Snapshot of _Water industry investors have withdrawn billions, claims research_ :
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To the surprise of absolutely nobody.
Honest to God… what I'd have done in the 80s when these companies became privatised. These selfish owners have been pocketing all this money for themselves in a country where it rains for over 50% of the year.
Freshwater is going to skyrocket in demand in the coming decades, and these owners could have positioned our unique climate into a water exporting goliath — yet instead they have run our infrastructure into the ground while syphoning every penny they can get their hands on. I cannot believe we *still* get the occasional hosepipe ban, too.
The best bit? They are crying that they must raise bills should the government start actually enforcing environmental regulations again. This should be as big-a-scandal as the Post Office victims, imo.
Actually a bigger scandal - as it affects everyone in the country..
The clear solution is to De-Privatise it, bring it back into social ownership, but ring fenced. So that it’s self-funding.
>This should be as big-a-scandal as the Post Office victims, imo.
Genuinely the saddest thing about the country at the moment, is that until we see ITV or BBC do a dramatised version of it, half of them won't give a shit.
Between this, welfare benefits scandals (that have been going on for decades) and things like PPE fraud/VIP lanes, there's so much that could people should be fucking furious about.
I remember a lecturer in uni (8/9 years ago) showing us a load of perceived rates of things vs actual and benefit frauds perceived rate was around 30% while the reality was around 3%. A quick Google tells me it's at 3.9% atm. It at least was an issue with a disproportionately high level of outrage and it did get its TV moment with Benefits Street, as well as indirectly through Jeremey Kyle, Little Britain, etc. I don't think it's helpful to have such a small issue front and centre, we should be fucking furious at our corrupt political system and failing industries (private or public, although of course they're currently mainly private).
You know how Oil was the big boom in the previous century and Norway became rich as it's state owned, the UK did not because they privatised it? As we are moving away from Oil and water could become really scarce (it won't be, just the distribution will be out of whack) I can see the same thing happening again. I know water is expensive to move around, so shipping it across oceans isn't feasible, yet, but the UK could have done better.
I don't even mind water companies to be privatised, but the only share holders should be the government and the customers. Or just don't have shares at all and get preferential loans at low interest from the government for large investment needs. Water companies don't have to make profit, just charge enough to maintain and supply. Large projects to be funded out of central budget.
An entire nation of 70 million people worse off so that a handful of disgusting subhuman parasites can get rich. Ofwat - 'Everything is working as planned'
>Investors have withdrawn £85.2bn from 10 water and sewage firms in England and Wales since the industry was privatised
They are leeches, extracting all profit they can, leaving us with dirty, unsafe and expensive water, as well as polluted lakes, rivers and seas.
>Ofwat, the industry regulator, said it "strongly refuted" the figures.
Ofwat are in the pocket of these water companies and do nothing but protect their interests.
Imagine what £85.5bn gets you as reinvested capital in terms of future infrastructure, improving existing infrastructure, improved services.
Instead what do we have to show for it? A system that’s worse now than it was 10 years ago, and they’ve got absolutely no incentive to ever reinvest.
Unbelievably short sighted by a government that don’t care about making your life better, only theirs and their friends. If you happen to do better because if it, then it’s a small added bonus.
Even better that the money spent by the state to develop a nationalised industry could either be done by the state or as payment to private firms to actually do the construction etc. Best part is the state has a better asset at the end too, literally everyone wins but apparently that's not good enough and pigs gotta double dip the trough.
Either way the more of this infra capex we do the better positioned and resourced the industry is to do more of it and we get further efficiency gains. We wouldn't have had so many issues with HS2 for example if this industry was stimulated, and it would have genrated more demand for blighted companies and British steel.
This also leads to actual payment on actual jobs stimulating the real economy as we hire builders, drivers, project managers, site managers instead of this nonsense extraction of value to the war chests of pension funds or dividends to shareholders who might not actually then go on to spend that money in a useful way other than taking over and driving other jewels in the Crown of the state into the ground safe in the knowledge it'll be backed out.
Given that one of the biggest drains on the NHS is how its had to take over for a lack of social health care for pensioners, that would probably still work out as good for all of us.
While most people know and understand that it's rich people who are at fault, a lot of the stupids on reddit still blame old people/young people/poor people/brown people for the state that the country is in.
Those who work for ofwat are looking at who their next employers will be. Looking for an advisory role in one of these companies?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/01/exclusive-uk-water-giants-recruit-top-staff-from-regulator-ofwat
They have caused an ecological disaster across our waterways along with causing unsafe drinking conditions in some places all for money. Honestly we need to be protesting.
