The bosses of Wessex Water received £50,000 in previously undisclosed extra pay from a parent company, in the same year that the utility was banned from paying bonuses, the Guardian can reveal.
Chief executive Ruth Jefferson and chief financial officer Andy Pymer were paid £24,000 and £27,000 respectively in the year to June 2025, according to a spokesperson for Wessex Water’s owner, the Malaysian YTL group.
The payments came from Wessex Water Ltd, which is the parent company of Wessex Water Services Ltd, the regulated water supplier for 2.9 million customers in south-west England. YTL said the payments were not bonuses.
YTL initially declined to identify the company that made the payments. Only after repeated questions about the transparency of its executive pay arrangements did YTL reveal the source.
The existence of the extra payments to Jefferson and Pymer, alongside former chief executive Colin Skellett, was revealed in the accounts of Wessex Water Services. The accounts said: “Colin Skellett, Andy Pymer and Ruth Jefferson received emoluments for services to other group companies which are disclosed in the financial statements for those companies.”
However, the size of the fees was not disclosed in the accounts of any of the group’s companies. They came on top of pay from the regulated company worth £440,000 for Jefferson and £249,000 for Pymer.
Water company executive pay has come under particular scrutiny after the government banned bonuses for bosses at suppliers guilty of criminal pollution.
Six water companies were banned from paying bonuses last year. The government included Wessex because of a criminal conviction for a sewage pumping station failure six years earlier, which killed more than 2,000 fish and resulted in the company paying a fine of £500,000. The ban applied to its chief executive and chief financial officer.
The spokesperson said Jefferson and Pymer received the payments from Wessex Water Ltd between July 2024 and 1 October 2024. Jefferson’s pay was not subject to the bonus ban before the latter date, when she took over as chief executive. Neither executive “received any bonus from any source” during the year, the spokesperson said.
“Wessex Water has always been transparent about its finances and publishes its accounts in line with regulatory accounting guidelines,” the spokesperson said.
Sarah Dyke, the Liberal Democrat rural affairs spokesperson and MP for Glastonbury and Somerton, said: “This lack of transparency over bosses’ pay only adds to the need to bring water companies into line.
“Wessex Water has gotten away with environmental vandalism and taking customers for fools for far too long. From carelessly polluting beaches and rivers throughout the south-west with filthy sewage to losing millions of litres of water through leaky pipes.”
The Wessex spokesperson said the company “does not ‘carelessly pollute’ beaches and rivers”, but said its storm overflows were “part of an outdated sewerage system” that it was investing to upgrade.
MPs and Ofwat, the regulator of water companies in England and Wales, have already raised questions over the lack of transparency over payments to water bosses from other group companies.
The Guardian last month revealed that YTL had paid Skellett a £170,000 bonus in the same year to June 2025. YTL said the bonus was not related to Skellett’s work for Wessex Water during the year to June, but rather was related to YTL’s property interests.
Yorkshire Water’s owners also gave its chief executive, Nicola Shaw, £1.3m in undisclosed extra pay via an offshore company. Shaw was also allowed to keep the pay, after Ofwat determined it was not a performance-related bonus, although she admitted not disclosing payments from a separate company was a “mistake”, after politicians responded with outrage.
Jefferson was promoted to lead Wessex Water after serving as chief compliance officer and general counsel. She was paid £440,000 in the 2024-25 financial year by Wessex Water Services. She will receive £590,000 in base salary this year, before any bonuses. Pymer received £249,000 from Wessex Water Services last year.
YTL’s explanation of the source of the extra payments to Jefferson and Pymer changed over the course of several weeks.
The YTL spokesperson initially said: “The payments did not come from any specific company, just YTL UK as the parent company for the various businesses in the country.”
There is no company named “YTL UK” on the UK companies register. After repeated questions, the company acknowledged that the payments were in fact made by Wessex Water Ltd, which sits directly above Wessex Water Services in the group’s complex corporate structure.
Wessex Water Ltd’s accounts made no reference to payments to Jefferson and Pymer. However, the spokesperson said Wessex Water Services had not made an incorrect statement because the payments were reported “within the aggregate payroll costs of the group” – a tally that includes the salaries of 3,200 people.
There was no “statutory or regulatory requirement to separate the costs out” because they were not directors of the parent company, the spokesperson added.
Skellett has previously said that water executives should only receive large pay packets if they perform well. Speaking at a union meeting in 2024 he said the “buck stops” with the chief executive.
“We get a lot of money,” he said, according to Utility Week. “If we don’t deliver what we should deliver we shouldn’t get that money.”
