The only natural experiment in water (Part I)

What thirty-five years of British water history actually teaches us, before we talk about the mess it’s in today, the ongoing reforms, and the huge pipeline of opportunities for water professionals.

If you work in water long enough, you end up in the ownership debate. Public versus private.

It happens at conferences, in tender rooms, on LinkedIn.

And it’s almost always a bad conversation, because both sides argue from ideology and cherry-picked anecdotes.

Here’s the problem: you can’t run a controlled experiment on a water utility. You can’t privatize half of a city and keep the other half public (I think…), wait twenty years, and compare.

Every country has one dominant model, one history, one set of confounding variables.

Except one.

After 1989, the United Kingdom accidentally became the closest thing our industry has to a laboratory.

England went fully private — the only country in the world to sell its entire water and sanitation sector on the stock exchange.

Wales went private, then mutated into something nobody had seen before: a not-for-profit utility financed entirely by bonds.

Scotland fought off privatization twice and built a modern public corporation instead.

Northern Ireland kept water free at the point of use, funded by taxes.

Same island. Same climate. Same Victorian pipes. Same legal tradition. Four models.

The status of the UK water sector is extremely interesting, full of opportunities for water professionals for the rest of our careers.

This is probably the topic I have spent the most time researching and discussing with colleagues over the last three years. I wanted to consolidate some of that knowledge, which is why I created this is Part I: what actually happened, 1989 to the mid-2010s, and what the experiment showed.

Part II will cover what’s happening right now, and where I think it’s going, stories such as Thames Water’s slow-motion crisis, the decision about abolishing Ofwat, the once-in-a-generation regulatory reform now on the table…all of it is downstream of the story I’m going to tell you today.

Let’s start where the British themselves started: at the bottom.