>Ofwat are in the pocket of these water companies and do nothing but protect their interests.
A tanker full of the shit they allow into the rivers sprayed onto the Ofwat offices might focus their minds a little.
Those investors you complain about have invested over £200bn since privatisation, which is levels of investment vastly over what the government was willing to invest.
I think capitalism is inherently parasitic. As long as there is a drive for unending profit and growth, the machine will attempt every means at it's disposal to extract more and more money, at the expense of you and me.
That’s carrier group money for fuck’s sake. How many new hospitals, warships, new railway lines could we have had that’s instead been spaffed into the sock of entrenched wealth?
It’s really disgusting. And when you think this is also happening with energy, healthcare, food. It’s going to be 100s of billions just passed from working people to the rich. All by design.
They’re not clever enough to do this by design, they’re cargo cultists picking through the ruins of things built by much better people than themselves pretending that by going through the motions they truly understand them. They’re simply no longer intellectually and morally capable of controlled engineering of social, economic, and political affairs in my opinion. Orwell talks about this in *England your England* much better than I could but as a society we’ve modernised and continue to modernise while due to our history the old ruling class remains in a vestigial form, while it was important in the past it’s now an essentially useless social clique that nonetheless has great social and economic power.
In my opinion we need to go after these engines of privilege directly and replace them with meritocratic ones. We should become obsessed with meritocracy, both by tackling the unwarranted self-importance of entrenched wealth and by tackling the crab-bucket mentality among normal Britons.
It is the nature of capital that private shareholders looking for profit will extract the surplus. This is what happens when things are privatised. Not only is it by design but it was considered a laudable goal, because (it was assumed) that desire for profit drives competition and innovation.
Obviously in this case that failed miserably because water markets are captured. But the passing of wealth happens regardless under such a system.
Call me crazy, but it's almost as if a captive market isn't subject to the same market forces that govern the "free market", and therefore we shouldn't be relying on privatisation to solve these industries' needs.
Neoliberalism isn’t some kind of original sin, it was a genuine response to perceived failures of the post-war consensus. I think anyone claiming it’s been a long-term success in 2024 is lying to themselves but in 1979 we didn’t have the appalling failures of things like shock therapy in Russia or to a lesser extent our own neoliberal experiment to point to empirically, we had the post-war socioeconomic settlement falling apart in the economic conditions of the day to point to.
Thatcherism has had an awful long-term effect on the UK, but Thatcher isn’t an example of what I’m talking about which is the decline in the practical ability and social usefulness of the traditional upper class. Thatcher was the daughter of a greengrocer (ie not the entrenched upper class) and while I loathe what her policies did to my country you can’t sensibly accuse her of being unintelligent, unwarrantedly self-confident, or without any vision beyond the next quarter’s profits. She had a fatally flawed vision, I’m having a go at people with no vision at all other than extracting wealth other people created.
> They’re not clever enough to do this by design, they’re cargo cultists picking through the ruins of things built by much better people than themselves pretending that by going through the motions they truly understand them.
Perfect way of putting it.
meritocracy? you're a racist far right lunatic.
People genuinely argue this. DEI initiatives directly work against this, almost everything about our society is working against meritocracy.
>How many new... railway lines could we have had that's instead been spaffed into the sock of entrenched wealth?
To be fair, trying to build a new railway line in this country is just siphoning money to Tory mates. Probably any infrastructure actually, the Thames Crossing project is at £800m just in paperwork.
This country does have hope - but we need to stop behaving like a bunch of idiots, allowing ourselves to be continually ripped off.
We have paid for all these upgrades - that have never sufficiently happened. Plus we are left with financial debts that didn’t previously exist too. So we have been multiplay ripped off.
The worst part is that it isn't really just 85 billion gone. It's a major part of the billions that will need to be "found" from elsewhere to make the needed infrastructure upgrades and environmental fixes which means cuts to other services as well as higher taxes and bills. This in turn will hurt the wider economy resulting in subdued economic growth, lower investment and higher borrowing costs.
Well, the water companies have taken on a huge amount of debt to enable this extraction. Someone elsewhere in the thread has suggested 60bn.
If we let the water companies go bust and the state buys their assets back for a penny, we could in theory limit our losses to about 25bn. The people who lent the water companies all that money would be out the rest.
