Terrific another "hardworking" CEO gets a fat bonus at our expense.
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
73 points (97.4% liked)
United Kingdom
6751 readers
414 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
top 31 comments
sorted by:
hot
top
controversial
new
old
Ofwat riding in at the last minute to save CEO bonuses, hurrah! Everyone rejoiced.
South West Water. Must be next in the queue for nationalisation after Thames?
Davy’s payouts were reinstated after guidance from regulator Ofwat over how the new rules would be applied.
Will the environment minister fire the regulator's CEO, or are they basically OK with this?
You know, you could do a perfect job and still have accidents happen. CEOs typically have a low base pay to bonus ratio, i.e. their bonus is their wage. This means that this headline means nothing and is written to create outrage without factual basis.
Let me guess, you also think that billionaires get where they are because they work reeeeeeeally hard?
No. I didn't even defend their pay. But people's reading comprehension is extremely limited.
A car sales person who sells a single car in a year and still gets their commission for that one car is perfectly fine in my ears. Some jobs just work like that.
Executive officers get large compensation because they have responsibility over the organisation.
That means that when “accidents happen”, they bear responsibility, and should not receive their bonuses and possibly should be fired.
If a potable water company is unable to deliver potable water to their customers, it’s a gross failure of the leadership to take all measures to ensure that the company does what it exists to do. This means they did not do a “perfect job”.
You clearly and completely misunderstood what I was saying.
It's a charged topic so it makes sense. Frustrating nonetheless.
Can you expand on the point? If they can’t deliver water the CEO shouldn’t be paid out; that’s the point of the salary/bonus ratio.
My point was that their pay is usually structured in a way that the base pay is a small percentage of their compensation and their bonuses are a virtually fixed part of their package and tied to company performance. They tend to not get any bonus when performing exceptionally poorly (e.g. going out of business). This means you get these bonus headlines even if they didn't get a particularly big bonus at all and maybe even had their wage docked. These kinds of headlines are incendiary.
The magnitude of pay really does not matter much at all for this discussion.
Where are any of them doing a "perfect job"? It would be good for you to present some factual evidence - bearing in mind it's a lack if facts you berate in others who are rightly outraged by CEOs' salaries.
The base pay of the CEOs of the 25 water companies range from lowest Ruth Jefferson (Wessex) on £440k to highest Liv Garfield (Severn) on £3.3 million. From what I can see there's no relationship between pay and the size or operational situation of the company. So those "low base pay" you claim are nothing of the sort. Many now have their bonuses rightly paused. Here's your outrage WITH factual basis.
I didn't claim that they were doing a perfect job. My criticism is on the phrasing of the headline and how CEO pay consists of a base pay and bonus with the bonus being large.
This means even a middling performance would expect a bonus payment.
This is independent of the amount of basepay. I didn't claim they were poor or underpaid. I only claimed that their wage structure enables polarizing headlines independent of facts.
You said:
CEOs typically have a low base pay to bonus ratio, i.e. their bonus is their wage.
In this case it's untrue. Not sure what your salary's like but for 99% of the country, £440k is not a "low base pay". By quibbling about the headline you try to distract from the grotesque nature of the way the water companies function.
I SAID RATIO. I never said their base pay wasn't a living wage. You even quote me correctly and still interpret it your way.
Nothing to do with interpretation. Their base pay isn't low (even as a ratio). You've not offered any evidence about the wage to bonus ratio (lack of evidence being your original gripe) You're either willfully ideologically ignorant or disingenuous. I would guess from seeing other posts that it's the latter.
10% of your wage being base pay is absolutely a low percentage. Example: https://www.ipcconsultants.com/blog/global-ceo-compensation-trends
Can you explain how that works for the least paid water CEO who earns £440k + bonus? Or the highest paid who receives £3.3 million + bonus?
I think I understand that you're making some sort of abstract, generalised point about CEO pay - but can you explain how that applies here to the pay of water fat cats?
This applies here due to the phrasing of the headline - the headline implies that the CEO got rewarded for doing a bad job based on being paid a "big" bonus. But their pay structure is structured in a way where this is a usual and expected part of their pay.
This isn't really about what water company CEOs are paid but journalists using CEO pay structure for an outrage inducing headline.
The general public will not be satisfied until water companies have no-one in charge of them because everyone in charge has been publicly executed.
I would be satisfied if I didn't need to do research every time I want to go for a swim to see if they have filled it with sewage recently or not.
Or that we receive a decent water supply for the incredibly high prices we pay. Five years ago I was paying £33 a month for water. I now pay £72 a month. In the last 12 months we've had a leak at the end of the road that wasn't fixed, a major leak (that was), three periods of not having water and now a ban on using hose pipes and filling up paddling pools in the heat.
