This month, the first international standard for purpose-driven organisations, ISO 37011, arrives for public consultation in the UK. Its arrival is a marker of how the ground has shifted. The idea that a company exists to do more than maximise shareholder value, that profit is better understood as a means to a worthwhile end than as the end itself, is slowly moving from the edges of the debate into the mainstream of how we think about governance.
The standard is deliberately sector agnostic, written to serve organisations of every kind, from regulators to businesses to public bodies. But it lands with particular force in water.
Few sectors are so clearly a candidate to be purpose-driven as water. It is not an ordinary market with willing buyers shopping between sellers. It is a single connected system, from abstraction through treatment and distribution to used water recovery, recycling and the return of water to the environment, and every part of it depends on the others. It is also the resource everything else rests on. There is no food without water, no economy without water, no biodiversity or health or wellbeing without it. When something is this essential, and this interdependent, the case for a shared sense of what it is all for becomes hard to argue with.
Yet today that shared sense is exactly what is missing. Decisions that ought to be guided by a common purpose - where to direct capital, how to weigh the cost to customers against the health of a river, what to build now and what to leave for the next generation - are made in silos, each part optimising for its own narrow target. The result is a system that can hit its individual numbers and still fail the people, the economy and the environment it exists to serve.
The new standard speaks most directly to the level of the single organisation. Plenty of companies already state a purpose, in an annual report or on a website. A purpose-driven company is different. It is one where that purpose actually shapes decisions, written into the articles of association, owned by the board, reflected in how performance is measured and how trade-offs are made.
In 2025, the government secured agreement across the water sector to update articles of association so that the interests of customers and the environment became a primary objective. That matters, because putting purpose into the articles makes it a legal part of a company's constitution rather than a statement of intent. But it does not automatically become purpose lived through daily decisions, and closing that distance is the real work.
The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee's report on water sector reform concluded that the sector "has completely lost sight of its purpose and increasingly operates as a network of financial services businesses rather than custodians of a public good".
Doing this properly raises harder questions. If a company exists to serve customers, communities and the environment, should its board carry a voice for each of them, so that the interests it is there to protect are present in the room where decisions get made? And are boards open with stakeholders about the value their decisions protect, create, or destroy, including the trade-offs? The opportunity now is to move from stating a purpose to running the business by it, and the new standard gives boards a credible way to do exactly that.
Getting purpose right inside a single organisation matters, but it will not on its own deliver the change the sector needs. A group of well run companies, each with its own idea of what doing the right thing looks like, still adds up to a sub-optimally governed system if those ideas pull against each other. What is needed is governance across the system, not only within it.
In this context, stewardship means acting with care, integrity and foresight towards the water system and everyone who relies on it.
That means every actor working to the same ultimate purpose, something specific enough to test decisions against. For water it might be something like this: to create lasting value for the environment and for everyone who relies on it, for drinking and washing, for growing the food we eat and making the things we need, and for the health and wellbeing that clean, reliable and a thriving water environment makes possible.
From there, each part of the system defines its role as its best contribution to that purpose. For example, government sets the direction, deciding what the country needs from its water system over decades rather than electoral cycles, and holding the ring between competing demands on the same resource. Regulators turn that direction into the rules, incentives and funding settlements that make it deliverable, weighing environmental, social and economic needs against each other in the open rather than pursuing each in isolation. This is not a lighter touch.
A regulator working to a shared purpose keeps every power it has to enforce and intervene when companies fall short, but it starts from a different question: what will make the whole system succeed? Companies turn that into delivery on the ground, closest to the catchments and communities they serve, and feed what they learn back up so the decisions made above them are better informed. Finally, people shape the system through how they use water, what they are willing to pay for, and what they demand of those running it.
A system aligned around a clear shared purpose also has the potential for better capital allocation because it provides confidence that it will still be delivering in the long term. That matters in a sector where Ofwat has raised concerns about the financial resilience of 10 of the 16 largest companies. Purpose is not a tax on returns. It is part of what protects them over time, because it keeps the underlying system healthy enough to deliver them.
This kind of thinking about purpose-aligned capital is gaining ground in the investment world too. Writing in Investments and Wealth, Noel Pacarro Brown makes the case for building portfolios around resilience rather than the assumption of perpetual growth, with essential needs infrastructure, water among it, as a core holding precisely because people depend on it whatever the wider economy does.
Seen through that lens, a water system built to endure is not a soft or values-driven bet. It is a resilient one. And once you accept that everything rests on a thriving water system, a much richer set of funding possibilities opens up, drawing investment from the many beneficiaries who gain when that system works. Purpose is how you find and unlock that value, and how you move these ideas from the occasional case study into the normal way of doing business.
The reform now underway is the moment to do this. The Cunliffe Review's 88 recommendations, and the plan for a single integrated regulator mean the structures are being redrawn anyway, and the choices made in the next couple of years will set how the system works. Purpose can be built into that, or it can be left out and retrofitted later at much greater cost. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a water system that really works for all of us.
Water has never been an ordinary business. It draws far more public scrutiny than sectors where dividends and shareholder returns are taken for granted, and rightly so, because in all our minds water is a public good. It is essential, it is shared, and it is built for the long term. None of the change we need will happen without people believing it is possible. Citizens are not bystanders to water reform, and unless enough of us are convinced there is a better way, the politics will fall short.
The chance in front of us is to make that purpose explicit and to align the entire sector around it, at the level of the organisation and at the level of the whole system, while the window is still open. That is how we move from purpose on paper to purpose that actually governs what happens, and how we build the successful and resilient water system that people, the economy and the natural world can all depend on.
At Clarasys, our purpose is to make a lasting difference to the way people live, work and grow, and in water that means helping the sector move from purpose as a statement to purpose as practice. We work with companies, regulators and government to turn purpose and stewardship into the governance, operating models and accountable action that hold up under real scrutiny, connecting the intent at the top of an organisation to the decisions made every day across it. The reform window will not stay open forever. The chance is to use it to build a water sector that earns trust, attracts the right investment and delivers for people, the economy and the natural world over the long term.
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