"Water quality has improved dramatically since privatisation"

This is partially true but heavily cherry-picks the timeframe and metrics. There were genuine improvements in some areas in the decades immediately after privatisation in 1989, the Environment Agency has documented reductions in pollution loads from sewage treatment works, including ammonia down by 80%, biochemical oxygen demand down by 55%, and phosphate down by 68% between 1995 and 2020. Beaches also improved.

However, the current overall picture is damning. The Environment Agency reports that only 14% of rivers in England currently meet "good ecological status" as defined by the Water Framework Directive. CIEH So while some chemical measures improved significantly over a 30-year period (largely driven by EU legislation and regulatory pressure, not privatisation itself), the overall ecological health of rivers remains very poor. Saying quality has improved "dramatically" while 86% of rivers fail to reach good ecological status is misleading at best.

"The increase in sewage discharges is only an increase in reporting"

This is the most misleading part of the comment, and echoes arguments that have been directly identified as industry deflection tactics. A peer-reviewed paper in Nature Water found that water companies discharged 12.7 million monitored hours of untreated wastewater into English waterways between 2019 and the end of 2023, and argued that the companies have prolonged this environmental disaster through strategies that mirror those of other large polluting industries. Nature

It is true that the overflow monitoring system started in 2016 with fewer than 1,000 monitors, and by the end of 2023 all storm overflows had monitors fitted, House of Commons Library which means earlier years were undercounted. So there's a grain of truth that better monitoring reveals more. But:

Research has demonstrated that water companies were substantially underreporting the number of untreated sewage discharges, many of which occurred under "normal" rainfall or even during dry weather, and at two wastewater treatment plants, almost 1,000 previously unreported spills were identified.

The volume of discharges has also increased. In 2023, there were 3.6 million hours of spills compared to 1.75 million hours in 2022, the number of individual spills soared by 54%. While some of this is attributable to 2023 being an exceptionally wet year, this trend over multiple years isn't just a reporting artefact.

The "it was always this way" argument is essentially unverifiable, and the water companies themselves have been caught discharging illegally on dry days, which refutes the idea that the problem is purely legacy infrastructure responding to rain.

"Longer-term testing data shows rivers are still improving"

Thats misleading in the current context. While long-term chemical data does show improvements from the 1990s baseline, invertebrate community richness increased from 1991 to 2005 overall, and to 2010 in urban rivers, with no increase after that. In other words, ecological improvement stalled well over a decade ago. Presenting an upward trend that stopped improving around 2010 as evidence that things are "still improving" today is not accurate.