WATER fat cats are taking home pay packets worth as much as £2 million a year while workers languish on poverty wages, Unison conference heard yesterday.

A new analysis of high pay in Britain’s 19 water companies — which are privately owned, apart from in Scotland — shows that there are five companies paying their top director more than £1m while failing to apply the living wage.

At United Utilities, which tops the executive pay league table, the highest-paid director is on a massive £2.2m a year.

Four water companies have not even entered talks with the Living Wage Foundation, which accredits companies as ethical employers.

The union says the cost of fair pay would be a drop in the ocean compared with executives’ cushy packages.

“Water companies are making huge profits and paying their top executives massive salaries,” Unison general secretary Dave Prentis said.

“They could easily afford to start paying their lowest-paid employees a proper living wage. This is the very least that workers in the water industry deserve.”

Unison wrote to companies earlier this year urging them to become living wage employers — and six have already been accredited by the Living Wage Foundation.

The £8.25-an-hour rate —£9.40 in London — is calculated by an independent review to take living costs into account.

It is significantly more than Chancellor George Osborne’s “living wage” of £7.20 an hour, which only applies to workers over 25.

But Unison members in the care sector, where workers are often not paid for travel time between home visits, spoke out yesterday against their employers’ failure to pay even the legal minimums.

“Osborne has not made funding available for the care sector,” delegate Louise Branch said.