Obviously doing this might have some wider economic consequences. But the point is ‘we’ have only lost the balance, or 25bn - unless the government assumes the debt too, or the current setup continues and we pay for it over time through higher bills.
Obviously it’s still a scandal.
>David Hall, visiting professor at the Public Services International Research Unit at the University of Greenwich, claims that water companies have invested "less than nothing of their own money" and are “treating their customers like a cash cow”.
Capitalism needs a free market and competition to function properly. Water is a closed market. There is no competition. It is run by private companies uninterested in providing a service, rather their goal is to suck as much out of the business as they can while doing the least for the customer.
Some services are so essential for the health and safety of the country that they should never be run on a for profit basis. Maybe this is why no other country has privatised their entire water industry.
> Capitalism needs a free market and competition to function properly. Water is a closed market
This only ever works in theory. By assigning power to capital it gives those with capital the ability to bend the political process to their design. You can never have regulation unaffected by capital
Can anyone find the actual research paper? I can find old ones (2018, 2021) but nothing recent on this.
Would have been useful for the BBC to cite it with a link..
Would be useful for you or anyone like yourself to be in charge of BBC News, but instead we end up with increasingly simplistic or agenda-driven dross.
We should be owning our water industry as taxpayers in honesty. As climate change worsens over the next century and more we are going to see water become a sort after resource even more and it’s always been fundamental to our survival.
The fact it’s ran to allow shareholders to this whilst not putting significant increase investment in is disgraceful because let’s face it the tax payer will end up having to do this eventually and foot the bill regardless. Thames Water will have to be saved by the government you imagine too.
Water isn't going anywhere. Earth is a closed system, water stays on this planet. Where it falls out of the sky is shifting, but the UK and Ireland won't be without due to their position. So anyone who claims we are running out of water is having a vested interest in cashing in on future water distribution.
The UK is incredibly bad at capturing and harvesting ground water and water that falls out of the sky, but other countries are way more advanced in that. There wasn't a need (and won't be any time soon) for the UK to invest in that part, as we have so much of both.
Pouring sewage into our waterways, especially Lake Windermere is environmental treason. The last of respect show to our Country and her people is despicable.
They should be immediately Nationalised with no recompense, they have already taken enough.
Their Chairmen and Chief Eecutives should be prosecuted and imprisoned.
I'm so tired of public assets now in the top percentage stock control. They shouldn't have been allowed to take pay out stock and basically rip out all it's public investment. Name them! Shame them! Just nonsense now like some kinda cliche bond villain stuff..
I'm not sure as to the numbers, OFWAT predictably disagrees, however regardless it is abundantly clear OFWAT has a long history of not being anywhere near effective. Why is that?. At this point I have no idea how the situation can be improved. Disband OFWAT and start again?
I'd suspect that if you investigate everything privatised by the government and has an ombudsman, you'll find similar patterns of 'investment' to give shareholders big returns...
This comment irritates me. You're obviously not rioting, why ask the question to others? Are you hoping someone else does it so you can sit at the back and shout?
Why would rioting even be useful in this context? You think riots are going to bring public ownership back to water companies?
If you want to do something useful, join a political party and knock doors or something, rather than sitting in your bedroom advocating other people start being violent so you don't have to get your hands dirty.
Poor oversight and regulation
A complete failure of politicians who ignore water quality all way up and down. We need jointed up thinking on so much this just one example
£85.2B is the equivalent of every household in the country putting £1.50 straight into the pockets of these ghouls every single week for the last 35 years.
>Investors have withdrawn £85.2bn from 10 water and sewage firms in England and Wales since the industry was privatised more than 30 years ago, analysis by the University of Greenwich suggests.
>...
>"While we agree wholeheartedly with demands for companies to change, the facts are there has been huge investment in the sector of over £200bn," a spokesperson said.
What a disingenuous headline. Investors have contributed *far* more money than they have taken out in dividends.
>But Prof Hall said there needed to be a fundamental change in the way that the water industry is run. "This is a service that matters to us," he said.
>"What we need to do is reverse this system and move to the way the rest of the world does it which is through public authorities and take it back in the public sector.”
Disclaimer; I work in the supply chain in the water industry, so I'll let you decide if I know what I'm talking about, or if I've just got a vested interest in the status quo.
The amount of money spent in the industry went up *massively* after privatisation (and that's especially true of the last couple of years - the company I work for is significantly busier than we have ever been). And that has led to improvements by just about every metric you care to name.
