A homeowner is locked in a dispute with his water company after being forced to shell out nearly £8,000 for sewage repairs.

Nik Westgarth, 39, paid £7,990 for repairs after sewage backed up in his home in Greenbank, Bristol, after Wessex Water told him it was his responsibility.

He asked the company to check on the issue in February 2026, at which point he says workers advised the problem was a private issue and therefore should be fixed by the homeowner.

Neighbours had also begun to experience sewage backing up into their property, which Wessex Water came to investigate.

It was decided there was a major failure in its own sewage infrastructure, Nik claims, and therefore a repair the company had a responsibility to carry out.

The single dad-of-one soon realised that the damaged section of the public sewer lay directly below where he was having issues months earlier.

Wessex Water has since returned to the site and carried out another major excavation where Nik’s own work had finished. But he now believes he should not have paid out.

Nik said: ‘The February failure was directly above or extremely close to the sewer they later discovered had substantially failed.

‘Yet, as far as the records supplied to me show, Wessex Water did not CCTV or properly investigate that sewer in February before deciding that the problem was private.

‘They have taken down every single wall of my garden, and this is already after I already did it all, so they had to redo every single thing I had to do privately.’

He added: ‘It’s a lot of money. I didn’t have that: I had to borrow it, and it’s left me in debt now. I have been really depressed. I’m a single dad (with) a three-year-old. It’s been awful. I’m absolutely exhausted.’

Since this new excavation started, Nik has launched a complaint with the utility company, asking it to provide the engineering evidence which led it to rule the sewer failure a private issue.

‘I feel I have repeatedly had to push Wessex Water simply to establish what happened and why,’ Nik said.

‘There is a wider public interest question here about what happens when a water company initially decides that a drainage failure is private, the homeowner spends thousands of pounds relying on that decision, and a substantial failure of the company’s own sewer is then discovered beneath the same area months later.’

Wessex Water said: ‘We can confirm that senior management are investigating this issue, in line with our standard complaints procedure.’

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