BRITAIN’S privatised water firms are “ripping us off” and control of the essential resource should be returned to the public sector, retail workers insisted today.

Water companies, which were privatised in 1989 by then Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher, pay shareholders an average of more than £2 billion a year in dividends while losing more than three billion litres of water every 12 months from their leaky, austerity-hit infrastructure, according to official estimates.

Leeds-based retail worker Iain Dalton told Usdaw’s annual delegate meeting in Blackpool that water firms are “laughing all the way to the bank” as customers face soaring bills and water is wasted or polluted by record levels of raw sewage dumping.

“We’re being ripped off,” he told delegates in the Empress Ballroom. “But the solution is simple.

“Instead of being run by private companies seeking to make a quick buck, we need vital basic industries like water to be publicly owned and run in accountable ways.

“They should not just be renationalised, but they should be democratically run by worker representatives and the rest of us who rely on a good-quality, affordable water supply.”

The call, backed by the union’s national executive council, will put pressure on the Labour Party to act.

Despite pledging to take key utilities into “common ownership” during his leadership election campaign in 2020, Sir Keir Starmer has since ditched many of the left-wing policies inherited from his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn.

Though Labour promised in 2022 to renationalise train-operating companies, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves confirmed last month that the party’s latest policy for other essential services is to drop renationalisation in favour of encouraging bosses to “prize economic resilience” by setting up British supply chains.