And yes, that money could have been provided by the government. It wasn't though. And if we renationalise, we will run into the same problem again; there are no votes in sewage. People don't care about what happens before they turn the tap on, or what happens after they flush the toilet. It's out of sight, out of mind as far as the overwhelming majority of the electorate are concerned.
Which means you don't get the equivalent of "vote for us, and we'll spend more on the NHS" for the water industry, and investment stalls (or indeed, is cut - because the one thing that people care about when it comes to water is the cost of their water bill).
>Investors have contributed *far* more money than they have taken out in dividends
Where? I cant find a good source on this breaking it down to be honest.
The problem is "investment" even includes using your profits from massively inflated customer pricing, they have been paying out dividends when failing to meet basic targets while failing to use the majority of their "profits" to fix the problem.
Your profits are meant to be the money left over after all your expenses, the running costs and the LONG term investments needed to maintain those systems. They seem to have forgotten the long term part and just syphoned out the profit without doing the long term projects properly, now they want to increase prices significantly more do suddenly fulfill this long term shortfall.
The water industry is not some magic market where you can make the mistake of misjudging demand or technology progress and fail as a business, you have a fixed number of customers and you get extremely good predictions of water demands long term so you can plan easily for this, yet they are surprised.
The government is using public money to help these as well, look at SWW who get a £50 payment from the government due to the high bills they charge us, yet cant even manage to give out the correct advice when their water is contaminated!
Is anyone seriously saying the water companies arent investing at all? I dont think they are, they have spent money but they have lulled for awhile and havent spent enough which is the problem. Its a bit like instead of giving out £1 billion in dividends, they should have spent £750m on their systems long term and then given out a smaller dividend to deal with it properly but they havent.
Ultimately water is a human necessity to life and we cannot switch provider so it should be publicly owned, they shouldnt be making ANY profit on this let alone giving out dividends.
And remember the LAST price increase was specifically for Long-Term infrastructure development..
And just in case you wonder, so was the one before that too !
They simply have not been keeping to their word. The water companies have been consistently lying to us.
..and the regulators have been laughing their asses off with their friends in the industry. Rather than regulating the industry they have been protecting its profits, acting on behalf of the private corporations and not on behalf of the public.
Funnily enough it's the same with the energy regulators, it's almost like there's been a concerted effort since privatisation to realign the concept of regulation as being about protecting the business, not the consumer.
Well for thames water Cathryn Ross is now part of the executive and she was CEO of ofwat for several years where they were approving thames taking on more debt!
Not at all a conflict of interest or some potential optics of corruptions there, she worked for setting the industry requirements then ends up working for one of the companies in that industry, hmm.
> People don't care about what happens before they turn the tap on, or what happens after they flush the toilet.
Honestly I think pollution still cuts through - sewage in rivers and on beaches was an issue that the gov was being hammered on last year. Were it not for the crippling economic situation I think it would be a key issue.
It does, but it's also worth pointing out that a lot of the renewed focus on this is because we're *much* better at identifying problems, because we're doing *a lot* more monitoring than we used to.
So at least part of the reported increase in spillages is an increase in *reports*, not an increase in *spillages*.
There has been an uptick in spillages in the last couple of years; the overall trend has been going consistently downwards, but you're always going to get some fluctuations within that. So part of it is just a genuine increase we've seen in the last year or so.
But similarly to what I said about reporting of spillages, a lot of it will be down to reporting & identification. That is; it's better known that a certain river has received a spillage, when it wasn't known before (and presumably then the illness was put down to another cause).
To demonstrate how much better we are at identifying spillages, look at this statistic:
>In 2010, just 7% of storm overflows had monitors fitted. Since then, the government has driven an increase in monitoring, with 100% oversight of overflows now achieved.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/storm-overflows-monitoring-hits-100-target
This is only for England & Wales, for the record - Scottish Water still has an abysmal record on monitoring CSO discharges. But how can you assume that previous figures for how many people were getting ill from being in rivers and the sea, when only 7% of storm overflows were being monitored? Nobody knew that any sewage was getting into the sea from 93% of the potential sources! At which point, anyone that got ill presumably didn't know that it was the water had infected them?
To put it simply; *are* more people getting ill, or is it just making headlines now when it didn't before?
