A consortium called London & Valley Water, backed by the senior creditors Elliott Management and Apollo Global Management, put a revised rescue proposal for Thames Water on the table on 21 July 2026: £3.35bn of new equity and £3.25bn of fresh debt 1. Thames Water supplies 16 million customers across London and the Thames Valley and carries close to £20bn of debt, roughly £1,250 of borrowing behind every customer on its books. The proposal needs approval from Ofwat, the economic regulator of water in England and Wales, then a public consultation, then High Court sign-off.
The creditors have said they are prepared to bid even if the company first enters the Special Administration Regime. That regime is the legal process under which the government appoints administrators to keep an essential utility running when its owner fails. The taps do not stop. The losses simply land somewhere other than where they started, and the question of exactly where is the entire fight. An earlier rescue led by the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) collapsed before this one arrived.
Read honestly, this is the one ledger in the register where a discrete, dateable event could plausibly happen in the next quarter, and also the one where the distress reading is most contested. Somebody willing to commit £6.6bn of new money thinks the asset is worth owning at the right price. Water is a regulated monopoly with guaranteed customers and a regulator that sets what they pay; the business does not lose demand, it loses arguments about who absorbs a debt pile built up under previous owners. What a customer eventually notices is the bill, because the cost of whichever resolution wins ends up in the price of water either way.
One gap belongs on the record. Ofwat's financial resilience and gearing reporting across the 16 water companies was unreachable on both attempts this run, so this register carries Thames Water from reporting and leaves the sector-wide row blank rather than estimating it.
