Ofwat Data: 41.4 Trillion Litres Lost to Leaks Since Privatisation in England & Wales — £52.7bn Paid in Dividends

“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” 

W. H. Auden.

Let’s start with a simple, terrifying fact. When you turn on a tap, you expect water to come out. It is the most basic transaction of modern life. Yet for more than three decades a parallel, invisible river has been running beneath England and Wales — a river of treated drinking water, escaping through leaks and disappearing into the ground.

And alongside it has flowed a second torrent: cash.

Two spreadsheets published by the regulator, Ofwat — one on leakage, one on dividends — allow us to map both flows across the same era: 1992-93 to 2023-24. What they show is not just an engineering story about old pipes. It is a story about priorities: what the system protected, what it postponed, and what it paid for.

Over those 32 financial years, the industry’s leakage adds up to 41.432819 trillion litres of treated water. Over the same period, regulated water companies declared £52.71494 billion in statutory dividends.

This is not a campaigner’s estimate. It is the regulator’s own data.

The datasets — and what they actually measure

The leakage spreadsheet is supplied is Ofwat’s long-term leakage dataset covering 1992/93 to 2023/24, “stitched” across methodology changes (historic methods up to 2016-17, then PR24-aligned definitions from 2017-18 onwards). It reports annual average leakage in megalitres per day (Ml/d) at company and sector level.

The dividend spreadsheet is Ofwat’s “Historic dividends since privatisation” dataset. For a like-for-like comparison with the leakage period, the key figure is the sector total of statutory dividends from 1992/93 to 2023/24.

A crucial point for readers: Ml/d is a rate (a “per day” measure). To convert it into “how much water was lost”, you have to convert that daily rate into an annual volume and then sum across years — which is exactly what we do below, using the actual day-count in each financial year (including leap years).

The invisible river — 41.4 trillion litres, in plain English

A megalitre (Ml) is one million litres. So when Ofwat reports, for example, 2,967.5 Ml/d for 2023/24, that means 2,967.5 million litres per day — treated water, already abstracted, pumped, cleaned and pressurised… then lost.

Across the full period:

• 1992/93 (sector total): 4,796.9 Ml/d

• 2023/24 (sector total): 2,967.5 Ml/d

That long decline looks like “progress” — until you do the arithmetic across 32 years.

The verified total loss (1992/93 to 2023/24)

Using Ofwat’s sector total Ml/d for each year, multiplied by the number of days in that financial year and summed:

• Total leaked water (1992-93 to 2023-24): 41.432819 trillion litres

That number is so large it becomes meaningless unless you anchor it.

How many Bewl Waters is that?

Bewl Water reservoir’s capacity is 31,000 megalitres — i.e. 31 billion litres.

So the industry-wide leakage total over the period is:

• 41.432819 trillion litres ÷ 31 billion litres ≈ 1,336.5 Bewl Waters

In other words, the “invisible river” that leaked away since 1992 would fill Bewl Water more than one thousand three hundred and thirty six times over.

And in just the latest year in the dataset:

• 2023/24 leakage ≈ 1.086 trillion litres (2,967.5 Ml/d × 366 days)

• That is about 35.0 Bewl Waters in a single year.

How long would that supply the UK’s households?

ONS estimates 28.6 million UK households in 2024, with an average household size of 2.35 residents.

The Environment Agency put average daily water use at 136.5 litres per person per day.

That implies approximate household demand of:
28.6m × 2.35 × 136.5 ≈ 9.17 billion litres/day.

So 41.4 trillion litres would supply all UK households for roughly:

• ≈ 4,516 days, or

• ≈ 12.4 years (illustrative, because the leakage dataset is England & Wales while the household count is UK-wide).

Even allowing for regional differences and non-household demand, the conclusion doesn’t wobble: the losses are of a national-scale supply order.

Name the companies — who leaked what (1992-93 to 2023-24)

Below is the company-by-company total leaked volume from the Ofwat leakage spreadsheet you uploaded, expressed in trillion litres and in Bewl Water equivalents (31bn litres per Bewl).

Two observations matter for fairness.

First: larger companies serving more people and maintaining more pipework will generally leak more in absolute volume. You can’t read this table as “the worst people” without that context.

Second: that fairness caveat doesn’t rescue anyone from the central point. Every single figure above represents treated water that customers paid to abstract, clean, and pump — only for it to vanish.

The biggest question isn’t “who had the oldest pipes?” It is: why did the system tolerate loss at this scale for this long?

The cash counter-flow — £52.7bn in dividends across the same years

Now the second torrent.

Ofwat’s dividend dataset shows statutory dividends declared by regulated companies since privatisation. For the exact same 32-year window as the leakage data (1992/93 to 2023/24), the sector total is:

• £52.71494 billion in statutory dividends.

This is the point where “leaks” stop being only an engineering story. Because the system did not merely “struggle” with infrastructure. It also consistently found cash for shareholder returns.

