The chief executive of the Tideway project in London has reportedly been awarded a £600,000 pay rise whilst the total cost of the project has been revealed to have risen by £100 million.
Now said to have cost £5 billion, the Thames Tideway Tunnel, known as London’s super sewer, is part of an effort to reduce pollution and clean the city’s river. Launched in 2024, it has been seen as a crucial upgrade to the capital’s sewage system as it aims to capture and store excess raw sewage when the network is overwhelmed to prevent it from flowing into the Thames.
Andy Mitchell CBE received pay of £2.5 million for the year to March 2025; up from £1.9 million the year before, according to accounts published by the Thames Tideway tunnel builder Balgazette Tunnel Ltd.
Mitchell’s pay increase can be broken down to a base salary of £555,000, a £500,000 retention bonus, an extra bonus of £423,000, and other unnamed benefits and pensions contributions totalling £21,000.
However, his total pay was lower than the £2.7 million salary he received in 2023.
Matthew Duncan, the Tideway company’s finance director, received a salary worth £1.7 million, up from £1.3 million last year.
The Thames Tideway project is being paid for by Thames Water customers through their water bills over the coming decades, with bills expected to rise by around £25 each year.
Thames Water operates the 15.5-mile tunnel, which connects to the utility’s existing Lee Tunnel. The project has said to have captured more than 6.7 million tonnes of sewage to date; sewage which would have historically spilled into the Thames.
Given the tunnel is being funded by additions to customer bills, the executives’ pay packets have come under scrutiny.
Luke Hildyard, the director of thinktank High Pay Centre, told The Guardian: “The culture of very high top pay and extreme concentration of income at the top of the distribution in the UK is a real problem for living standards. If so much of the wealth generated by our economy is captured by a tiny elite, it becomes much harder to improve life for everybody else.
“We need a plan to address this issue and more reasonable pay levels for quasi public service roles like this would be an obvious place to start. No doubt running Tideway is a challenging role, but it also carries considerable prestige and other non-financial rewards. It seems likely that a competent project manager could have been found without requiring such extravagant executive pay awards.”
A spokesperson from Tideway told the Guardian: “The Thames Tideway tunnel is a world-class infrastructure project and one of the most complex in the UK. It has been delivered within the original timetable and within the cost range estimate for bill payers outlined before we started work, at around £25 a year. After nine years of construction and the work of around 25,000 people, it is now operational, protecting the River Thames from millions of tonnes of sewage pollution.
“Tideway’s remuneration reflects the complexity of the engineering challenge and takes account of schedule, cost, health and safety and sustainability goals. The increase is largely due to the payment of a long-term retention incentive that has supported consistent leadership and the successful delivery of this vital infrastructure project.”
Tideway and Thames Water are two separate companies, with the former being owned by a consortium of investors including Allianz, Amber Infrastructure, and Dalmore Capital. Thames Water has found itself in hot water in recent years, with the company having accumulated billions in debts. Last month, the UK government stepped up for the temporary nationalisation of the company after KKR walked away from an acquisition deal.
