Familiar concerns over bosses’ pay, prices and borrowing emerged in the utilities’ early years in private hands, with UK dubbed the ‘dirty man of Europe’
There was a time when privatised British water companies were as unpopular as they are now. During the hot summer of 1995, the managing director of Yorkshire Water, Trevor Newton, achieved notoriety when he urged customers to use less of his company’s product by issuing a motivational message: “I personally have not had a bath or shower for three months.”
After a round of jokes about “the filthy rich” – because megabucks pay for water company bosses was also in the headlines in those days – Newton invited the press to watch him washing with a flannel and bowl. It later emerged he had been popping out of Yorkshire for a soak at his parents’ and in-laws’ homes.
