Severn Trent boss paid £3.2m regardless of agency’s tremendous for sewage spills in river

The boss of Severn Trent Water has been awarded a £3.2m pay deal, together with a £584,000 bonus, regardless of the corporate being fined £2m for spilling 260m litres of sewage into the River Trent.

Liv Garfield, who has been the pinnacle of the utility agency for a decade, noticed her pay improve by 2.1% , bringing her total take-home pay during her time as Severn boss to more than £28m.

Garfield obtained simply over 60% of the whole quantity of bonus she was eligible forduring the yr to the tip of March. The reward was curbed partly as a result of Severn didn’t hit environmental targets because of the £2m tremendous this yr.

Severn, which serves 4.6m households and companies from Bristol to the Humber, and mid-Wales to the east Midlands, was handed the tremendous by Ofwat in February for polluting the River Trent between November 2019 and February 2020.

Ofwat’s investigation discovered that the Strongford therapy works in Stoke-on-Trent discharged greater than 260m litres of sewage, the equal of 10 Olympic-sized swimming swimming pools.

Final month Garfield was pressured to defend her pay packet while telling the BBC that the 60,000 spills Severn was responsible for in 2023 did not make her feel good.

The information of Garfield’s bonus comes only a day after it was revealed that Susan Davy, the boss of South West Water’s dad or mum firm, Pennon, received a £300,000 pay increase, regardless of an outbreak of diarrhoea brought on by a parasite in Devon’s water provide.

The rise got here regardless of Pennon executives agreeing to forgo bonuses resulting from its poor efficiency on sewage dumping.

The UK’s three fundamental political events have all promised robust motion on water firms and their bosses who dump sewage in waterways.

The Conservative manifesto, which was revealed on Tuesday, pledged to work with the regulator to carry firms to account and ban executive bonuses if a company has committed a serious criminal breach.

On Monday, the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto promised to convert water companies into public benefit companies and “ban bonuses for bosses until the discharges and leaks end”.

It comes because the environmental campaigner Feargal Sharkey referred to as for a public inquiry into the water trade and claimed that they have been scamming “scamming” clients.

Talking at a fringe occasion on the GMB annual convention in Bournemouth, the previous Undertones singer stated: “Now we have ended up with each river in England being polluted, whereas £72bn of your cash has been stripped out.”

He added that each chief govt of a water firm and the regulator ought to be “hauled” earlier than a public inquiry.

A Severn Trent spokesperson stated: “Delivering for our clients, our communities and the setting underpins our strategy to remuneration.

“Just below three-quarters of govt pay is straight linked to efficiency, with stretching targets in place.

“In 2023-24 we maintained our place as a sector-leading performer, delivering in opposition to our operational targets for patrons, investing £1.2bn throughout our area and reaching a four-star score from the Environmental Company for a fourth consecutive yr.”