Count Binface might be joking. The water industry can’t afford to.

Count Binface has a wonderfully simple proposal for Britain's troubled water industry: make the people running water companies swim in the rivers they're responsible for. The idea has resurfaced during his unlikely campaign in the Clacton by-election – ridiculous, of course – but the joke lands because everyone understands the truth. Water companies have faced years of anger over sewage spills and pollution, and over whether the people responsible are ever really held to account.

Britain's water problem is no longer something that stays hidden underground. It's political, financial and environmental – and, increasingly, personal. People are told not to use their hosepipes while they drive past water leaking into the road. They pay higher bills while reading about sewage in rivers. They hear arguments about executive pay, fines, debt and nationalisation, and every talking head has an answer. Swim in it. Fine it. Restrict it. Nationalise it.

The question at the kitchen table is usually simpler: why can't somebody just fix it?

Should CEOs swim in it?

Count Binface's proposal works as satire precisely because nobody wants to take him up on it. England's rivers and coastal waters have become a potent symbol of public frustration with the industry, and the sector has faced sustained pressure from government and regulators to clean up its record on sewage discharges, executive pay and cover-ups.

It’s an old-fashioned accountability question: would you personally accept the outcome your organisation is delivering? We don't need chief executives donning snorkels, but we do need an industry where the answer to that question is increasingly “yes”.

Should regulators fine it?

Fines have their place. Regulation matters, and polluters should be held to account. But fines don't replace ageing pipes, expand treatment capacity, build reservoirs, or give an engineer an accurate picture of a pumping station built decades ago.

Britain is already good at identifying failure after it happens. The bigger opportunity is getting much better at preventing it before it does – which means better assets, but just as importantly, better information about those assets: better planning, better coordination, better visibility of risk, and ultimately better decisions.

Should water companies restrict it?

By late July this year, eight water companies had introduced temporary-use restrictions, between them covering millions of customers – including all of Thames Water's roughly 10 million supply base – as prolonged dry weather and high demand put resources and treatment systems under pressure.

But public trust is fragile. Ask someone to stop watering the garden in an exceptionally dry summer, and most people follow the logic. Ask them to do it while water is visibly disappearing through a broken main down the road, and they’re less inclined to comply.

The reality is more complicated: drought is real, and the Environment Agency is clear that temporary-use bans depend on each company's individual water-resource position, not just its leakage record. Ofwat's current settlement includes several hundred million pounds specifically for further leakage reduction, alongside major investment in smart metering intended partly to help tackle it. But is that enough?

Should government nationalise it?

Consider Thames Water. In its 2025/26 annual report, the company reported statutory net debt of around £18.5 billion, and Andy Burnham's government is now weighing the possibility of nationalisation as attempts continue to resolve its future. Public disbelief is understandable: how does a business providing something as fundamental as water end up carrying that level of debt while facing criticism over leakage, pollution and ageing infrastructure?

But there's a practical point: changing who owns an asset doesn't change the condition of the asset. A pipe doesn't get younger because it moves from private to public ownership. An inaccurate drawing doesn't become accurate. An unidentified clash doesn't disappear. Whether nationalisation is the answer or not, somebody still has to understand, design, plan, construct, maintain and operate the infrastructure.

Is anyone on top of it?

There’s evidence that well-directed investment can have an impact customers feel at the tap. Severn Trent says it hasn't imposed a hosepipe ban in around 30 years – not because the Midlands has escaped hot summers, but because of sustained investment in leakage reduction, including smart meters and leak detection via drones – which it says beat its 2020–2025 target by cutting leakage 16%. The region remains ban-free, although the company has publicly warned customers to use water wisely and sparingly this summer.

We’re not saying every company can simply copy and paste. Severn Trent’s solutions – regions differ widely in sources, population and infrastructure. But it poses a sensible question: what can the rest of the industry learn from the operators managing resilience well? That feels more productive than just asking who to blame – especially with an extraordinary amount of money about to be spent trying to fix things.

£104 billion: enough of a game changer?

AMP8 isn't another incremental five-year cycle. Ofwat has approved around £104 billion of expenditure for 2025 to 2030 – the largest investment programme in the industry's history, aimed at improving supply, reducing pollution and building resilience. But spending £104 billion is one thing; turning it into measurably better infrastructure is something else entirely.

The scale of what already exists is easy to underestimate: more than 350,000 km of water mains, over 575,000 km of public sewers, and thousands of wastewater treatment works and pumping stations across England and Wales. Much of it is underground, some of it very old, and – critically – information about existing assets isn't always complete or current. Majenta's own water industry white paper found that a substantial share of asset information across the sector may be incomplete or out of date.

There are some simple truths here. Before you can improve something, you need to understand what's there. Before you construct it, you need to know how you're going to build it. Before you operate it for the next 30 or 40 years, you need to decide what information the people running it will actually need. That's where digital engineering stops being a technology discussion and becomes an infrastructure one.

Understanding what we've actually got

A laser scan of an ageing facility isn't exciting to most water customers, and nobody discusses an information management strategy over dinner. But these things matter.

Reality capture establishes what's actually there, rather than relying on old drawings. Information management creates a reliable source of truth. 3D modelling identifies problems before construction starts; 4D planning lets teams rehearse how complex work will actually be delivered. Asset information and digital twins then help operators understand condition, performance and maintenance needs long after the construction teams have left.

We've seen this play out in practice. At Brighton East Water Treatment Works for Southern Water, Majenta developed a 4D model for a new treatment plant being built within a constrained, live site. It helped the team fix fence lines, rethink vehicle access, optimise concrete pours and reduce disruption to the surrounding area.

None of that sounds revolutionary on its own – but that's the point. Digital engineering isn't about producing impressive models. It's about making thousands of better decisions before they become expensive physical problems. Multiplied across £104 billion in AMP8 investment, the significance changes considerably.

Build it once. Digitise it forever.

AMP8 should be judged by more than the physical infrastructure it leaves behind. Every new treatment works, pumping station, reservoir and upgraded network should also leave something else: better information than the industry started with. What was built, why it was built that way, what's installed and where, how it should be maintained, what assumptions were made and what risks remain. AMP8 isn't simply a chance to repair Britain's hidden infrastructure. It's a chance to understand it properly for the first time.

Five years from now, customers won't judge the AMP8 investment programme by the number of projects commissioned or billions spent. They'll judge it by what comes out of their taps, what leaks they pass on their commutes, and whether they can water their gardens in July.

£104 billion gives the water industry an extraordinary opportunity. But money alone won't solve the problem. We need to understand the infrastructure we already have, capture the information we don't, and use digital engineering to make those billions work harder.

Swim in it. Probably not. Fine it? If we must. Nationalise it? Perhaps. But ultimately, somebody still has to fix it – and to do so, we need to understand what we've actually got.

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