Affinity Water: Executive Pay, Leaks, Outages and Emissions — What the Company’s Own Accounts Reveal (2018–2025)

Affinity Water has had a turbulent seven years. Executive pay and shareholder rewards have at times raced ahead of progress on leaks and service, and its environmental record is a patchwork of genuine gains and stubborn problems. Overall, the data point to modest improvements on some measures and glaring shortfalls on others – raising hard questions about whether customers’ bills are really being used in their interests.

As the UK’s largest water-only supplier, Affinity Water Limited operates across roughly 4,515 km² in three supply regions in the South East, delivering about 950 million litres of drinking water a day to more than 3.5 million people from Bedfordshire to Kent. Water is drawn from rivers and underground aquifers, treated at around 96 works, and pushed through more than 16,600 km of pipes to homes and businesses.

Who owns Affinity – and who really calls the shots?

Affinity is not a public or council-owned utility. Its immediate parent is Affinity Water Holdings Limited, and the directors state that the ultimate holding and controlling company in the UK is Daiwater Investment Limited. Daiwater is, in turn, owned by a consortium of infrastructure investors – principally Allianz (through Allianz Capital Partners), HICL Infrastructure (managed by InfraRed Capital Partners) and Dutch fund DIF – whose funds and clients are ultimately the economic beneficiaries. 

In plain English, that means the taps in Hertfordshire, north-west London and parts of Kent are controlled not by local councils but by global investment funds whose core duty is to maximise long-term returns to their own investors.

Executive pay: high rewards, patchy performance

Affinity’s top table has been busy revolving. Pauline Walsh was CEO from 2018 until late 2022, with Finance Director (later CFO) Stuart Ledger alongside her. Keith Haslett became CEO in 2022/23 (initially as interim), and Martin Roughead took over as CFO in 2023/24 before being succeeded by Adam Stephens in 2024/25.The money has been striking. The “single total figure of remuneration” (salary, bonus, pension and share awards) published in the annual reports shows:

• 2018/19 – Walsh £666k, Ledger £298k. 

• 2019/20 – Walsh £876k, Ledger £387k. 

• 2020/21 – Walsh £782k, Ledger £391k. 

• 2021/22 – Walsh’s final year: £1.295m, Ledger £543k, boosted by bonuses and long-term incentive payouts.

• 2022/23 – Haslett £232k (part-year), Ledger £486k. 

• 2023/24 – Haslett £709k, Roughead £422k.

• 2024/25 – Haslett £1.553m, with CFO Adam Stephens on £298k and outgoing CFO Roughead on £193k.

A Guardian analysis this winter highlighted that 2024/25 package of roughly £1.6m for Haslett, driven by performance bonuses and share awards, at a time when customers face inflation-linked bill rises and renewed leak concerns.

To be fair, the reports stress that bonuses are tied to hitting targets on leakage, customer service and environmental performance. Yet across the same period Affinity repeatedly missed key leakage goals in the early AMP7 years and only just scraped short of its 20% reduction target by 2024/25. When customers see executives capturing seven-figure paydays while the network still leaks tens of millions of litres a day, it is hard to argue that incentives are aligned with everyday experience.

Dividends: one big payday, then famine

On dividends, the picture is more nuanced. The company’s own figures show:

• 2017/18 – a huge equity dividend of £58.5m to shareholders.

• 2018/19 – a further £6.6m. 

• 2019/20 – no dividend. 

• 2020/21 – a £1m dividend from the small non-regulated business only.

• 2021/22 onwards – no equity dividends from the regulated water business up to and including 2024/25.

The official line is that, from 2020, profits are being retained to fund investment and keep bills lower. That is welcome. But the earlier pattern – a very large payout in 2017/18 followed by years of drought – raises awkward questions about timing. Customers might reasonably ask why so much cash was extracted just before the company entered a period where it now insists every penny must stay in the business.

Affinity also finances itself heavily through debt, which means investors can still earn interest and internal returns, even when headline dividends are zero. That is entirely lawful – but for a household in Hatfield or Folkestone whose bill keeps rising, the optics of huge historic shareholder and executive rewards are uncomfortable.

