Other stories from last week

(by Karma Loveday)

Lee Pitcher MP, former water industry employee and chair of a number of All Party Parliamentary Groups relevant to the sector, has been appointed Parliamentary private secretary to Defra. 

Yorkshire Water has appointed Jonathan Lewis as a non-executive director and chair designate. He will take over as chair from 1 October 2026, succeeding Vanda Murray OBE DBA. Lewis is chair of Associated British Ports and former chief executive of Capita and Amec Foster Wheeler. The company said the appointment follows a governance review to reflect its new ownership arrangements and the scale of its ongoing £8.3bn investment programme. Lewis brings experience in guiding complex infrastructure businesses through large-scale transformation programmes. Further announcements will be made shortly about new independent non-executive director appointments.  

Trevor Bishop, independent consultant with extensive experience across many regulation, policy and water resource roles, has been appointed as the first interim chair of the new Regional Water Planning Partnership for the south west.

Welsh Water has appointed Kaye Maguire as chief people and governance officer and Christian Irwin OBE as chief asset officer, as part of continuing work to the refresh its executive team as it delivers a £4.2bn AMP8 investment programme. Maguire will join this year from recruitment agency Michael Page, where she has served as general counsel and company secretary since 2018. Irwin will join in 2027 from Network Rail, where he is capital delivery director for the North West and Central region and leads a £1bn annual capital investment portfolio.

Ofwat has issued a £5m tender for an independent monitor for South East Water, for the two years between October 2026 and October 2028. The role will be to monitor, assess and report on  South East Water's progress in delivering a turnaround in its operational performance and resilience, consistent with undertakings accepted by Ofwat in its recent enforcement decisions on  water supply resilience, customer care during supply interruptions, and compliance with a licence condition requiring the company to hold two issuer credit ratings that are investment grade. The submission deadline is 7 September. 

Everflow, the multi-utilities provider serving UK SMEs, has appointed Mari Jones as its new water managing director. The company said Jones had almost two decades of leadership experience across customer service, commercial operations, communications and transformation.

In her new role, she will focus on removing friction from customer journeys, further improving operational performance and evolving Everflow’s offering around the needs of small businesses.

In separate Everflow news, Ofwat said last week that it had opened an enforcement case into the retailer, “to investigate concerns that in its work with third party intermediaries the company may be using the market dataset in a manner which is not permitted by the Wholesale Retail Code and Market Arrangements Code”. Under current arrangements, access to market data is restricted to wholesalers and retailers, with a recent code change permitting third party access to a customer’s data if that customer has given express permission. 

Business Stream has announced it is among the winning bidders in the first round of the Water Efficiency Cambridgeshire Fund. It secured funding for two projects: one focused on water stewardship, and the other supporting small-to-medium sized enterprises to identify water-saving opportunities and to implement water-saving devices. Other successful bidders include Waterwise, Wave and King’s College Cambridge. All winning bids together seek to save an estimated 628,000 litres of water per day in Cambridgeshire by March 2027. Applications for round two are expected to open this summer. 

Veolia has successfully completed comprehensive testing of nine target PFAS compounds at its High Temperature Incinerator facility at Ellesmere Port, achieving destruction rate efficiencies of up to 99.9999%. Veolia said it has the capability to safely eliminate a 10,000 tonne stockpile of aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF) fire suppressants at the facility. This product was banned in July 2025, to protect against potential groundwater contamination.