The English water companies are more than 70% owned by shareholders abroad, for example:
• Wessex Water is 100% owned by a Malaysian company, YTL
• Northumbrian Water is owned by Hong Kong businessman Li Ka Shing
• Thames Water is partly owned by investors from the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, China and Australia
We Own it has costed bringing water back into public ownership. They say:
Taking back our water means buying back the water companies so they can be publicly owned, like Scottish Water. This isn’t a particularly radical thing to do – right now in the energy industry the Conservative government has quietly taken some duties from National Grid to create a publicly owned Future System Operator by 2024 to plan for net zero. It is passing legislation and arranging compensation for shareholders. Bringing the privatised English water companies into public ownership would involve a similar process.
Parliament can decide on an appropriate level of compensation for shareholders, depending what it thinks is in the public interest. This decision can take into account, for example, the outrageously bad track record of the water companies - how little they have contributed over the years and how much they’ve already extracted in profit.
If we gave the shareholders back what they put in (i.e. the equity value of the shares) it would cost just under £15 billion to buy back the water companies. We would save around £2.5 billion a year because we wouldn’t have to pay out shareholder dividends and borrowing costs are lower in the public sector. Bringing water into public ownership pays for itself in around 6 years on that basis.
More here:
weownit.org.uk/public-ownership/water