What we are hearing about AMP8 is very different to the official narrative. At Murray McIntosh, we speak to water industry professionals every day — engineers, programme managers, capital delivery directors, framework leads — and the picture they are painting is one the sector needs to confront. Programmes are stalling, talent is draining away, and the spending figures are masking what is really happening on the ground. In this article we share what those conversations are telling us — including which companies navigated Year 1 well and which struggled, what it means for hiring, and what the sector needs to do differently before it is too late. We are calling Year 1 what it really was: Year 0. We suspect much of this will resonate with anyone close to AMP8 delivery — but we hope some of it will surprise you too.

The CMA referral stalled programmes before they started

When Ofwat issued its Final Determination in December 2024, five water companies — Anglian Water, Northumbrian Water, South East Water, Southern Water, and Wessex Water — moved to challenge it through the CMA. A sixth, Thames Water, initially rejected Ofwat’s determination but deferred its reference given ongoing discussions about its own recapitalisation. While the CMA process ran its course, capital programmes stalled. Companies had little appetite to commit major AMP8 expenditure against a settlement still in dispute, creating a dead zone at precisely the moment should have been building. The CMA published its Final Determinations in March 2026, awarding the five companies £463 million in additional revenue —just 17% of what they had requested — and nudging the allowed rate of return up from 4.03% to 4.20%.

Paul Horton, CEO of Future Water, puts it plainly: “This modest win has provided some clarity, but many in the sector still argue it leaves a funding gap for the massive £104 billion investment requirement.” It is a view we hear consistently. The marginal improvement in the rate of return is welcome, but it has not cleared the momentum stall. Programmes that paused during the CMA process have not simply restarted — the dead zone has left a legacy of deferred decisions, delayed sanctions and cautious capital allocation that the sector is still working through. Clarity of settlement is one thing. The confidence to commit at scale is another, and the two are not the same.

Year 0 has just ended — but the line between AMP7 and AMP8 still remains frustratingly blurred

Ofwat’s early drawdown mechanisms allowed companies to continue AMP7 activities into early AMP8 — understandable given widespread AMP7 slippage linked to COVID and supply chain disruption. But the practical effect is a blurred boundary between cycles. Year 1 spend looks healthy, but genuineAMP8 schemes are lagging and staffing plans in some organisations still appear to be based on legacy logic rather than actual AMP8 needs. Paul Horton, CEO of Future Water, captures it well: “While Anglian Water reported a record £1.1billion investment in Year 1, much of the industry is still in the planning and mobilisation phase for genuine AMP8 schemes.” This is structurally baked in— not a criticism, but in our view a reality the sector needs to acknowledge. Because if nobody says it openly, programmes will be planned on false confidence, and the workforce implications will catch people out.

Obligation dates are moving — quietly, and without announcement

Statutory and regulatory obligation dates within AMP8programmes are being deferred — through planning delays, slow mobilisation and regulatory overhang. For frameworks and supply chain companies who resource-planned around those dates, work anticipated in 2025 has slipped into2026 or beyond. No formal announcements. It is simply happening, across multiple programmes.

What we are hearing from clients reinforces this. Where 2030 was the assumed delivery horizon at the start of AMP8, we are now seeing project end dates being set to 2032 and 2033. Year 0 has effectively pushed the goalposts — and the sector has quietly accepted it.

Is the sector sleepwalking into a compression crisis?

Despite the £104 billion headline, capital authorisation and scheme sanctioning remain slow. The PR24 (2024 Price Review) process and CMA review have created a cautious, risk-aware environment, and with outcome delivery incentives and cost recovery remaining politically sensitive, internal governance has tightened across the sector. The conditions for full mobilisation are not yet in place.

From where we sit — speaking to senior water professionals and engineers every day — this is not abstract concern. We arealready seeing the early signs of the pattern the sector has followed in every previous AMP: years one and two bring under-mobilisation and workforce drift; years three and four bring acceleration, supply chain pressure and cost inflation; year five brings deadline-driven delivery, quality trade-offs and regulatory fallout.

This is a strategic warning. We know the water sector has always had back-loading as a fail-safe — but AMP8 is twice the size of its predecessor, and the consequences of repeating that pattern are proportionally greater. Paul Horton, CEO of Future Water, puts it starkly: “The slow start in 2025 means that to meet 2030 targets, the sector now faces a ‘bow wave’ of work in Years 3 and 4 that many fear is physically undeliverable given current supply chain capacity.” The decisions made in the next twelve months will determine whether AMP8 delivers on its promise, or whether the sector arrives at 2030 in a familiar panic.

What this means for hiring

The slow start to AMP8 has had a direct effect on the labour market — and not all water companies are feeling it equally.

Delivery model decisions made in AMP7 are defining who’s hiring now

Companies that maintained their AMP7 delivery models have hired more effectively. We are the recruitment partner for Anglian Water, and working with them during the full AMP7 cycle and into AMP8, we saw them make a clean transition with a largely unchanged delivery model. The @One Alliance has operated on Anglian for 21 years, with Binnies added for AMP8 to further strengthen the workforce. That depth of continuity means the senior leadership were already in place when AMP8 began — enabling a smooth transition at a time when contractors who won work on new frameworks are still hiring for the senior roles needed just to get started.

Working patterns have also played a part. After an initial push toward full-time office attendance, a shift to bi-weekly working has strengthened Anglian’s position in the candidate market and meaningfully improved their ability to attract and retain the calibre of candidate AMP8 demands.

But even Anglian, arguably the best-positioned water company entering AMP8, did not meet their AMP7 headcount targets. With AMP8demands significantly higher — around 800 additional heads required over the next four years — the scale of the challenge ahead is considerable.