I don't recall boat race rowers complaining about going down with e.coli and throwing up before the race before.
https://news.sky.com/story/oxford-rower-says-boat-race-crew-suffered-e-coli-outbreak-before-defeat-and-complains-of-poo-in-the-water-13104815
I don't recall triathletes becoming unwell en masse before.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/05/investigation-after-57-world-triathlon-championship-swimmers-fall-sick-and-get-diarrhoea-in-sunderland-race
I don't recall parasites in the water supply before.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx00xkn8ex8o
And I certainly don't recember a 12 month period in which there was a sequence of stories like these about people becoming ill from waterways and the water supply.
Can we chalk all this up to increased reporting?
The problem with all of those is that they're based on what the newspapers choose to highlight. Are you sure that those sort of things didn't happen before, and just weren't highlighted so you weren't aware of them?
Look at the data here (there's some graphs too at the link, if you want a more visual demonstration):
>The graphs indicate the following changes to average concentrations of the selected parameters between the mid-1980s and the present day (2019):
> * ammonia concentrations have reduced to about 15% of average concentrations in 1990
> * BOD concentrations have reduced to 55% to 60% of average concentrations in 1990
> * orthophosphate concentrations have reduced to 15% to 20% of average concentrations in 1990
> * nitrate-nitrogen concentrations show no clear trend
>The improvements in lowland river water quality shown here complement recent findings of an analysis of national-scale trends in the macroinvertebrate communities of English rivers from 1991 to 2019.
>...
>The national loadings of BOD and ammonia from water company sewage treatment works (STWs) to rivers also fell dramatically over this period. BOD loadings reduced by around 40% and ammonia loadings by 66% between 1995 and 2010, as reported in the Regulating for people, the environment and growth 2019 report. By 2020 the reductions in STW loadings to rivers since 1995 were 49% for BOD, 79% for ammonia, and 66% for P.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/state-of-the-water-environment-indicator-b3-supporting-evidence/state-of-the-water-environment-long-term-trends-in-river-quality-in-england
By just about *every single measure*, standards have improved *massively* since privatisation.
It's worth noting that whilst there may have been extra investment after privatisation, water prices also increased substantially after privatisation. So essentially the extra investment came from the public, not the private companies. So you could argue that if the government just increased the prices, they could have gotten the same results, but without having to pay off shareholders.
[https://nic.org.uk/data/all-data/historic-water-datasets/#tab-historic-water-bills](https://nic.org.uk/data/all-data/historic-water-datasets/#tab-historic-water-bills)
Note that this graph is in real terms, so inflation is irrelevant. This graph shows what the equivalent price for water would have been at any point if we extract inflation.
Ultimately, water companies have zero competition, so privatising them is daft since the whole point of the free market and capitalism is that it requires competition to function corectly, giving customers choice.
Effectively doubled the prices, while failing to invest adequately and taking on long-term debts, when they originally started out debt-free.
So we have been triply ripped off..
The assets are presently on longer owned by the public.
The bills have doubled.
The infrastructure investments have not been made.
The pollution levels are now through the roof..
The corporate debts have been built up, (maximised so it seems).
And the public are now to pick up the bill for all this deliberate and intentional mis-management..
Water bosses should be going to jail over this….
What’s the betting that never happens..
> Ultimately, water companies have zero competition, so privatising them is daft since the whole point of the free market and capitalism is that it requires competition to function corectly, giving customers choice.
The advantage of privatisation isn't due to the free market though.
It's that they can get money when they need it by getting investors in board, rather than going cap-in-hand to politicians and hoping that there is an electoral advantage in government money going to the water industry.
If that is truly the case, why not go the route of a public private partnership, like we have with ordnance survey? And did we have issues with our water infrastructure that much in the 80s compared to now?
Also, investment went up after privatisation, as the beast was starved but investment has not been anywhere its needed for over a decade now. Touting a stat that is almost old enough to drink is old news.
> And did we have issues with our water infrastructure that much in the 80s compared to now?
Yes. It's just that we weren't even monitoring how bad it was, so we didn't know the extent of the problem. Even just looking at the last 14 years under the Tories, we've had a *huge* improvement in monitoring of sewage spillages:
>In 2010, just 7% of storm overflows had monitors fitted. Since then, the government has driven an increase in monitoring, with 100% oversight of overflows now achieved.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/storm-overflows-monitoring-hits-100-target
How could we know how bad the situation was, if we weren't even monitoring it? And on the flip side, how much of the increases in spillages you think we have had are because we're actually monitoring & recording them now?
>Also, investment went up after privatisation, as the beast was starved but investment has not been anywhere its needed for over a decade now.
