One star Yorkshire Water boss to get £660k reward

A series of major failures including rising pollution, missed environmental projects and declining customer satisfaction have been reported by Yorkshire Water during the past year. A Yorkshire Water spokesperson said: “We are disappointed that it is likely that we will receive a reduced rating from the Environment Agency in its annual Environmental Performance Assessment this year. We know our environmental performance is not where it needs to be and we accept there is more to do, especially on pollution. Improvement on pollution will take time given the scale of new infrastructure that is needed, but we have the right plan in place and by 2030, we will have reduced pollution incidents and delivered significant improvements to river health. One of the other reasons we are likely to be downgraded is because we haven’t yet finished all the work on our Water Industry National Environment Programme that we were due to finish by 2025. Although we completed 668 obligations under the programme, we have not yet delivered five remaining projects in West Leeds. We are underway with those five projects and they will complete in 2028. It’s disappointing that this historic lack of delivery is likely to impact our rating, but we are committed to improving our pollution performance, delivering the remaining schemes, and making our record investment of £8.3bn between 2025 and 2030 to improve service for customers, reduce pollution and deliver better environmental outcomes.”