How many times did your water company dump raw sewage near you? 14,275 outfalls monitored. Every spill counted. Every hour logged.
Customers are paying more while companies leak treated drinking water, dump raw sewage and still hand out large executive pay packages. This is what extraction looks like in the water industry: households fund the system, but too much of the money vanishes into failure instead of service.
Water companies plan their infrastructure for 62.3 million people in England. The ONS says 57.1 million live here. That's a gap of 5.2 million — and it's the water industry's own planning figure, not ours.
The GP register shows a remarkably similar gap — 4.9 million more patients registered than the ONS says exist. Two completely independent systems. Two different government datasets. Same answer: roughly five million more people in England than the official count.
Caveat: The WRMP population is what water companies use for infrastructure planning, not a census. It includes their own growth forecasts and may overlap at boundaries. Some companies serve parts of Wales. The gap cannot be entirely attributed to uncounted population — but it is consistent with the GP register gap, the NI number discrepancies, and Policy Exchange's call for an emergency census. Two independent infrastructure systems both suggest roughly the same number of unplanned-for people.
Sewage data: Environment Agency Event Duration Monitoring (EDM) 2024 Storm Overflow Annual Return. Published March 2025. All 10 water and sewerage companies in England.
Location: Grid references from EA permits converted to lat/lon. Distance calculated from postcode centre. Nearest outfalls shown within 5km.
CEO pay: Verified against latest company annual reports for 2024-25 and Ofwat executive pay rulings. Where Ofwat blocked bonuses, figure reflects latest verifiable amount.
Leaks: Ofwat Water Company Performance Report 2024-25. Figures shown are each company's reported 2024-25 leakage performance on Ofwat's three-year average basis, converted to approximate Ml/day from the published baseline and percentage change.
Spill count: "Counted spills using 12-24h count method" — the standard EA metric.
What this doesn't show: Permitted discharges from treatment works (legal), combined sewer overflows during extreme rainfall (may be unavoidable), or volume of discharge (EDM measures duration, not volume).