Yorkshire Water ranked alongside Thames Water in Ofwat ratings

These almost tripled in 2024, with previous figures showing the firm has one of the worst records in the country.

The red rating - which is described as “significantly below target” - was included in the EA’s annual Environmental Performance Assessment, which was published yesterday.

This gave an overall rating of two stars out of four, which means the “company requires improvement”.

In 2020, Yorkshire Water was categorised as industry-leading by the regulator, however since then it has received two stars in three of the four years.

Ofwat also published its Water Company Performance Report yesterday, which categorised Yorkshire Water as “lagging behind”. This put it in the same bracket as Thames Water and Southern Water.

These damning assessments have come at the same time as chief executive Nicola Shaw’s overall remuneration has reached more than £3m over the last two financial years.

This includes two off-shore payments of £660,000 on top of her main salary and any bonuses.

Bills are set to increase by 41 per cent over the next five years to pay for upgrades to the water system’s creaking infrastructure, while there is a hosepipe ban heading into Christmas.

In the last seven years, the company’s debt has risen from £4.2bn to £6.8bn, requiring £275m to be spent each year paying shareholders to service the interest. That puts Yorkshire Water’s debt to equity ratio at 70 per cent, which Ofwat describes as unstable.

Professor Becky Malby, chair of the Ilkley Clean River Group, said: “This is three years into a chief executive who was here to do financial recovery and to deliver a massive improvement in performance.

“It’s not happening … the culture of the organisation is absolutely hell bent on making shareholder money.

“It’s not hell bent on the environment and securing solutions - it’s what can they get away with at a minimum? And how they can ramp up the money they can get from us - and we are absolutely captive.”

Environment Secretary Emma Reynolds added: “We are facing a water system failure that has left our infrastructure crumbling and sewage spilling into our rivers.

“Under this government, water company inspections and criminal investigations have reached record levels, uncovering the true extent of the problem.

“We are taking decisive action to fix it, including new powers to ban unfair bonuses, and swift financial penalties for environmental offences.”

A Yorkshire Water spokesperson said: "As we said in July, when the pollution figures were first published, our performance in 2024 was not good enough.

“We take our responsibility for the environment very seriously and have investigated each serious incident in detail to understand root causes.

“We have a plan which includes investment in infrastructure, giving us more intelligence about the system so we can react before an issue becomes an event, and employing more people to allow us to respond more quickly.”

They said that as a result of the Ofwat rating “customers will receive an adjustment to their bills from April next year”.

The spokesperson added: “Throughout the last five years, our teams have worked tirelessly to deliver for Yorkshire, such as reducing leakage and supporting our more vulnerable customers.

“We have seen improvement across the majority of all our metrics, but nevertheless we are disappointed that we've not met all of Ofwat’s targets over the past year.”