October 13, 2026

Water Investment Is Increasing. Is Leadership Capability Keeping Pace?

Charlotte Whitehouse

The £104 billion is the figure everyone quotes but the question that gets far less airtime is who is accountable for spending it well, and how much harder that job has become.

We have already looked at the structural side of the story in Why Water Infrastructure Is Still Playing Catch-Up. This piece is about the leaders being asked to deliver AMP8: the five years from April 2025 to March 2030, funded by Ofwat’s December 2024 final determinations and left intact by the CMA’s March 2026 redetermination of the appealed price controls.

The Leadership Job Has Changed, Not Just Grown

Delivering AMP8 would be a stretching brief in any environment. It is landing in the toughest accountability environment water leaders have faced.

The Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 gave government and regulators powers to block unjustified executive bonuses and to set a fitness and propriety test for senior leaders.

The January 2026 White Paper, A New Vision for Water, goes further: a single integrated regulator replacing the current patchwork, a Chief Engineer to put engineering expertise at its centre, and a stated intention to look at a new regime for senior accountability. A Clean Water Bill followed in the May 2026 King’s Speech.

So, today’s water executive is being asked to deliver a record programme, rebuild public trust and operate through a regulatory transition at the same time, with personal accountability under sharper scrutiny than before.

That is a different job from the one many incumbents were hired to do.

What A Leadership Gap Looks Like in Practice

The consequences of a capability gap are no longer abstract. In May 2026, the Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee reported that South East Water lacked proper leadership and had deep cultural problems, concluding that culture change at that scale required a change in leadership. Within days its chair had resigned, and its chief executive had announced he would step down.

Elsewhere, the response has been structural. Welsh Water’s new chief executive, who started in January 2026, has halved the size of the executive team and is building it back with a Chief People and Governance Officer and a Chief Asset Officer, explicitly to add change-management experience and operational depth as it delivers a £4.2 billion programme.

Leadership structures are being redesigned, not just topped up.

The Shortage That Rarely Makes The Headline

Workforce estimates for AMP8 vary, but none of them are small. Industry analysis points to more than 30,000 additional skilled roles across England and Wales, while other estimates, which include replacing retiring staff, run to around 100,000 new workers by 2030.

Most of that conversation focuses on operatives, engineers and apprenticeships, and rightly so. But there is a quieter shortage above it.

Research from the consultancy Carrington West, reported in the trade press, found that 63% of water-sector hiring managers rate leadership and people-management skills as the hardest contractor capability to find. Technical skill can be trained in, and the ability to lead people through this scale of change is much scarcer.

Where We Think The Gap Will Bite

Our view is that three leadership capabilities will separate the organisations that turn AMP8 funding into results from those that don’t.

Board-level challenge

With senior leaders now facing a fitness and propriety test, the quality of the chair and non-executives matters as much as the chief executive. Boards need people with the experience to test delivery plans, not just approve them. The South East Water findings show what happens when that scrutiny arrives from outside rather than from within.

Change and culture leadership

The most visible failures in the sector have been failures of culture and accountability as much as engineering. Boards need leaders who can change how an organisation behaves, not just what it builds.

Technical and regulatory credibility

With a Chief Engineer planned at the heart of the new regulator, executives will be questioned by people who understand the asset base. Leaders who can speak credibly about engineering and delivery risk, and who can build a working relationship with a regulator that is still taking shape, will be at a premium.

Permanent Hires Alone Won’t Close It

AMP8 runs to a fixed date, and experienced change and transformation leaders are hard to find. Waiting out a notice period, or for a role to be filled at all, is a delivery risk. We expect more organisations to combine permanent appointments for the long-term leadership bench with interim and fractional leaders, brought in to stand up change programmes, steady a team through a transition or cover a critical role.

That blend only works if boards decide early what they are solving for. Three questions are a useful starting point:

The Test Beyond The Funding

The funding is settled. Whether AMP8 delivers the resilience, environmental improvement and public trust it was meant to will depend on the people accountable for it, and on whether their capability is being built as deliberately as the capital programme.

If you are strengthening your leadership team for AMP8, whether through Search, interim cover or a mix of both, we would be glad to talk.

Get in touch!

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