About Us

No matter where we live, what we look like or who we vote for, we agree that water should belong to all of us and be run in our interests. Take Back Water is an alliance of activists who’ve come together to make this a reality.

Our objective is to win full democratic public ownership of water. We believe that financial disobedience is the tactic we need – the best lever we can use to force the government to act. And we know it’ll take all of us acting together to make it work.

Our plan is to build a powerful participatory movement. We believe in the ability of ordinary people to develop self-organised, mass social and political interventions – so our movement is open to anyone who wants to take back water.

Everything we do is done off our own backs. There are no paid staff, creative agencies or ‘experts’. We have no institutional funding and rely only on donations through our website and contributions from our own pocket. We use the skills we’ve learnt over the years and political insights we’ve gained from being involved in movements and learning from them.

The conversations leading to Take Back Water started in 2023. At this point, it was clear the privatised water system had reached a crisis point. Inflation and interest rate rises were exposing the deep issues in the water companies’ debt-based financing models. Sewage releases continued to dominate headlines, water outages were rising and new local campaigns were springing up to tackle these issues.

Many of us had been involved in the Don’t Pay campaign against rising energy bills and from this experience, we knew that the tactic of withholding payment from privatised utilities was something with a lot of power. We also understood some of the challenges in building and sustaining a non-payment campaign.

Water companies are making us pay their interest on their debt so that the financial elite can rob us blind for 35 years whilst making our rivers and seas into cesspits. We needed to do something.

In 2022, Don’t Pay brought together a mass movement for non-payment of energy bills. Within 90 days, 3 million people were ready to withhold payment and energy companies called it a make-or-break threat to the industry. The campaign forced the hand of the Prime Minister and the government had to intervene.

Don’t Pay was a defensive campaign that was started in a very short space of time — we wanted to urgently stop the catastrophic 80% rise in energy bills before it came into effect. It had a good political strategy and grew very quickly with very few resources. But the campaign wasn’t developed enough. It wasn’t clear enough how the strike could be sustained over a long period of time On-the-ground organising was patchy at best. It also grew far too quickly to be able to maintain coherence once the government intervened, limiting price rises through the Energy Price Guarantee.

However, it did introduce an important new idea: if we can get enough people to withhold payment at the right moment, then privatised utility companies - which are often loaded with debt and run under the assumption that people have no choice but pay them - suddenly don’t look like the license to print money that they once did.

This is powerful. The water companies, their shareholders and the politicians can get away with this because they think there’s nothing we can do. Demonstrations can be ignored, but if you can hit them where it hurts, that can change things very quickly.

New campaigns against the water companies – some of them inspired by Don’t Pay – started to emerge as sewage releases increased in 2022 and 2023. Campaigns like Don’t Pay for Dirty Water, Boycott Water Bills, Surfers Against Sewage and many others.

The situation with water is different to energy. The movement is more developed. And in some ways we have more leverage. The water companies are incredibly vulnerable, more than the energy companies were, and a sustained and coordinated campaign against them could make privatised water completely unviable.

What if we could bring together the experiences of all these different movements at a moment where we have the maximum amount of leverage?

In March 2024, that moment appeared. For years, water companies have depended on borrowing billions of pounds in order to run the water system while paying out dividends to shareholders. As interest rates went up, this stopped working and more cash had to go to debt repayments. Thames Water asked its biggest shareholder for money to stabilise its finances. The shareholder refused, effectively writing off its stake in the company. This was our moment.

We started researching the finances of the water companies and the plans that the government and the thinkers influencing major political parties were making for how to handle this moment. Thames water was the most debt-laden, but almost every private water company is heading for bankruptcy.

As for the plans: almost across the board, Labour, Conservative, the Treasury, the plan is to do the same as when train companies go under — temporarily nationalise them, pay off debts and then offer the infrastructure up for tender to another private company. The cycle repeats…

We started developing a campaign strategy. We decided that the timeline for this is several years, as first Thames Water, then the other water companies start to go under. We looked at the problems with Don’t Pay that made it unsustainable.

By May, we had something worth discussing. We invited people from campaigns against sewerage leaks, existing non-payment campaigns, groups campaigning for public services and trade unions to feed back and help us improve the strategy.

Take Back Water launched on 22 June and the real story starts from here.

We think mass financial disobedience is the tactic we need to win public ownership of water. But we need a mass movement to pull it off. This won’t be a story of individuals, it’ll be a story of the collective — thousands of people taking over this campaign to turn it into real power from below.

We hope you’ll join us. Together, we’ll take back water.

We’re building Take Back Water as a decentralised campaign with a small core team providing the supporting infrastructure that regional campaigns need to run campaigns against the water companies in their area.

The core team is an unincorporated association — this is the same legal structure used by small charities, clubs and trade union branches. It means we have a bank account and a constitution — an agreed set of rules about who is responsible for the money we hold and data like our email list.

That said, over time we want the importance of the core campaign to reduce compared to the regional campaigns against individual water companies as they develop.

We’re still a very new organisation and lots of this will evolve as the campaign develops. We’ll publish how we’re spending any donations we receive and try to be as transparent as possible about the decisions we’re making.