Water companies have been in the public eye for the wrong reasons again recently. South West Water was in the dock pleading guilty to supplying water unfit for human consumption, while the regulator fined South East Water £22.5m for repeated supply failures that affected more than 280,000 people over three years.

As the full scale of the sewage pollution scandal has been revealed to the public over the past six years, key figures working for the regulators and the privatised companies have been heavily criticised. Channel 4’s drama Dirty Business has focused attention on individuals at the heart of the scandal.

The Guardian examined what some of the main characters are doing today.

James Bevan

Sir Bevan, a former Foreign Office mandarin, was chief executive of the Environment Agency from 2015 until March 2023. He has been criticised from inside and outside the agency for failing to police the behaviour of water companies, stifling frontline fieldwork, reducing monitoring, failing to protect rivers, gagging staff, and when faced with growing public outcry about the state of English rivers, trying to weaken the tough regulations which repeatedly show how waterways are being choked by a cocktail of sewage and agricultural pollution.

Bevan said he liked the system of operator self-monitoring, in which water companies were given the powers to report their own pollution – described by critics as marking their own homework. The Labour government is ending the practice. Bevan told MPs: “We have some quite sophisticated ways to check that data.”

He was appointed a non-executive director of Dwr Cymru, or Welsh Water, a not-for-profit water company with no shareholders, in February 2025. The company said: “His extensive experience of environmental regulation and public policy … have been constructive and valuable during a period of significant activity including regulatory reform and investment in the sector.”

David Black

Black was chief executive of Ofwat from April 2022 to 2025. He joined the regulator in 2012 as director of economics, and was later promoted to chief regulation officer.

In his time at the regulator water companies hugely extended their debt burden, above the Ofwat benchmark of 60%, created complicated offshore structures to minimise tax bills and paid high dividends while neglecting infrastructure. The economist Dieter Helm has described the way private companies have run the water industry as “great financial engineering”.

Black left Ofwat in August 2025 after the government’s decision to replace the regulator. He is scheduled to appear at the Weekend of Mistakes Festival 2026 at Hay-on-Wye this month. He will talk about what went wrong with the UK’s water industry – and how to fix it – at the £150-a-ticket event.

Richard Aylard

Aylard, a retired Royal Navy officer, joined Thames Water in 2002 as corporate responsibility director and then became its external affairs and sustainability director.

He was at the forefront of public anger over sewage pollution and water outages across south-east England. He is still at Thames Water as a director and special adviser to the chief executive. He has acted as a primary spokesperson for the company on environmental performance, such as discussing investment plans for sewage infrastructure.

Matthew Wright

Wright was chief executive of Southern Water between 2011 and 2016, when the company illegally discharged billions of litres of raw sewage into protected waters across Hampshire and Kent.

A judge fined Southern a record £90m in 2020 for dumping between 16bn and 21bn litres of raw sewage into some of the most delicate environments in the country and falsifying data by “very significant under-reporting” of its number of illegal pollution spills. Ofwat had imposed a record £126m penalty on Southern in 2019 for the same offences.

Wright, who was paid more than £5m during his time at the helm when the failings occurred left the company in December 2016 and became UK director of the Danish renewable energy firm Ørsted until 2020. He later worked at National Grid ESO and served as chief operating officer of Exagen Group until February 2024 as it shifted towards renewable energy. He admitted that the offences at Southern Water had happened “partly on my watch”.

Susan Davy

Davy was chief executive of South West Water for five years and was its chief financial officer from 2015 until her retirement in December last year. She ran the company while it was responsible for repeated sewage pollution and was given a two-star rating for environmental performance.

She was also in charge when it supplied water unfit for human consumption to 2,500 households in 2024, for which it pleaded guilty on 4 March.

Davy received an £803,000 pay package in the last financial year in her role after receiving £191,000 in long-term bonuses.

On leaving she said: “Running a water company is always interesting, often challenging, but totally fulfilling. I have enjoyed taking responsibility for the provision of a sustainable service to millions of homes.”

Ofwat imposed a £24m enforcement package on South West Water last summer after a three-year investigation into its failures in managing wastewater treatment works and sewer networks.

The regulator said the company had failed to upgrade its treatment works to prevent sewage discharges into the environment, failed to properly deal with the content of its sewers and failed to put in the resources to monitor its treatment works properly.

Nicola Shaw

Shaw, the chief executive of Yorkshire Water, had her bonus banned last year under a law Labour brought in in 2025 to stop bonuses being paid to the heads of companies found to be the worst for sewage dumping.

Yorkshire Water was given a £47m fine in 2024 for excessive spills from storm overflows as a result of poor maintenance. Ofwat said the company routinely released sewage, failing to ensure that discharges from storm overflows occurred only in exceptional circumstances, which had “resulted in harm to the environment and their customers”.

Shaw still received extra payments totalling £660,000 from Yorkshire Water’s Jersey-registered parent company, Kelda Holdings, in the 2023-24 and the 2024-25 financial years.

Sarah Bentley

Bentley was the chief executive of Thames Water from September 2020 to June 2023. She joined from Severn Trent and promised an eight-year turnaround for the company, but left with immediate effect after three years following a public outcry over the discharge of raw sewage into rivers and missing targets on pollution and sewer flooding.

Bentley said in 2023 that she would forgo her bonus for the 2022-23 financial year, but the company was accused of a flimsy PR stunt after it was revealed she had been given nearly double her annual salary with a £1.5m pay package. Bentley did little to stem the huge debts Thames Water took on, which stand at almost £20bn, or reduce record sewage pollution into the environment.

She left during a major Ofwat investigation into illegal sewage discharges from almost three-quarters of Thames Water’s treatment plants. The regulator imposed a £104m penalty on the company in June 2024 for routinely discharging raw sewage into the environment. It said almost 70% of Thames’s treatment plants had operational problems, and that the company had failed to manage its wastewater networks effectively.

David Henderson

As chief executive of Water UK, the trade association for the industry, Henderson worked alongside Ofwat to reduce fines for water companies and potential jail time for chief executives.

Henderson is a former Downing Street official who was a longtime adviser to Gordon Brown and the former Labour cabinet minister Ruth Kelly.

David Miliband

Miliband was environment secretary in October 2006 at the time when the deal for Macquarie to take over Thames Water was agreed. Miliband has been president and chief executive of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a global humanitarian aid organisation, since 2013.

Regina Finn

Finn was chair of Ofwat when it approved the Macquarie deal.

Macquarie initiated a period of heavy financial leverage, debt accumulation and dividend extraction. It loaded Thames Water with significant debt while extracting about £1.1bn in dividends and interest payments, leaving it with a legacy of high debt. Thames Water has since admitted that the company sweated assets for decades.

Finn now works as a director at the consultancy firm Lucerna Partners. One of her major clients is Thames Water.