Severn Trent water giant reports eye-watering profits of £320 million as water bills soar for West Midlands' customers

Severn Trent’s profits and revenues surged last year before the water giant hit consumers with a more than one-fifth annual increase in bills in April.

The company, which supplies water and sewage services to more than 4.7 million households and businesses across the Midlands and Wales, including the Black Country, Staffordshire and Shropshire, hiked up bills by an average of 21 per cent this year.

The increase equates to roughly £99 annually, with the average household now set to pay £556 over the course of the year.

Severn Trent said the sharp increase in bills will help fund about £15 billion in investment to upgrade its network of pipes, sewers and reservoirs over the next five years.

Meanwhile, the company enjoyed a bumper year financially, it revealed on Wednesday, with profits surging 59 per cent to £320 million for the year ending March 31.

Water firms have been the subject of growing public outrage over rising bills at the same time as high levels of sewage pollution and executive bonuses in recent years.

Severn is among the better performing of the privatised water companies on environmental metrics in recent years, and beat recent targets set by Ofwat, the watchdog said in October.

The company, headquartered in Coventry, said on Wednesday that its annual performance on “serious pollutions” also met the top industry standard set by the Environment Agency.

“That said, we have missed our overall regulatory pollutions target, and we understand that our assets need to be future-proofed to deal with more frequent extreme weather events,” it added.

On sewage spills, it said that in the first four months of 2025 it had seen year-on-year spill reductions of 66 per cent.

Chief executive Liv Garfield said the company’s environmental performance “has been made possible by our financial strength”.

“The £1 billion equity raise we secured ahead of this five-year business cycle, combined with strong financing and cost control, has given us the firepower to invest in our growth plan and will see us create 7,000 new jobs in our communities and through our supply chain.”

Annual revenue rose 3.8 per cent to £2.4 billion, the company said.

Severn Trent's customer operations director Steph Crawley told the Express & Star on Monday May 19 the water company, which delivers two billion litres of it to 4.6 million homes each day, will be investing £400 million across its network on 843 miles of new pipes to keep supplies moving.

She said:  "We have also reduced leakage by a record 16 per cent in the last five years."

And the company aims to go further, she added, by reducing leakage by another 15 per cent in the next five years and to halve the volume of water lost from the network by 2045. 

She said Severn Trent has 66 reservoirs which draw water from rivers, springs and boreholes to supplies resilient during drier, hotter weather and the company has a team of experts managing the flow of water on its network around the clock and she added: "We’re also proud to have among the highest quality drinking water in the world too, ahead of countries like Sweden, Portugal and Australia, while our average supply outage lasts less than five minutes."