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.