And this matters because we are not talking about an optional luxury service. Water is the prerequisite for almost everything else: health, food, sanitation, fire safety, schooling, basic dignity.

Company dividends — with one vital caveat

Ofwat’s dividends spreadsheet is historically complex. Some dividend histories are grouped to reflect corporate lineages (for example, South West Water’s history is grouped with Bournemouth/Bristol within the dataset structure). So the most responsible way to report “by company” dividends is: use Ofwat’s own ‘Total’ line within each company grouping, and be explicit about the grouping label.

Using that method for 1992/93 to 2023/24, the biggest dividend totals are:

• Anglian group: £9.04bn

• United Utilities group: £8.66bn

• Severn Trent group: £7.90bn

• Thames group: £6.69bn

• Yorkshire group: £4.98bn

• Northumbrian group: £3.57bn

• South West group (incl. Bournemouth/Bristol in the dataset grouping): £3.50bn

The point is not to pretend dividends automatically “caused” every leak. The point is simpler — and more damning:

in the same decades the system allowed trillions of litres of treated water to be lost, it also delivered tens of billions in payouts.

That is the broken bargain in one sentence.

But the Guardian said £57bn by 2020… — here’s the updated regulator figure

The Guardian (and others) have previously cited ~£57bn paid out up to around 2020. What the latest regulator spreadsheet gives you is a way to update that claim, transparently, year by year.

From Ofwat’s statutory dividend dataset:

• Total statutory dividends from 1992/93 to 2023/24: £52.7bn

• If you extend the window in the same Ofwat dataset to include 1990/91 and 1991/92, the total becomes £54.3bn (1990-91 to 2023-24).

If you are trying to compare “dividends paid” to “leakage measured”, the clean comparison is the matched period (1992/93 to 2023/24): £52.7bn.

Either way, the story remains: this is a sector that has been able to sustain very large distributions across the era in which leakage remained persistently vast.

Why this matters in 2026 — the global water reality has caught up

It is no longer credible to treat water as a background utility that can be taken for granted.

In January 2026, reporting on a UN University analysis described an era of “global water bankruptcy” — sustained overdrawing of water systems beyond safe limits.

And the “water wars” framing is not melodrama. The Pacific Institute’s Water Conflict Chronology documents thousands of incidents where water is a trigger, weapon or casualty of violence, with major recent updates expanding the database dramatically.
The Guardian has also reported on tools developed to anticipate conflict hotspots linked to water stress.

Against that global backdrop, 41.4 trillion litres leaking away in a relatively wealthy country is not just wasteful. It is morally grotesque.

Because treated water is not simply “rain that fell anyway”. It is energy, chemicals, pumping, treatment works, skilled labour, and cost — all expended to create something we then allow to vanish.

The human cost — when the system fails, it fails hard

Leakage is sometimes discussed as though it only means “higher bills” or “inefficiency”. That is the polite version.

In real life, when networks fail, ordinary life breaks first:

Homes lose the basics — drinking, cooking, washing, flushing. Hygiene becomes a logistical problem, not a habit. Time, stress and dignity drain away with the water.

Then essential services are hit. Hospitals depend on water for infection control. Schools and care homes cannot operate normally without reliable sanitation. Fire services depend on pressurised networks and hydrants. Businesses that rely on cleaning, cooking or processing simply stop.

This is why “water resilience” is not a technical footnote. It is critical infrastructure.

Murky water — the system question, not the pipe question

The sharpest critique emerging from recent research is that water’s problems are not only “operational”; they are systemic — rooted in how the sector is owned, funded and governed, and in what the incentives reward. The book Murky water: Challenging an unsustainable system explicitly argues that tinkering is not enough, and calls for a deeper overhaul of ownership/management/planning.

Whether readers agree with every prescription or not, the Ofwat spreadsheets give that critique its hard edge: it is much harder to dismiss “system failure” claims when you can see, in regulator data, both the scale of physical loss and the scale of financial distribution across the same decades.

Conclusion: two ledgers, one judgement

We are left with two ledgers:

The physical ledger:

From 1992/93 to 2023/24, 41.432819 trillion litres of treated water leaked away — about 1,336.5 Bewl Waters — even after decades of public promises to “get a grip on leakage.”

The financial ledger:

Across the same period, regulated companies declared £52.71494bn in statutory dividends.

They are not separate stories. They are the cause-and-effect signature of a model that proved it could reliably deliver shareholder distributions while tolerating extraordinary, persistent losses of a resource that human life literally depends on.

In an era when the UN is warning about water systems being pushed beyond sustainable limits, and when conflict researchers track water as a driver and accelerant of violence, this is not just embarrassing. It is reckless.

Water is the most precious commodity humans have. A modern country should not be losing it in reservoir-multiples while simultaneously paying out dividends as though “normal service” continues.

The job now is not simply to replace pipes — though that must happen. The job is to replace the set of priorities that made it possible for decades to accept a leak of this magnitude as the price of doing business.

The Shepway Vox Team

Discernibly Different Dissent