That’s not actually true On drinking water, the private era is clearly better. The Drinking Water Inspectorate, set up in 1990, reports overall compliance rising from about 98.9% in 1990 to 99.97% in recent years, including 99.97% in England in 2025. Failures on pesticides, lead, coliforms and metals fell sharply in the 1990s. Customers are far less likely to lose supply or suffer sewer flooding than in the early 1990s. Companies say they have spent about £160 billion on pipes, treatment works and sewers since 1989, roughly double the 1980s rate. England’s tap water now sits with the safest in international comparisons. That is the part people mean by “safe to drink,” and it did not get worse under private ownership. Bathing water also improved for decades. Compliance with European standards was under 76% in 1989 and over 91% by 1999; non-compliance later fell to about 1%. Most designated beaches are now rated good or excellent. The recent failure is sewage in rivers and the sea, not the tap. Storm overflows, built to stop sewage backing up into homes, now spill hundreds of thousands of times a year in England. Monitoring is almost complete in England, so the numbers are more visible than they used to be. Ecological status is poor: about 16% of English surface waters are classed good, against about 66% in Scotland and 30% in Wales. That gap is real, but it is not a clean public-versus-private test. Scotland is far less densely populated, farmed and industrialised, and until recently monitored only a minority of its overflows. Pollution incidents per kilometre of sewer are similar. The Independent Water Commission and the Office for Statistics Regulation have both warned against treating those headline percentages as like-for-like. The post-2010 deterioration also sits on regulation and finance, not ownership alone. Ofwat let companies load up debt and pay large dividends while leakage and overflow investment lagged, and Environment Agency enforcement budgets were cut. Public ownership in the 1970s and 1980s had the opposite problem: chronic underinvestment because water lost out in the public spending round. So the record is split. Water from the tap is safer now than when the industry was publicly owned. Rivers and coasts are cleaner than in 1989, but England’s sewage discharges in the last decade are a genuine failure of the privatised, lightly enforced model — not evidence that the old public system was safer to drink from.