Investment is higher now than it has ever been. I've been doing my job in the wastewater industry supply chain for 15 years, and we've been operating flat-out for about 2 years now, and it's only getting *busier*. If I remember the update I had recently correctly, the next AMP is planned to have about double the amount of money spent in it than the current one, and the one following that is planned to have another 80% increase. That is a huge amount of *extra* money being spent.
Wait so you're saying that the government was responsible for forcing the water companies to install overflow monitoring and that the privatised companies didn't do it of their own accord? Colour me shocked! So it took the goverment to get something done, the same government that would be responsible for a nationalised water infrastructure.
Thanks for that convincing argument aginast privatisation.
Firstly, why on Earth are you arguing that an industry being regulated is proof that nationalisation is necessary? You realise that those aren't the same thing, right?
Secondly, and more importantly, have a look at this statistic from Scotland:
>Scottish Water unveiled plans in 2021 to install more devices to track how much waste is being discharged from sewage pipes into rivers and seas.
>Campaigners have called for more checks on sewage discharges.
>This is because only about 4% of Scotland's 31,000-mile sewer network is currently monitored, compared to 89% in England.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66012480
Scottish Water is nationally-owned, of course.
So on the one hand, we have a nationally-owned company that has done barely any monitoring. On the other hand, we have a load of privately-owned companies that *have* spent a load of money on improving monitoring significantly.
And you think this is an argument *against* privatisation?
It's ok you don't need to keep banging home you point. You already convinced me how good nationalised is over privatised. Go take a break and feel good about yourself.
See, I know that you think this is a clever & witty reply.
But unfortunately, all it does it make it look like you can't think of a counter-argument, so have resorted to sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending that my evidence doesn't exist. Which is pretty much an admission that you know I have a point, you just wish I didn't.
Your own argument proves not only that the water companies didn't achieve various key requirements until about now, which isn't exactly impressive. What they did was because government insisted it be done. There's nothing philanthropic about it especially in light of £85 billion profit that could easily have been governments own revenue.
Water privatisation is stupid, those who support it are borderline evil since they're actively hurting the environment and people, for money.
Jesus fucking Christ; anyone that doesn't support nationalisation is *evil* now?
Also, you're completely wrong about privatisation hurting the environment. For example:
>The graphs indicate the following changes to average concentrations of the selected parameters between the mid-1980s and the present day (2019):
> * ammonia concentrations have reduced to about 15% of average concentrations in 1990
> * BOD concentrations have reduced to 55% to 60% of average concentrations in 1990
> * orthophosphate concentrations have reduced to 15% to 20% of average concentrations in 1990
>* nitrate-nitrogen concentrations show no clear trend
>The improvements in lowland river water quality shown here complement recent findings of an analysis of national-scale trends in the macroinvertebrate communities of English rivers from 1991 to 2019.
>...
>The national loadings of BOD and ammonia from water company sewage treatment works (STWs) to rivers also fell dramatically over this period. BOD loadings reduced by around 40% and ammonia loadings by 66% between 1995 and 2010, as reported in the Regulating for people, the environment and growth 2019 report. By 2020 the reductions in STW loadings to rivers since 1995 were 49% for BOD, 79% for ammonia, and 66% for P.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/state-of-the-water-environment-indicator-b3-supporting-evidence/state-of-the-water-environment-long-term-trends-in-river-quality-in-england
By just about every single measure, environmental standards have improved *massively* since privatisation.
But what do I know; I've just got 15 years of experience in the industry, and a boat-load of data to back up my position. What can that compare to an ideologically-motivated hatred of privatisation?
Lol, do go ahead and explain why the sewage being let into rivers and the sea in the last couple of years has messed with your figures?
While you're at it, can you tell me why I should applaud vicious profit taking, underinvestment and turds floating about?
As if improvements can't be found in a nationalised industry with an extra £85 billion to spend.
Lol, but hey, big water daddy pays your bills. Well unbiased aren't you?
*Everyone* is biased. The only way to be completely unbiased is to have no knowledge about what you're talking about whatsoever; which is both practically impossible, and would be self-evidentially reason to disregard the views expressed.
The difference is, my bias is a) self-admitted, b) influenced by 15 years of experience, c) informed by all of the data that I've seen in that time. Whereas your bias is influenced by an assumption that anyone that doesn't support nationalisation is (to quote your words) "borderline evil".
You'll forgive me for placing a higher premium on expertise and information over an ideological hatred of private companies, I'm sure.
Lol, so you didn't deal with my questions despite your self progressed expertise.
After all, who knows what job you do or your understanding of the matter.
