ANGRY residents are staging a demonstration outside the offices of Wessex Water, in Claverton Down Road, Bath, to protest a pay rise for its chief executive against a background of ongoing pollution of waterways.

B&NES Green Party has helped to organise the protest planned for 3 pm Thursday (July 30), spurred on by an announcement earlier this month that Wessex Water boss Ruth Jefferson was to receive a pay increase taking her salary to almost £800,000 per year.

This is despite Wessex Water last year being fined £11 million for failing to properly operate, maintain, and upgrade its infrastructure to handle sewage flows.

It also comes on the back of a 20 per cent increase in local water bills.

The Greens said water is rapidly becoming a major national political issue with campaigners for decades urging that public utilities such as water should remain in public hands, governed for the public good rather than for profit.

Their arguments received a huge boost earlier this year with the release of the Channel 4 docudrama, ‘Dirty Business’, which told a horrifying story of sewage pollution, its deadly impacts, and the corporate complicity underneath it all.

Green Party constituency policy officer Dr Neil Howard, of the University of Bath, said: “The pollution of our waterways is a national scandal.

“Private companies pay their bosses ever more obscene salaries while letting the infrastructure that we all depend on rot.

“Wessex Water are a stain on our city and our countryside.”

Local Green Party Cllr Joanna Wright said: “In a summer of unrelenting heat, we and our children should be able to enjoy getting cool in our rivers and our streams, but we cannot for fear of E. coli and other filth dumped by cynical corporations.”

The Green Party is the only major party to have called for complete nationalisation of water companies, arguing that water should be treated as a public essential rather than a profit-driven commodity.

In a recent YouGov survey, 82 per cent were fully in support of returning to state-run water.