James Bevan
Sir Bevan, a former Foreign Office mandarin, was chief executive of the Environment Agency from 2015 to March 2023. He has been criticized from inside and outside the agency for failing to rein in the behavior of water companies, stifling frontline field work, reducing oversight, failing to protect rivers, muzzling staff and, in the face of growing public outcry over the state of English rivers, seeking to weaken tough regulations that repeatedly show how waterways rivers are being suffocated by a cocktail of sewage and agricultural pollution.
Bevan said he liked the operator self-monitoring system, in which water companies were given the power to report their own pollution, which critics described as doing their own homework. The Labor government is ending this practice. Bevan told MPs: “We have some quite sophisticated ways of verifying that data.”
He was appointed non-executive director of Dwr Cymru, or Welsh Water, a not-for-profit, non-shareholder water company, in February 2025. The company said: “His extensive experience in environmental regulation and public policy… has been constructive and valuable during a period of significant activity which included regulatory reforms and investments in the sector.”
David Black
Black was chief executive of Ofwat from April 2022 to 2025. He joined the regulator in 2012 as director of economics and was later promoted to director of regulation.
During his time at the regulator, water companies vastly expanded their debt load, above Ofwat’s benchmark of 60%, created complicated offshore structures to minimize tax bills and paid high dividends while neglecting infrastructure. Economist Dieter Helm has described the way in which private companies have managed the water industry as “great financial engineering.”
Black left Ofwat in August 2025 following the government’s decision to replace the regulator. It is due to appear at the Weekend of Mistakes 2026 Festival in Hay-on-Wye this month. He will talk about what’s gone wrong with the UK’s water industry (and how to fix it) at the event, which costs £150 a ticket.
Richard Aylard
Aylard, a retired Royal Navy officer, joined Thames Water in 2002 as director of corporate responsibility and later became director of external affairs and sustainability.
He was at the forefront of public anger over sewage pollution and water cuts across the south-east of England. He remains with Thames Water as a director and special advisor to the chief executive. He has acted as the company’s primary spokesperson on environmental performance, such as discussing investment plans for sewer infrastructure.
Matthew Wright
Wright was chief executive of Southern Water between 2011 and 2016, when the company illegally discharged billions of liters of raw sewage into protected waters in Hampshire and Kent.
A judge fined Southern a record £90m in 2020 for dumping between 16bn and 21bn liters of raw wastewater into some of the country’s most sensitive environments and falsifying data by “very significantly under-reporting” its number of illegal polluting discharges. Ofwat had imposed a record £126m fine on Southern in 2019 for the same offences.
Wright, who was paid more than £5m during his tenure when the failures occurred, left the company in December 2016 and became UK director of Danish renewable energy firm Ørsted until 2020. He later worked at National Grid ESO and served as chief operating officer of Exagen Group until February 2024, when it moved into renewable energy. He admitted the crimes at Southern Water had occurred “partly under my supervision”.
Susana Davy
Davy was chief executive of South West Water for five years and was its finance director from 2015 until her retirement in December last year. He ran the company while it was responsible for repeated wastewater contamination and received a two-star rating for its environmental performance.
He was also in charge of supplying water unfit for human consumption to 2,500 homes in 2024, for which he pleaded guilty on March 4.
Davy received a pay package of £803,000 in the last financial year in his role after receiving £191,000 in long-term bonuses.
On leaving he said: “Running a water company is always interesting, often challenging, but totally rewarding. I have enjoyed taking on the responsibility of providing a sustainable service to millions of homes.”
Ofwat imposed a £24m enforcement package on South West Water last summer after a three-year investigation into its failings in the management of wastewater treatment works and sewage networks.
The regulator said the company had failed to improve its treatment works to prevent wastewater discharges into the environment, had not adequately addressed the contents of its sewers and had not allocated resources to adequately monitor its treatment works.
Nicolas Shaw
Shaw, chief executive of Yorkshire Water, was banned from bonuses last year under a law Labor introduced in 2025 to prevent bonuses being paid to directors of companies deemed worst for wastewater dumping.
Yorkshire Water was fined £47m in 2024 for excessive storm spills as a result of poor maintenance. Ofwat said the company routinely released wastewater, without ensuring that storm overflow discharges occurred only in exceptional circumstances, which had “resulted in harm to the environment and its customers”.
Shaw still received additional payments totaling £660,000 from Yorkshire Water’s Jersey-registered parent company, Kelda Holdings, in the 2023-24 and 2024-25 financial years.
Sara Bentley
Bentley was chief executive of Thames Water from September 2020 to June 2023. She joined from Severn Trent and promised an eight-year turnaround for the company, but left with immediate effect after three years following a public outcry over the discharge of untreated sewage into rivers and failure to meet targets on pollution and sewage flooding.
Bentley said in 2023 that he would give up his bonus for the 2022-23 financial year, but the company was accused of a flimsy PR stunt after it was revealed that he had been given almost double his annual salary with a £1.5m pay package. Bentley did little to curb the huge debts taken on by Thames Water, amounting to almost £20bn, or to reduce record sewage pollution into the environment.
He left during a major Ofwat investigation into illegal wastewater discharges from almost three-quarters of Thames Water’s treatment plants. The regulator fined the company £104m in June 2024 for routinely discharging untreated wastewater into the environment. He said almost 70% of Thames’ treatment plants had operational problems and the company had failed to manage its wastewater networks effectively.
David Henderson
As chief executive of Water UK, the industry’s trade association, Henderson worked alongside Ofwat to reduce fines for water companies and potential jail terms for chief executives.
Henderson is a former Downing Street official who was a long-time adviser to Gordon Brown and former Labor cabinet minister Ruth Kelly.
David Miliband
Miliband was Environment Secretary in October 2006, when the deal was struck for Macquarie to take over Thames Water. Miliband has been president and chief executive of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a global humanitarian aid organisation, since 2013.
Regina Finn
Finn was chair of Ofwat when it approved the deal with Macquarie.
Macquarie began a period of heavy financial leverage, debt accumulation and dividend extraction. It saddled Thames Water with significant debt while extracting around £1.1bn in dividends and interest payments, leaving it with a legacy of high debt. Thames Water has since admitted that the company has squandered assets for decades.
Finn now works as a director at consulting firm Lucerna Partners. One of its main clients is Thames Water.
