Competition puts water quality at risk, warns chief regulator
Published 3 December 2014
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Opening the water market to competition for business customers creates “a lot of risk” for water supplies and consumers, according to the sector’s chief environmental regulator, Jeni Colbourne.
In an interview with Utility Week (read the full interview here), Colbourne, chief inspector of the Drinking Water Inspectorate, outlined her concerns around the planned opening of the water market in 2017.
She said: “One would hope that the industry, Defra and Ofwat will work out that maybe they can’t control the risks and decide to go down another route.”
Colbourne, who has outlined her concerns in a letter to Open Water, the body running the market opening, said: “At the end of the day, you have a consumer who turns on a tap and is exposed to the water.
“By opening the market you are tinkering around and making more complex the relationships upstream that lead to that consumer.
“As soon as you introduce more parties – these are human beings and human beings make errors. Those errors lead to a whole series of theoretical risks.”
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