When your audience stops believing you, the bill arrives later
Two of Britain's most strategically important sectors have spent recent years producing communications in volume, yet both have seen public belief collapse anyway. The lesson is not that they communicated too little, it’s that activity and belief change are not the same thing, and the gap between them carries a price.
The water and energy sectors in England share a striking structural problem. In both cases, organisations communicated consistently: publishing reports, issuing statements at every point of controversy, meeting regulators, and running customer engagement programmes.
None of it moved public belief in the direction they needed. The gap between what each industry said and what audiences actually concluded kept widening, until it translated into regulatory action, political intervention, and constraints on commercial planning that continue to compound.
Water provides the starker example. In January 2025, environmental scientists published a peer-reviewed analysis in Nature Water examining the communications of the nine major water and sewerage companies in England over a five-year period. They found evidence of 22 of the 28 deception tactics previously documented in tobacco, fossil fuel, and pesticide industries.
The tactics included rebranding sewage treatment works as "water recycling centres", describing illegal discharges as "diluted wastewater", and deflecting blame toward agricultural runoff while the companies' own contribution to river pollution went largely unmonitored.
The study described an industry that had been very active in its communications, and had used that activity to obscure rather than address the belief gap its behaviour had created.
The consequence was not just reputational. In May 2025, Ofwat confirmed a record fine of £122.7 million against Thames Water alone, following investigations into wastewater failures and dividend payments. By the time the penalty was issued, Thames Water's consumer trust score, tracked annually by the Consumer Council for Water, had fallen to 5.12 out of ten, the lowest of any supplier.
The CCW Water Matters 2025 survey found the sector’s overall trust score had fallen for a second consecutive year, reaching 6.28 out of ten, the lowest in the survey’s thirteen-year history. What the data shows is not a communications failure in the narrow sense. It is a belief failure in the structural one. The industry communicated. Audiences updated their beliefs in light of what they were actually experiencing. The gap grew because communications were structured to manage perception rather than close the distance between stated intent and lived reality.
Energy tells a different version of the same story. Ofgem's Wave 6 consumer tracking survey, published in July 2025, found that trust in the sector had risen by five percentage points from 2024 to reach 41 percent overall. That improvement, real and hard-won, followed years of investment in consumer communications and customer service programmes across the industry. Yet 41 percent still means that well over half of energy consumers do not trust the sector to treat them fairly. The sector ranks lower on trust than any other major industry measured.
The energy sector's experience carries a specific lesson for senior communicators in any regulated industry. Trust can move. Five points in a year is meaningful and did not happen by accident. But the distance between 41 percent trust and the level at which a sector operates with genuine regulatory goodwill and political cover remains large. Incremental movement is not the same as closing a belief gap. In both water and energy, the cost of that gap is not abstract. It sits in the premium on regulatory intervention, in contracted strategic planning windows, and in political permission that organisations in both sectors have lost.
For any director working in a regulated industry, or in a sector facing sustained public scrutiny, the two sectors together make a single argument: the belief environment in which your organisation operates is not a background condition. It is the ground on which every strategic decision is tested. When that ground is hostile, the cost of everything rises: the cost of making a case to regulators, of holding investor conviction, of recruiting talent that might otherwise go elsewhere.
The structural question for any communications leader is whether they have the diagnostic capacity to understand the belief environment they actually operate in, rather than the one their outputs assume. Most monitoring tools give an organisation one view at a time: media sentiment, social conversation, or search data. None triangulates across all three, and none incorporates what AI systems are now synthesising and presenting to audiences as credible guidance about your sector.
In both water and energy, belief formed in spaces that traditional communications monitoring did not reach and calcified before the communications function had a diagnostic picture accurate enough to respond. By the time regulatory investigations, political interventions, and trust score declines confirmed the problem, the gap had already set. The cost of starting late, in both cases, is still being paid.
