You are paying again to fix this. Nobody has shown you the plan.
Bills in the South West rose by about a third in April 2025, to pay for infrastructure that thirty years of billing was already meant to deliver. If we are paying twice, the least we should get is a public, evidence-based plan: which assets are failing, why, what fixing them costs, and in what order they get fixed. That plan does not exist in public. River Hub is a group of volunteers building the evidence for it.
Higher bills should buy accountability, not just capital
The case made for the increase was underinvestment. The record alongside it is harder to square: in the year to March 2024 Pennon reported a statutory loss after tax of £8.5m and still raised its dividend, to 44.37p a share. In 2024 South West Water recorded around 550,000 hours of sewage spills — the worst performance in the sector. Across England, storm overflows ran for a record 3.6 million hours.
We are not arguing about whether investment is needed. We are arguing that money raised from residents and businesses should come with a published, testable plan — and a way for the public to check progress against it. Right now, the data needed to write that plan is scattered across regulatory returns, annual reports and information requests, in formats designed to be difficult.
- Which overflows on the Dart spill most, for how long, and how that has changed year on year.
- Whether a treatment works has the capacity to serve the population it already carries — and what is left for growth.
- Which assets are failing chronically rather than exceptionally — the emergency overflows firing for hundreds of hours are the clearest case.
- Where the published record is silent, and what had to be obtained by information request to fill the gap.
So we did the regulator’s job, badly funded and in our spare time
River Hub is built by volunteers at Friends of the Dart. To answer basic questions we had to invent our own methods — for example, estimating whether a treatment works can serve its local population, and how much headroom remains. Devising and publishing methods like that is the regulator’s and the water companies’ job, not ours.
Every method we use is written up on How we know, with its assumptions and its limits. Where a figure is an estimate, we say so on the figure. Where the data came from an information request rather than a live feed, we name the request.
We do not claim these are the right answers. Our methods are the best a volunteer group could build from the public record, and we expect them to be improved on — or corrected.
The point is that these questions can be answered transparently — and that whoever is spending our money should be answering them in public, so the public can have confidence that the fixes being designed are the right ones.
Two things we need from you
The next round of environmental spending — the WINEP that decides which assets get fixed after 2030 — is being shaped now, from investigations already under way. River groups have a narrow window to get the worst assets onto that list, and it is closing.
One catchment proves the method. Every river group needs the same evidence for their own catchment, in time for the next WINEP cycle. Donations pay for the data work, the information requests and the platform — not salaries.
DonateAsk for three things: published methods for assessing whether each asset can serve its population; the results published as open data; and a plan that names the assets to be fixed, in order, with dates. We will give you the figures for your own catchment.
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