South West Water took a different approach, opting for a full restructure and a new delivery alliance — a significant undertaking that required extensive renegotiation before AMP8 hiring could begin in earnest. Restructuring at the start of a new cycle is not without logic, but it does create a lag, and in a competitive candidate market where timing matters, starting late turns a difficult hiring environment into an even more challenging one.

Through the volume and seniority of conversations we have every day, we develop a genuine understanding of what HR allocation models need to look like for AMP8 delivery. That means we can identify talent attraction gaps before they become programme risks — something that is increasingly as important to our clients as the candidates we place.

The roles in demand have shifted toward early-stage capability

The last six months have been dominated by early project involvement capability — commercial leads, quantity surveyors, planners —alongside senior design leadership as companies work to get programmes into a deliverable state. We have significantly increased our commercial market presence recently, and have supported for example @One Alliance, Wessex Water and Morgan Sindall with quantity surveyors, commercial leads and estimators.

The demand for this front-end capability is a direct reflection of where the sector currently sits. Paul Horton, CEO of Future Water, observes: “There is a massive surge in demand for front-end roles like commercial leads and quantity surveyors to navigate the new regulatory settlements, while traditional site delivery teams remain under-utilised.”It is a pattern we are seeing directly — and it speaks to a market that is still preparing to deliver rather than actually delivering.

The inter-AMP talent drain is happening again

With mobilisation slow, we are seeing major tier 1companies redeploying engineers into higher-paying sectors such as nuclear, oil and gas, and energy. When water timelines eventually firm up, those people rarely return. It remains the single biggest source of talent loss the sector faces between cycles.

This is where the conventional wisdom about recruitment breaks down. In most industries, it’s about who you know. In water, the real competitive advantage is knowing when someone is available. Engineers don’t disappear — they move onto other projects, often in other sectors, and the window to bring them back to water is narrow. Miss it, and they’re gone for the cycle.

At Murray McIntosh, we track exactly this. We know which engineers are working on which projects, and when those projects are due to complete. That intelligence allows us to move quickly — reaching the right people at the right moment, before another sector does. In a market defined by timing, that is the difference between securing the talent needed and spending six months searching for someone who signed elsewhere three months ago.

Clients are hiring on contract first — and converting later

Clients are currently leading with contract hiring —speed to site matters more right now than getting the employment model right from day one. In an uncertain programme environment, the flexibility of contract makes sense. But it comes with consequences the sector is not yet fully reckoning with.

Contract-first means workforce planning is being deferred, not solved. Teams are being assembled quickly but without the stability that long-term delivery requires. Institutional knowledge walks out when contracts end, and the cost of repeatedly rehiring is rarely factored into programme budgets. For the supply chain, contractors on short engagements have less incentive to stay when a better opportunity presents itself — and in a market where engineers are already being pulled toward nuclear and other sectors, contract-only hiring does little to anchor talent to water.

What we are seeing is a market prioritising the here and now over the longer term. As programmes accelerate into years three and four, the absence of a stable permanent workforce will become one of the sector’s most pressing problems.

The industry is missing a centralised view of workforce delivery

There is a broader issue that neither water companies nor their frameworks are adequately addressing — and in our view, it requires intervention at the highest level. Water companies look at their own head count needs in isolation. Nobody is looking at the whole picture.

That may be about to change — though not in the way the sector might have hoped. The January 2026 Water White Paper confirmed the government’s intention to abolish Ofwat and create a single integrated regulator, merging relevant functions from the Environment Agency, the Drinking Water Inspectorate and Natural England into one body. It is, on paper, exactly the kind of joined up thinking the sector has needed. But for those trying to deliver AMP8 right now, it adds another layer of uncertainty to an already complex landscape. We are seeing a “wait and see” culture emerging in boardrooms — with capital authorisation decisions being deferred while the shape of the new regulator becomes clearer. A regulator in transition is not a regulator in full command — and the workforce planning gap remains unaddressed in the meantime.

When Ofwat managed the Tideway project, it asked at the outset how many people would be needed to deliver it. That kind of centralised workforce thinking has not been applied to AMP8, despite it being the largest investment programme the sector has ever undertaken. And this is not just a UK problem. Neil Dhot, Executive Director of AquaFed, puts it in a global context: “The lack of a holistic and coordinated approach to talent acquisition, development and deployment of skills in water utilities is a global issue.”

We believe workforce delivery needs two distinct streams. The first is making better use of existing talent — treating the current workforce as a contingent resource that can be mobilised quickly and moved between programmes and geographies as delivery demands shift. The second is pipeline. Growing the next generation of water engineers is a long-term investment, and the sector will not see the return within AMP8. Here too, Neil Dhot’s words resonate: “Water utilities need to understand the career path aspirations and opportunities that young talented professionals are looking for. There are generational differences in the expectations of young professionals today.” The water industry needs to ask honestly whether it is genuinely competitive as a career destination. It carries the largest infrastructure spend of any UK sector, yet engineering salaries consistently lag behind nuclear, energy and other competing programmes.

The Road out of Year 0: What needs to happen now

To rectify the current trajectory, the sector must move beyond the Year 0 mentality by accelerating capital authorisations and scheme sanctioning to prevent a catastrophic back-loading of work. Rather than allowing companies to plan headcount in isolation, a coordinated, centralised approach to workforce planning is needed — one that treats the existing talent pool as a strategic, deployable resource.

Ultimately, the industry must improve its competitiveness as a career destination and shift away from short-term contract hiring toward long-term workforce stability. Only then will the £104 billion headline translate into genuine, high-quality delivery.

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