Paying for water: water pricing and equity in England and Wales

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the business of water supply in England and Wales has been gradually transforming from the supply of a service to citizens, to the sale of a commodity to customers. The paper provides a genealogy of concepts of efficiency and equity in water regulation over the past thirty years, prior to evaluating the implications for water consumers of one aspect of this process – the shift away from policies prioritizing inter‐ and intra‐regional equalization (implying a principle of social equity) towards policies prioritizing economic efficiency (implying a principle of economic equity) in water charging. In closing, alternatives to the current arrangements for domestic consumers are proposed.