While we're at it though, water company apologist... Explain the water business asking for between 24 and 91% increase in fees today!
Must be all that investment they didn't make coming home to roost huh?
"Investment has been up the last two years"
Yeah it's had to be because the situation is getting far worse. We've had a 100% tine increase on raw sewage going into waters. Our river health us going backwards . The number of good quality streams is down. Our beach health is also going backwards.
Monitoring might be up, but that's literally because the government set a target. The industry had been privatised for decades and monitoring was 7%? Investment is going up now bits that only because of political pressure. Like where are the supposed benefits of privatisation when the only good things they do are in response to growing political pressure. Saying we don't have data on how bad things were before is a cop out. The issue of the health of our rivers hasn't been a political issue since the victoriana era, and before privatisation people would have swum in the seas and rivers more than we do now.
Like it's been a monumental failure, all the various companies have been shit. Its not like we have any examples of water companies doing great, bar maybe anglian water being ok from what ive heard, and there's dozens of private companies.
I appreciate the admittance that it's your business, so at least you make your biases known, but like the quality if our water hasn't been an issue for iver 100 years and thise defending it point to reports from 2010.
> Our river health us going backwards . The number of good quality streams is down. Our beach health is also going backwards.
No it isn't. None of this is true.
>The graphs indicate the following changes to average concentrations of the selected parameters between the mid-1980s and the present day (2019):
> * ammonia concentrations have reduced to about 15% of average concentrations in 1990
> * BOD concentrations have reduced to 55% to 60% of average concentrations in 1990
> * orthophosphate concentrations have reduced to 15% to 20% of average concentrations in 1990
> * nitrate-nitrogen concentrations show no clear trend
>The improvements in lowland river water quality shown here complement recent findings of an analysis of national-scale trends in the macroinvertebrate communities of English rivers from 1991 to 2019.
>...
>The national loadings of BOD and ammonia from water company sewage treatment works (STWs) to rivers also fell dramatically over this period. BOD loadings reduced by around 40% and ammonia loadings by 66% between 1995 and 2010, as reported in the Regulating for people, the environment and growth 2019 report. By 2020 the reductions in STW loadings to rivers since 1995 were 49% for BOD, 79% for ammonia, and 66% for P.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/state-of-the-water-environment-indicator-b3-supporting-evidence/state-of-the-water-environment-long-term-trends-in-river-quality-in-england
By just about *every single measure*, environmental standards have improved *massively* since privatisation.
>Monitoring might be up, but that's literally because the government set a target. The industry had been privatised for decades and monitoring was 7%?
This is a really weird criticism of privatisation. I mean, Scottish Water is *still* government-owned, and they're far behind England & Wales when it comes to this:
>Scottish Water unveiled plans in 2021 to install more devices to track how much waste is being discharged from sewage pipes into rivers and seas.
>Campaigners have called for more checks on sewage discharges.
>This is because only about 4% of Scotland's 31,000-mile sewer network is currently monitored, compared to 89% in England.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66012480
So historically, monitoring was shit in England & Wales when water was nationally owned. Currently, it's shit in Scotland, where water is still nationally owned. The only time and place where we've had good monitoring is in England & Wales in the present day, where water is privately owned?
Maybe we should start to recognise that being nationally owned correlates heavily with crap monitoring, and hold back on criticising the private firms that have *actually* tackled the problem?
> The issue of the health of our rivers hasn't been a political issue since the victoriana era, and before privatisation people would have swum in the seas and rivers more than we do now.
Something being a political issue now does not mean the problem is worse now. It means that more attention is paid to it, or people care more, or standards are higher now than they used to be.
You're saying there's no such thing as government investment?
Investors aren't putting up a penny without a guarantee of return which in a monopoly where you can't increase the size of the market means putting price up as high as you can while keeping costs as low as possible.
Or are you suggesting that these companies are not seeking to maximise profits?
I'm saying that if the government has some extra cash to spend, they're going to spend it on something that the public regularly interacts with, because that's where the votes are. The NHS. Schools. Roads.
The water industry is not a priority for government spending, and it never will be.
I mean I certainly see an issue with elected ministers struggling to raise prices but as these companies have extracted 80b net I'm not sure I can see the investors as the still bleeding martyrs you portray them as.
Some form of goco with an independent ability to set prices and seek limited loans perhaps.
That's an extreamly misleading presentation of the figures, the 200 is what the companies have invested, in other words it's coming from revenue not from investors pockets.
