department gave no details about which firms turned up, and declared that “we do not hold any minutes of the meetings you have asked about”.

Government policy on water companies was already shifting by mid-August, when sources at the Environment Agency and Ofwat told the Guardian that “some stricter options that had been proposed were now off the table”.

The government announced a water bill to give regulators new powers in early September. But a clause in the bill could allow costs of bailing out underperforming companies to be transferred to bill-payers, and Reed has ruled out water nationalisation. By the end of the month his department was relying on analysis paid for by the water industry to push back against public ownership – analysis that was deemed “economically illiterate” by leading economists. 

And when Reed wrote an open letter earlier this week, suggesting that campaigners should trust Labour to clean up the sewage scandal, they reacted with fury. Windrush Against Sewage Pollution’s Ash Smith told the Guardian that the environment secretary’s “refusal to face the facts and to rely on water company-funded fiction about costs is setting captive bill payers up to bail out private equity and keep the unforgivable exploitation going on for another five years”.

According to Good Law Project’s Tamara Walters, it’s becoming increasingly clear that “after campaigning in prose rather than poetry, Labour means to govern in disappointment”.

“For all their talk of clearing up the Tory sewage scandal,” Walters said, “ministers seem determined to make exactly the same mistakes. So it’s both shocking and all too familiar to find that they’ve been meeting water bosses off the record. If ministers talk to big business, we need to know what they’re saying. We need to know they’re working for us, and not for shareholders.”

Defra did not provide a comment after we approached them.