Some life decisions are made while not entirely sober: Las Vegas weddings, buying a boat, joining a gym. And somewhere on that list of financial self-harm sits the moment you declare: “You know what I need? A house with a swimming pool.”
For some, it’s a shimmering rectangle of liquid regret. It starts with noble intentions: afternoons of leisure, a plastic of fizz in hand (get used to uttering the refrain “no glass near the pool!”), sun gently warming your shoulders, children laughing, dogs frolicking, neighbours consumed with envy. In theory.
In practice? If you don’t keep on top of it, nor have an expensive cover, it can become a festering pit of gull and duck droppings, drowned beetles, a rat or two doing the backstroke, and enough algae to merit a cameo in The Blue Planet.
I’ve written before about how much I love my pool. But that was before the water companies came knocking for extra cash. Those bastions of public trust. The ones cheerily dumping raw sewage into our rivers while paying investor dividends and themselves bonuses as rewards for failure.
Water UK, which represents the 16 water and waste water companies in England and Wales, is now proposing that if you own a pool or, heaven forbid, a large garden, you should pay more for your water. And it’s not just about installing water meters, which I already have. It’s about increasing what they charge people in my position for the water we use.
The justification for bumping up prices is less clear. I had initially suspected it was because they were holding my pool personally responsible for every drought since the industrial revolution. However, according to the Met Office, rainfall between October 2022 and March 2024 was the highest amount recorded for any 18-month period since data started being collected in 1836.
Our water infrastructure is in dire need of upgrading, that’s for sure — and England’s privatised water companies have patently failed to invest adequately: the last reservoir built in this country was the Carsington Reservoir in Derbyshire, completed in 1992, since when the UK’s population has grown by about 10mn.
And in the 34 years since privatisation, England’s water companies have
paid out £83bn in dividends, and incurred £74bn in debt; all while paying
themselves significant salaries and bonuses. In the 2023-24 tax year, water company executives in England and Wales received a total of £9.1mn in bonuses, a slight increase on the £9.01mn doled out the year before.
At Anglian Water, my local provider, charges for customers are expected to rise by 15.5 per cent in real terms by 2030. Its new chief executive, Mark Thurston, has a base salary of £504,000, plus benefits and bonus — the previous incumbent’s total pay package varied between £1.3mn and £2.3mn a year during his decade-long tenure.
Still, no matter: if you’ve dared to install anything thirstier than a birdbath, prepare for financial punishment.
It wouldn’t be so bad if owning a swimming pool didn’t already feel like a second job.
It’s not just a hole filled with water like an enormous bath. You need pumps, filters, skimmers, heaters, timers, floaty things, inflatable unicorns, chemicals with names that sound like rejected Bond villains (trichlor, or stabiliser).
Then there’s the maintenance. If you don’t keep it spotless, it goes cloudy. Add too much chlorine, your eyes melt and swimming shorts go yellow. Not enough and suddenly it’s bacteria bingo. The dog falls in, your friends’ kids drop a Cornetto in the deep end, and within minutes you’ve accidentally created a new ecosystem.
Is it even worth having a pool in Britain? Some use it once in June, when temperatures touch 23°C. And again in August, when, five drinks deep at a barbecue, someone dares you to jump in fully clothed. Which, if you’re over 50, really shouldn’t happen.
The rest of the time? It’s a high-maintenance water feature, a home for suicidal squirrels and a very expensive way to store rainwater.
The equipment will forever demand attention and money. The alligator electrodes will corrode and the pool vacuum will disintegrate. The filter sand will need replacing. The pipework leaks. The pool house rots. You’ll need to upgrade the electrics because wet sockets and high voltage are not, as it turns out, great friends. And then you have to pay to heat the thing to a usable temperature (28°C, thank you). But at least the energy costs are applied fairly: the more you use, the more you pay. Now the water companies want to swoop in and charge those who use extra more for every drop.
It’s a canny piece of misdirection on their behalf, I suppose. After years of mismanagement they need more money, so why not extract it from somewhere where it will elicit the least public sympathy? After all, if you can afford a pool, you can afford to be punished. Perhaps this logic will be applied elsewhere? Pay higher fuel prices because you own a Roller? Pay more for your underwear because you wear a Rolex? It’s just the latest area in life where we seem to be drifting from regulation into retribution.
That, or someone at Water UK has a grudge because they never got invited to one of my pool parties. They are pretty good, to be fair.
James Max is a broadcaster on TV and radio and a property expert. The views expressed are personal. X, Instagram and Threads @thejamesmax