Leakage: “nearly there” is not good enough

Leakage is measured in Ml/d (million litres per day). Affinity’s base year for the current regulatory period (AMP7, 2020–25) is 2019/20. Its promise to Ofwat was to cut leakage by 20% over that five-year window.

The figures in the reports show the journey:

• 2018/19 – leakage at 196.1 Ml/d against a target of 167.7 Ml/d after a major burst on a large raw-water main; this triggered substantial penalties.

• 2019/20 – reduced to 162.1 Ml/d, broadly on target.

• 2020/21 – performance slipped; the three-year rolling average reduction was only 1.9% against a 6.5% target, triggering around £8m of outcome-delivery penalties across leakage and interruptions. 

• 2021/22 – a big improvement, with a cumulative leakage reduction of 10.8%.

• 2022/23 – leakage down 15.8% versus the base, slightly beating the company’s 14% interim target. 

• 2023/24 – cumulative reduction 18.3%.

• 2024/25 – final year cumulative reduction 19.4%: better than 2023/24, but still just short of the headline 20% pledge. 

So leaks have unquestionably fallen – nearly a fifth lower than five years ago – and Affinity now earns small rewards rather than penalties on this measure. But the company still missed its own end-of-period promise. When every second counts in hot, dry summers, “almost” is not much comfort to a village staring at standpipes.

Crucially, Affinity’s leakage reduction has been slower than some peers, and it started from a higher base. That makes the early-period bonus payments to departing executives especially contentious.

Outages and service interruptions: Kent’s bad winter and beyond

Today it’s been reporterd, a burst water main left large parts of CT18, CT21 and TN25 without supply, affecting communities around Folkestone, Hythe and Ashford, according to Affinity Water and KentOnline.

Affinity’s advice to customers was blunt: expect “no water” in those postcodes, don’t run washing machines or dishwashers, and if you still had a trickle, fill bottles and kettles before supply was turned off for repairs.

The disruption quickly hit public services. Brockhill Park Performing Arts College (Hythe) and St Augustine’s Primary School (Saltwood) both closed, citing an inability to provide basic hygiene and safety facilities, and warning they would need system checks once supply was restored.

Engineers are currently working on the burst main; and Affinity is due to update customers later this morning. At present there is no exact restoration time — but it shows how a single main failure can shut schools and destabilise daily life across multiple towns and villages.

It came hard on the heels of the much-publicised Tunbridge Wells and Pembury outage—a South East Water failure, not Affinity’s—which has run on for days and, at its worst, left thousands without safe tap water after problems at a treatment works, triggering a formal investigation and a barrage of criticism from MPs and regulators.

Compared with that chaos, Affinity’s record looks competent: Ofwat-audited performance reports show it broadly meeting targets for unplanned interruptions of more than three hours per property, with verified methodologies and green assurance from independent reporters. 

But local journalism across 2019–25 tells a familiar story of burst mains and low pressure – Harrow streets closed by emergency works, Wembley and Watford residents boiling kettles while crews repair pipes, and regular “sorry, your water is off” alerts from councils and Affinity itself. None of these is catastrophic in isolation; together they show a network that still struggles under stress.

The bottom line: Affinity is clearly not the serial outage offender that South East Water has become, yet its own infrastructure remains fragile enough that a single break can knock out large areas.

Rivers, abstraction and biodiversity: progress, but pressures rising

Affinity operates in some of the most water-stressed catchments in Britain, including chalk streams that are internationally rare. Since 2015 it has reduced licensed abstraction from sensitive rivers and aquifers by more than 40 Ml/d, partly by developing alternative sources and inter-company transfers.

The company highlights habitat restoration projects and tree-planting along rivers such as the Mimram, Beane and Ver, and it has made much of “sustainable abstraction” in its Water Resources Management Plan. Those steps are real and deserve credit: they help fragile streams keep flowing in hot summers and improve biodiversity.

But there is a catch. Less abstraction from rivers means that more of the region’s limited water budget must be found through leak reduction and cutting household consumption. With leakage still above target and per-capita use stubbornly high, the ecological gains remain precarious. A few dry years or planning decisions that add tens of thousands of new homes could wipe out the headroom Affinity has created unless further cuts go much deeper.

Carbon and climate: early gains, then a plateau

Greenhouse-gas emissions are reported in tCO₂e – tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. Across the seven years, Affinity’s figures tell a story in three acts: early decline, methodological change, and renewed pressure.

