You're paying for the rain

My mate texted me "surface water drainage" and then about a minute later "its a scam", and that was where this started, not much context and no follow-up, so I've since spent an evening reading a High Court judgment about a sewer in St Helens. Cheers for that.

The basic bit first. Part of your water bill is for rain, not the water you actually use but the rain that lands on your roof and runs down the drainpipe into the sewer. United Utilities (who I pay, being in the North West) charge around £105 a year for it if you're on a meter, or roughly 27% of your sewerage charge if you're on the old rateable value system. It's called surface water drainage and it's part of your bill, you just skipped that line because everyone skips that line.

Fair enough in principle tbh, rain goes in their pipes and they deal with it and they bill you for it. The catch is that loads of houses don't send their rain to the sewer at all. Older places and anything rural often have a soakaway instead, basically a hole in the garden full of rubble where the gutter water quietly vanishes into the ground, and if that's you then you've been paying for a service you have never once used.

The water company has no idea either, because they don't keep a record of how every house drains, so the default is that everyone pays and it's on you to prove you shouldn't. When the companies took drainage over from the councils they just assumed every home was connected and carried on billing on that basis. Yorkshire Water's rebate form asks you to draw them a plan of your house showing where the rain off your roof ends up, (an actual drawing) and I genuinely love the idea of a multi-billion-pound utility sitting there waiting for your sketch of your drainpipes.

You can get some of it backdated as well (Yorkshire will go back up to six years) but not every company is as keen. Someone on MoneySavingExpert found out the other houses on her estate had been getting the discount for years and her water company still wouldn't backdate hers more than a year, apparently because they hadn't known she had a soakaway, even though she had the same setup as the rest of the estate.

Anyway that's the mild version, and it gets a lot better (worse) in St Helens.

Brendon International is a freight forwarding firm with about 30 staff on the Sankey Valley Industrial Estate, and when they moved onto the site in September 2000 United Utilities started billing them for surface water and highway drainage straight away. UU also charged them for foul sewage for a few years, right up until someone noticed Brendon's toilets go into a septic tank and have never been anywhere near a public sewer, and that charge got stopped and refunded in 2004.

The surface water charges kept going though, for eighteen years, and this is the bit that sent me. As of July 2013 UU's own sewer records showed no sewers on that estate at all, public or private, so they were billing a company for using a sewer that didn't exist on their own map. The judge put it more politely than that and said it wasn't obvious on what basis UU had been charging, which is judge for "what".

The sewer does start turning up on UU's records after that, and its history is honestly a mess so I'll go in order. In December 2013 it appears on an internal map for the first time as a 525mm concrete pipe, marked private. In April 2015 the same pipe gets listed as 225mm instead, and nobody at UU could ever explain why it changed (hold onto that, it matters later). By 2016 UU were treating the sewer as private and refunding the other businesses on the estate on that basis.

Brendon only queried its own bill in 2018. UU's contractors surveyed the site and found Brendon wasn't connected to the public network, and UU got as far as preparing a refund of roughly £150k before someone internally asked to double check first. A UU engineer did another survey in March 2018 and decided the sewer was public after all, so the records were changed to say so, Brendon got a much smaller refund and a lower charging band instead, and when they appealed it got knocked back.

So Brendon took them to court (HHJ Cadwallader, Manchester, December 2022). UU's case was that the council had dug up the old 225mm sewer around 2004 and put in a bigger 525mm one on UU's behalf, and if that were true the sewer would count as public. The only evidence the sewer had ever been 225mm was that 2015 record, and the judge reckoned it was most likely a clerical or typing error that couldn't support the idea of a rebuild at all. The council said they'd never touched the sewer and had no paperwork, and Hazel James, who owns Brendon and had been there the whole time, said she'd never seen any roadworks, so a big chunk of UU's argument rested on a typo.

Brendon won, and the judge found UU and Water Plus (who took over the billing in 2016) were never entitled to charge a penny, so they had to pay back around £152k between them. There's a line in the judgment where he says he'd hope it isn't common practice for a water company to bill people when its own records don't show the sewer as public and then leave it to the customer to challenge. The next sentence is just "However, that is what happened here."

Oh and it turned out most of the other occupiers on the estate had either never been charged or had already been refunded, so Brendon was basically just the one still paying.

That's businesses and old estates though, and I think the version my mate actually meant is new-builds, where the same thing is happening to basically every estate that's gone up in the last decade.

Modern estates have to deal with their own rain, so developers build what's called SuDS (sustainable drainage systems). In practice that usually means a pond or a grassy ditch called a swale with pipes running into it, and it's a nice idea, except then nobody takes them over. Home Builders Federation research last October found 97% of new sewers and 98% of SuDS on recent estates are still unadopted years after they were built, and when they FOI'd the six biggest water companies they found almost 2,300 applications for sewer adoption over three years, of which 79 actually got done. SuDS was even worse, about 170 applications and three adopted, and on top of that councils won't adopt the roads until the water company has adopted the sewers under them so the whole estate just sits there in limbo.

Somebody still has to cut the grass round the pond, so developers set up a private management company and every homeowner pays it an annual fee, usually a few hundred quid and sometimes over a grand. The CMA reckons around 1.6 million homes are on these arrangements and the government's own figure from 2024 was nearly two million, so pick your number, and those same households also pay full council tax and full water bills with no discount for the fact their drainage is privately run. Paying twice, basically, and one bloke on the MSE forums calls it a scam outright so my mate's in good company.

My favourite one is a new-build owner posting last November whose estate drains into a pond that flows into a brook, and they'd been getting the surface water discount because none of it goes anywhere near the public sewer. Then UU adopted the pipes running to the pond and put the charge back on, while fully accepting the water still doesn't go into their sewers, purely because they own the pipes now. So you've got a pond maintained by a company you pay, fed by pipes owned by a different company you also pay, emptying into a brook that nobody's worked out how to bill you for yet.

Worth saying the HBF is the housebuilders' trade body, so their research points the finger at councils and water companies and not so much at the developers who set up the management companies in the first place. Everyone involved seems to agree homeowners are getting done and nobody agrees it's their fault.

And the part that made me piss myself is that the fix already exists. Schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act would set up proper approval bodies for SuDS and sort out who adopts and maintains them, and it got Royal Assent in April 2010. Wales switched it on in 2019 and England never has. Defra said it'd happen in 2024 and it didn't, and this year I found a drainage supplier confidently posting in July that it's finally being implemented in 2026 while another company had posted back in May that it absolutely isn't. What actually happened is that in August the planning rules got tightened so SuDS have to meet national standards on basically any development, but there's still no approving body and still nobody obliged to adopt anything, so that law has been sat there fully written for sixteen years with nobody pressing the button. The government did run a consultation on unadopted estates that closed in March, so maybe something happens, idk.

I still haven't asked my mate which one he meant tbh.