This summer, Ofwat provisionally approved £3.4 billion of additional investment across thirteen water companies. Nine new reservoirs are planned by 2050. The biggest infrastructure programme in a generation is underway. On paper, things are getting better.
Step outside the industry and the picture looks different.
Bills are going up. Sewage is still entering rivers. Executives are still collecting bonuses. A White Paper promised the most ambitious overhaul since privatisation and, eight months on, most people can’t point to a single thing that’s changed. The trust deficit is growing. And good news, badly communicated, doesn’t land as good news. It’s just more of the same.
So what’s happening?
The reform gap
In January 2026, the government signalled sweeping change with a new regulator, smarter metering and a fundamentally different relationship between companies, customers and the environment. The language was bold and the intent appeared genuine.
But eight months on, from a customer’s perspective, very little has changed. Ofwat is still Ofwat. The Transition Plan promised for 2026 hasn’t arrived. The Water Reform Bill is some way off. In the space between announcement and delivery, something damaging has happened. The reform narrative has raised expectations it can’t yet meet. A fresh withdrawal from the credibility bank.
So the £3.4 billion arrives not as proof that the system is working but alongside consultation on further bill increases, before the ink is dry on promises of root and branch reform.
Lost in translation
Ask most people what PFAS means and they won’t know. Ask them about capital maintenance allowances or resilience headroom and the answer will be the same. These are the terms the sector reaches for when explaining what it’s doing, and they mean nothing to the person whose bill has gone up by a third.
The sector speaks in a language sometimes only it understands, and defaults to it when talking to almost everyone else.
The cost of that gap is real. Copper Consultancy’s own research, produced with the Future Water Association, found that 46% of people do not understand how water gets to their homes, and 44% disagree that their own consumption behaviours have any impact on water shortages. That is not public indifference. It is the result of decades of communication that prioritised technical detail over the human experience.
The sector has a genuine story to tell. It is telling it in a language most people cannot hear.
Co-design is a delivery mechanism, not a soft option
So the sector needs to communicate more clearly, but that alone won’t solve the problem. The process needs to change too.
Investment programmes are still largely communicated at people rather than designed with them. A scheme is planned, approved and funded. A campaign is commissioned to explain it. Consultation, where it happens, tends to follow decisions already made. The public receives information. It is rarely asked for a view that can change anything.
This model produces resistance – the planning objections, the campaign groups, the local opposition to infrastructure communities might have supported had they been involved from the start. When communities feel consulted rather than engaged, they draw the obvious conclusion about whose interests are really being served.
Co-design changes that. When communities help shape how schemes are delivered they improve, and communities become advocates rather than objectors. It requires bringing stakeholders in earlier than feels comfortable. And accepting that genuine involvement means some things will change. But the investment is far more likely to land, with communities and with the public, when people have a stake in it.
The window is short
The Ofwat consultation closes on 24 September. The Transition Plan is coming. Each is a chance to demonstrate that reform means something, which is that investment is real, and that the sector understands what it owes the communities it serves.
But moments pass. And the water industry has a long history of reaching for technical language when plain speaking was needed, of consulting when it should have been listening.
What is missing, and always has been, is a communications strategy serious enough to match the ambition. Sector wide, sustained, built around outcomes that matter to people, rather than processes that matter to regulators. Not company by company. Not scheme by scheme.
The window to get it right is shorter than it looks.
Want to talk strategy?
Copper Consultancy works with water sector clients on stakeholder engagement, communications strategy and community involvement. If you’re navigating the investment and reform agenda and want to think through your approach, we’d like to talk.
Get in touch with our water team at water@copperconsultancy.com.
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