• 2018/19 – total gross emissions 79,684 tCO₂e. 

• 2019/20 – down to 72,179 tCO₂e (a 9% fall), helped by a cleaner national grid and efficiency gains. 

• 2020/21 – further down to 64,401 tCO₂e, with carbon per megalitre of water falling by about a third compared with 2018/19. 

• 2021/22 – headline “gross” emissions drop sharply in the statutory table because most purchased electricity is now bought on a REGO-backed green tariff, so counts as zero in scope 2; net emissions are around 13,000 tCO₂e. 

• 2022/23 – methodology widens to include more scope-3 (“value-chain”) emissions; operational gross emissions are 67,155 tCO₂e and total carbon footprint around 92,000–135,000 tCO₂e depending on method.

• 2023/24 – Affinity decides to stop paying the premium for the green electricity tariff, arguing it no longer offers value for money. As a result, reported net emissions jump to about 135,000–158,000 tCO₂e.

• 2024/25 – total net emissions remain very high: around 152,000 tCO₂e on a location-based basis, and nearly 189,000 tCO₂e on a market-based view that reflects the end of the green tariff.

So while Affinity has become more energy-efficient and cut emissions per unit of water treated, its absolute carbon footprint is climbing again as it reports more of the real-world impacts of its construction projects, supply chain and standard-tariff electricity.

The company still says it is committed to net-zero operational emissions by 2030, in line with the Water UK pledge, but acknowledges that reaching that goal will now depend much more on physical changes – renewables, electric vehicles, lower-carbon construction – rather than simply buying “green” power.

Regulation, penalties and fines

Unlike Thames Water, Anglian or South West Water, Affinity has not been hit with headline-grabbing Ofwat fines for sewage spills or unlawful dividends. Recent regulatory clashes have been limited to outcome-delivery incentive (ODI) adjustments, a few million pounds a year up or down depending on performance against leakage, supply interruptions and customer satisfaction targets, plus isolated cases where Ofwat ordered refunds for over-charging on connections.

There is also an Environment Agency enforcement undertaking on Affinity’s record for a pollution incident, involving a £110,000 package of payments and improvements rather than a court fine.

In other words, Affinity is far from spotless, but it has avoided the kind of systemic failure that has landed some rivals in the dock. The bigger question is whether the current regime – small ODI tweaks and negotiated undertakings – is really sharp enough to drive long-term change when executive rewards remain so generous.

So, how fair is Affinity to its customers?

Set against the meltdown at South East Water and the long-running scandals at Thames, Affinity might look almost respectable. It has:

• reduced leakage by nearly 20% and made real investments in chalk-stream protection;

• improved carbon efficiency per unit of water and started to grapple honestly with its full supply-chain emissions;

• stopped paying dividends from the regulated business for several years, at least on paper directing cash into investment instead.

Those positives deserve recognition.

But the other side of the ledger is harder to swallow.

• Executive pay has climbed into the million-plus bracket even as the company fell short of its own 20% leakage promise and continues to rely on a fragile, ageing network.

• A huge £58.5m dividend was paid out in 2017/18 – before the “we must reinvest everything” era – and customers have since been told that there is no room for any sharing of gains.

• Absolute greenhouse-gas emissions are now rising again, not falling, once the accounting tricks of green tariffs and narrow scopes are stripped away.

• Local outages, though shorter than the horror stories in neighbouring South East Water territory, still hit thousands of people when a single main fails, as Kent discovered in December 2025.

For households in Bedford, Barnet or the Folkestone hinterland, the minimum expectation is a reliable supply of clean water, honest environmental stewardship and executive rewards that feel proportionate to performance. Affinity Water is doing better than the very worst of Britain’s privatised water companies – but that is a low bar.

Over the next regulatory period, the company’s leaders will have to prove that seven-figure pay packets and complex financial structures can coexist with a genuinely resilient, low-carbon and leak-tight network. If they cannot, the calls for tougher regulation – or more radical change in ownership – will only grow louder.

Sources: Affinity Water annual reports and performance reports 2019–2025 (for financial, environmental and service metrics); Ofwat publications; and regional news coverage of outages. All data above are drawn from these reports.

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