18/08/2026
And here’s the sucker punch.
A big chunk of this £3.4bn water bill hike about to hit every single one of us, is in effect a subsidy for big-tech, corporate data centres!
Here’s how:
Within that £3.4bn sits £477m specifically to serve new housebuilding and data centre development.
United Utilities received the largest single approval, £995m, partly for water infrastructure serving data centres in east Manchester.
Read that again. Households in drought, under hosepipe bans, are being asked to fund the water infrastructure for data centres.
The bill for corporate demand is being socialised through the domestic tariff, in the middle of a supply emergency.
We pay for the infrastructure, we pay for the debt, we pay for the profits, and roughly a third of what we pay goes out as returns to investors and creditors.
Only public ownership will stop this daylight robbery.
