Why Thames Water Paid Its Finance Boss £1m From an Emergency Loan
Thames Water paid its top finance executive, Steve Buck, a £1m signing-on fee at the end of July 2026, The Guardian reported on 10 August 2026. The money came from a £3bn emergency loan that the company's creditors agreed to provide the previous year. The payment was revealed in a letter sent last week by Thames Water's chair, Sir Adrian Montague, to a group of MPs who oversee environmental policy, which Sky News first reported.
Buck joined Thames Water from Pennon Group, owner of South West Water, in April 2025. Before that, he was finance director at British Gas and had also worked at Anglian Water. The £1m payment was originally supposed to be paid when he was hired but was held back for 15 months while Thames Water took legal advice on whether it had to follow through. According to Reuters, Buck was named CFO on 2 April 2025. His total pay for the year to 31 March 2026 was £591,000, which included a £491,000 base salary, a £25,000 payment to help with his move, and a further £491,000 figure that matched his overall disclosed package. The £1m signing fee was not mentioned in Thames Water's annual report released last month. Separately, Thames Water's own announcement confirmed Buck receives an annual salary of £500,000, a pension allowance of 12% of salary, and a car allowance of £12,500 per year.
The £3bn emergency loan was agreed with creditors in 2025 to keep Thames Water running while the company tries to work out a longer-term plan to fix its finances. Thames Water provides water and sewage services to 16 million customers across London and the Thames Valley, and it has been on the edge of collapse for more than two years.
Thames Water is one of at least eight water companies banned from paying performance bonuses because of environmental failings. The £1m payment to Buck was called a signing fee rather than a bonus, which let the company go ahead after its legal review.
The broader picture here is a fight over who controls the company. The creditors who effectively own Thames Water's debt have offered the government a "golden share" — a special stake that would give the state oversight powers without taking full ownership — as a last attempt to avoid having their debts reduced. That offer is a response to political pressure for public control. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, previously said the government should take Thames Water into public ownership to write off billions of pounds in debt. A Special Administration Regime, which is the UK's process for handling the collapse of essential utilities, would let the government take over and restructure the company's finances, but creditors and shareholders would lose out.
Buck himself has said the financial challenge is serious. In May 2025, he told Reuters he expected up to £900 million ($1.19 billion) in regulatory fines for the 2025–2030 period and argued that those fines needed to be delayed to avoid forcing a government rescue.
The broader question this raises is whether emergency money meant to keep a company afloat should be used to pay executives. The £3bn loan was meant to keep Thames Water running, not to fund recruitment packages. Creditors agreed to lend the money on the understanding that Thames Water would negotiate a real plan to fix itself. A £1m signing fee taken from that loan — even one the company was legally required to pay — will be examined by the same MPs who are deciding whether the company should stay in private hands at all. Montague's choice to disclose the payment to MPs voluntarily may reflect an awareness that the information would come out anyway, but the timing, coming alongside the golden share offer, makes any deal that protects creditor interests harder to sell politically.
What happens next depends on whether the government chooses a Special Administration Regime or accepts a creditor-led deal with a golden share. The golden share would give the state oversight without full nationalisation, which could satisfy demands for accountability while keeping the company in private ownership. But if ministers decide the debt is too large and creditor concessions are not enough, public control remains the alternative that Burnham and others have pushed for. Either outcome will change the rules for the entire UK water sector, where several companies face the same mix of environmental failures, heavy debts, and public anger over executive pay.
