The Sewage We Made

Channel 4’s Dirty Business arrives trailing comparisons to Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which is accurate to a point. The formula is similar: docudrama, institutional wrongdoing, ordinary people fighting back.

But the Post Office scandal was a story about a rogue IT system and institutional cowardice. The water crisis is something else. Nothing here malfunctioned. The outcome follows from the way the system was built.

That distinction is what makes Dirty Business more unsettling than its predecessor, and also more difficult to dramatise. Joseph Bullman and Paul McGuigan have three hours across three consecutive nights to make audiences feel something about debt structures, regulatory capture, and Victorian sewer infrastructure. They do it the obvious way: put a dead child at the centre.

Heather Preen was eight years old when she died in 1999 from an E. coli infection contracted on a Devon beach near a storm pipe discharge. At the coroner’s court, the water company’s explanation was that she had stepped in dog faeces.

When several other children also fell ill, the logical implication that they all had to have stepped in the same piece of dog excrement went unaddressed. The company’s lawyer went further, suggesting the father bore responsibility: Heather had been the only one to step into it, while her parents and sister had managed to jump over it. The verdict was death by misadventure. The file was closed.

What followed is what the series presents as the real cost. The Preen family fell apart. The parents separated. The father turned to alcohol and later took his own life. The series frames Heather’s death as the first recorded in Britain attributable to raw sewage entering the sea near a beach.

The series returns to their story repeatedly, and rightly so. It grounds what would otherwise remain an abstraction: the £88 billion in dividends paid out since 1989, the sewers rotting underneath, and the institutional reflex, evident in every layer of the story, to find someone else to blame.

The fictional spine carries the structural argument. David Thewlis plays Ash Smith, a retired police detective, and Jason Watkins plays Professor Peter Hammond, a computational biologist. They meet over dying fish in the River Windrush and spend the series doing what the Environment Agency has, according to the series, largely declined to do: investigating.

Asim Chaudhry’s Mickey Lazarus, a sewage plant worker-turned-whistleblower, gives them what regulators already had access to but did not use.

The casting is cannily counterintuitive. Thewlis and Watkins are not the face of activist Britain. They read as middle England: careful, sceptical, one even loves jazz. The series understands that the water companies’ greatest political asset has always been the subject’s difficulty.

Nobody chooses to think about sewage infrastructure. These two men are not converts. They are people who had something forced on them and kept looking.

What they find, and what the series lays out with clarity, is a structure built for extraction. When the government privatised the water industry in 1989, it wrote off £5 billion in debt to make the companies attractive to buyers. Since then, those companies have accumulated more than £60 billion in new debt while paying out billions in dividends. The infrastructure that the debt was supposedly servicing has continued to decay.

Thames Water has a rehearsed answer to the Victorian sewers charge. Not all the pipes are Victorian, the company says, and technically it is correct: average the entire 500,000-kilometre network together and most of it post-dates the Nineteenth Century. Water UK, the industry’s trade body, has published an analysis making exactly this point.

You must read the analysis carefully to learn that the infrastructure causing the damage is the old combined network, where sewage and rainwater share the same pipe during storms. That network is roughly a fifth of the total by length, and most of it is extremely aged.

The Greater London Authority estimated in 2003 that half of London’s drainage network was already over a hundred years old, and a third over a hundred and fifty years old. The industry’s averaging exercise is arithmetically accurate and designed to mislead.

The series leans hardest on Cameron and Truss, and the logic is sound. In 2012, Cameron introduced his “one in, two out” rule: any minister who wanted to bring in a new regulation had to identify two existing ones for the axe. He personally wrote to cabinet members, holding them accountable for the regulatory burden on their departments.

The Environment Agency lost staff, funding, and authority. What replaced active regulation was self-reporting: the water companies monitoring their own discharges and submitting their own data to an agency that no longer had the resources to verify any of it. Truss accelerated the same logic. This was not mismanagement. It was Tory policy.

The series is also honest enough to show it continuing under Labour. Starmer’s government talks about removing blockers for builders, courts the same finance capital, and brings forward a Water Reform Bill that campaigners argue still subordinates public health to investor stability. Then there is Reed at Stamford Bridge. The series does not need to editorialise about what Labour’s water policy amounts to. It just shows you the Environment Secretary’s face when Kay Burley asks him about it.

Channel 4 should be commended for making it. Grenfell: Value Engineering – Scenes From The Inquiry demonstrated that the broadcaster retains the courage and the institutional commitment to put difficult structural arguments on primetime television, to name the responsible parties, and stay with the human cost long enough for it to register.

Dirty Business belongs in the same tradition. That this kind of television still needs to exist is itself part of the story.

Peter Hammond’s closing line, that we need to put the people who care back in charge, carries weight precisely because the series has shown what was dismantled to produce the current situation.

But “care” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It implies the problem is one of personnel, that better people in the same chairs would produce different outcomes. The series knows this is not quite right, even if it cannot quite say so.

The 1989 privatisation was not a gamble that went wrong. It was a transfer of public assets built over a century, written off at public expense, handed to private capital with a legal obligation to its shareholders, and no serious mechanism to enforce anything else.

Thatcher did not stumble into this. The logic was explicit. Water, like everything else the state had accumulated, was to be returned to the market. The market would allocate it efficiently. Prices would regulate behaviour. Profit would drive investment. The market knew best.

Thirty-six years later: £60 billion in debt, £88 billion in dividends, a fifth of the sewer network so old and overloaded it spills raw sewage into rivers as a routine operational response to rainfall, and a regulatory structure that spent two decades losing the staff and authority needed to do anything about it.

Heather Preen died on a Devon beach. The Windrush runs brown. Thames Water requires a court-supervised bailout to continue operating.

The industry now proposes to spend £104 billion upgrading the network under the current investment round. The bill for these improvements? Well, there is only one source for that. And it is you.

None of this is accidental. None of it represents the system breaking down. It represents the system arriving, after thirty-six years of compounding, at the destination it was always travelling towards.

You cannot extract that volume of value from an essential public utility. Starve its infrastructure, hollow out its regulator, and then express surprise at the result.

Simon Pearson is a Midlands-based political activist and ACR member

The Sewage We Made