You might sneer at people being fed up with this but things DO need to change and a good first step would be calling the bosses and owners of these companies to account.
I don't think it's possible to hold bosses to account by looking at atomised things like "something bad went wrong but they got a bonus." You need far more information than that.
Were you representative of a typical customer of your water company, or did you get unlucky? How was the water company in the article on leaks over the relevant period - did they improve them or not? What about their prices?
It's important to realise that, in the UK, we have been fleeced by water companies. Note the perfect tense: have been. They already did it. We're not being fucked, it happened in the past. The people responsible are in Australia, laughing at us. The infrastructure is now broken, and the money that was supposed to prevent it breaking is being used to buy yachts. The question now is, how are we, the people who have been fucked, going to pay for that, and how are we going to prevent it from happening again? Roughly speaking, we can:
- nationalise the water companies. Everyone pays, through taxation; or
- keep the water companies private. Their customers pay, through bills
Both are hugely unpopular. What we cannot do is:
- Get the people who fucked us to pay (because they are in Australia, and did nothing illegal at the time); or
- Get private companies in the UK to pay out of their own pocket (because why would they).
That is the fundamental thing, not bonuses. Not paying out bonuses won't fix the water system. It won't bring your bills down (not measurably, anyway), or fix leaks, or prevent sewage discharges. Bonuses should be paid out based on sensible targets being delivered, with a suitable way to deter short-term decision making (such as clawbacks). They shouldn't be at the whim of "something went wrong and the overall system is shit, so fuck 'em".
Were you representative of a typical customer of your water company, or did you get unlucky? How was the water company in the article on leaks over the relevant period - did they improve them or not? What about their prices?
I'm not sure if you've been living under a rock for the last few years but I'm far from being the only one experiencing this type of service from water (and other monopolies, too). But you recognise that we've been "fleeced" so I guess you have some awareness.
We need a political and economic system where people are ACCOUNTABLE. Politicians who lie or carry out policies to enrich themselves or their associates at the detriment of others or businessmen who run utility companies need to face legal and financial redress. Not only should the CEO of Southern Water (for example) lose his bonus but he shoudl be personally fined for the chronic lack of water in parts of Kent in the recent months that have adversely affected people's lives (to the point of illness and death in the cases of the elderly people without water during an intensely hot 3 days).
We need a return to the types of progressive tax regimes that existed between roughly 1945 and 1970 when the burden of taxation genuinely fell on the shoulders of those who could afford it. Tax the richest and use it to bring utilities back into common ownership. We don't need CEOs on £3.3 million; we need well-paid engineers and on-the-ground hands-on managers who can run them effectively in our interests. The neoliberal koolaid has been drunk by so many that it's hard to get most people to realise there are alternatives to targets and incentives and bonuses.
"Something went wrong" with the system they're ultimately responsible for, the system that they've stripped to the bone in search of growth in a saturated naturally monopolistic market.
Loss of bonuses should be the least of their fucking worries. -.-
The headline isn't "Susan Davy to get bonus in spite of having stripped Southwest Water to the bone and taken on massive debt to pay dividends to shareholders". She started in 2023, after the water companies were stripped to the bone and went into massive debt for exactly that purpose.
I think you're mad because someone ought to pay, and so you want this person to pay, whether she was responsible for the thing you're mad about or not. I'm mad about it too, but that's not fair.
She willingly took on responsibility for the shitshow, risk/reward. She happens to be holding the bag when the music is stopping, I couldn't care less how long she personally has been in the role.
It's not like this class of people works harder than others, so that massive fucking pay packet has to be for something. I assume it's for the risk of taking on the responsibility.
So you would say let's just not pay CEOs of failing water companies much until those companies improve? It's not like the "music is stopping" specifically now - all these companies are in bad situations with many problems going back years. This sounds like a recipe for, as soon as a company develops serious problems, running that company hard into the ground as they can't find anyone competent to manage it.
If this were about executive pay in general then sure, let's cap it compared to worker pay. But there is nothing special about the scenario of a company doing badly: if you specifically reduce executive pay for those companies, executives won't work for them. Who knows, maybe worker committees will work this time.
There's no evidence that paying CEOs huge sums means you get better leaders. Independent analysts have said for a number of years that the pay of CEOs has fallen out of alignment with the market. There have been recent reports of CEOs receiving bonuses of millions even though the performance of their company has declined under their tenure.
If this were about executive pay in general then sure
no evidence
Evidence for what? I don't think you understand what I'm saying because you seem to be talking about something I already agreed with and asking me for evidence.