CMA provisionally approves price rises for five English water firms

The Competition and Markets Authority has provisionally allowed five English water companies to raise customer charges slightly more than the industry regulator previously permitted, potentially adding hundreds of millions of pounds to household bills over the next five years, the regulator said on Thursday. The CMA’s independent panel granted additional increases to Anglian Water, Northumbrian Water, South East Water, Southern Water and Wessex Water after the companies challenged Ofwat’s December price determination, which set the baseline for charges through 2030.

The panel approved modest uplifts: an extra 1 percentage point for Anglian and Northumbrian, 3 points for Southern, 4 points for South East and 5 points for Wessex. Taken together, the provisional decision would provide about 556 million pounds in extra revenue out of the 2.7 billion pounds the five firms had sought. Regulators said the sum would fund improvements to supply resilience, reductions in pollution and higher financing costs. On average the additional allowance is expected to add roughly 3 percent to bills for customers of the disputing companies on top of the increases already set by Ofwat.