Former Wessex Water boss received £170,000 bonus despite ban on performance pay
Company owners say bonus was unrelated to water business and complied with ban after pollution conviction
The former chief executive of Wessex Water received a £170,000 bonus from its parent company last year despite a ban on performance-related pay after criminal pollution failures on his watch.
Colin Skellett received a total of £693,000 in pay from the water company’s Malaysian-owned parent company, YTL Utilities (UK), including the bonus, according to its accounts up to June 2025.
The bonus prompted strong criticism from the Liberal Democrats, which said it showed that the government’s bonus ban was “nowhere near strong enough”.
Wessex was banned from paying bonuses for the year after it was criminally convicted in November 2024 for a sewage pumping station failure six years earlier, which killed more than 2,000 fish and resulted in the company paying a fine of £500,000. In June the government banned bonuses covering the 2024-25 financial year for the chief executives and finance bosses of Wessex and five other companies. Wessex received another £11m fine last month over more sewage failures.
However, the water industry regulator, Ofwat, said that Skellett was able to retain the bonus under the law, because it was related to a different part of the parent company’s business. YTL is developing housing, offices and an arena in an area north of Bristol known as Brabazon.
A spokesperson for Wessex and YTL said that the bonus “entirely relates to his new role and was entirely funded by YTL. In his new role Colin is responsible for YTL UK group businesses including the development of Brabazon New Town”.
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A water bill from Southern Water