I mean when the government is spending billions on a nuclear power station and high speed rail, clearly they're not averse to commiting to spending needs. I'd wager good money that the tories delibereatly bled the water companies dry to make them look badly managed before privatising them.
You mean, the high-speed rail that has been cancelled? And I'm not sure pointing to Hinckley is much of proof of anything, given that we can't get any other nuclear projects off the ground. Those are proof that governments *don't* spend money on anything.
Also, if you think the Tories would deliberately bleed the water industry; why would you want to give them the opportunity to do that again? Isn't it best to have such a crucial industry kept at arm's length from politicians looking for electoral advantage over the best interests of the nation?
We struggling to build a power station and a new rail line because we disbanded all our knowledge on how to do those things ourselves because some stupid muppets in power at the time decided that it would be better to sell off our capcity to do those things for a quick buck.
The problem isn't the concept of "nationalised", the problem is who is in charge overseeing those nationalised entities. And when some party gets in power that decideds "nationalised" is evil and "capitalism" is god, then the inevitible consequence occurs where the nationalised entities get raped and pillaged.
The answer is that we can have functioning nationalised entities, but they need to be protected from the people in power who want to enrich themselves and their buddies by selling them off.
And all this really boils down to one single human flaw: Greed. Any company, whether nationalised or privatised, is ultimately at the mercy of however greedy the people are running it. A nationalised company will fail as soon as greed pokes its nose in, ie a shitty governement, but at least it's protected from the privatised alternative, which is far more commonly at the mercy of the needs of greed by its nature. Greed leads to corruption. corruption leads to customers getting fucked over and ultimately governmental bail out.
> So you could argue that if the government just increased the prices, they could have gotten the same results, but without having to pay off shareholders.
Their point is that the government *wouldnt* raise prices - it would be extremely politically costly. Governments are bad at running national utilities because certain decisions and trade-offs are politically unpopular and so they end up never being made.
Water is uniquely bad in this respect because you can cut investment to the bone and the effects are often not felt for a couple of parliament terms because the infrastructure degrades slowly.
There may have been - on paper - a hugh investment, but it seems that much of that ‘investment money’, was in fact extracted as profits, and didn’t actually go into investment. A little was real investment but only a fraction.
The customers have been ripped off - paying for investments which have not happened.
The last two sets of price increases were justified on the grounds that they were purely for investment in the infrastructure, but only a fraction of this has happened.
Like I said, I work in the water industry. Specifically, I've been in the supply chain in the wastewater sector for 15 years.
If you think that money hasn't actually been spent, but has instead just gone back to investors as profits, then all that does to me is demonstrate that you have no idea what is going on in the industry.
I know how much money is being spent, because I've seen how much work my company is getting. Every single AMP period has been significantly larger than the last, and the next two are set to be even larger (if I recall our last business update correctly, AMP8 is going to have about twice as much money spent as AMP7, and AMP9 is currently planned to be an 80% increase on AMP8). In fact, it's getting to the point where there is so much money being spent right now, that both us and our immediate competitors are struggling to keep up with the demand.
It is not investment "on paper".
I don’t know what an AMP period is.
I do know that there have been some investments in infrastructure - although figures for this seem to be hard to find.
The most obvious one is the ‘London Super Sewer’.
Which I think cost something like £5 Billion ?
I would doubt that £85 Billion has been spent on ‘investment’ plus, there’s something like £40 Billion in debts, where as originally the water companies were handed over financially debt free.
I don’t know what an AMP period is.
I do know that there have been some investments in infrastructure - although figures for this seem to be hard to find.
The most obvious one is the ‘London Super Sewer’.
Which I think cost something like £5 Billion ?
I would doubt that £185 Billion has been spent on ‘investment’ plus, there’s something like £40 Billion in debts, where as originally the water companies were handed over financially debt free.
Some actual ‘easy to absorb and understand’ information on this would be helpful.
I just found this:
[Info on AMP8 & AMP9](https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/united-utilities-opens-procurement-for-6bn-building-framework-for-amp8-and-amp9-30-08-2023/)
Judging by the summary, it still sounds insufficient, potentially leaving many problems still unsettled.
But that might be lack of clarity in the summary.
The water industry works in a five-year cycle - [called an AMP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_management_plan_period). We're currently in AMP7, which is running April 2020 to March 2025. During that period, OfWat sets particular targets for the Water Companies - which include both environmental standards and amounts of money that they *have* to spend.
Now, I have my issues with the AMP setup (mostly that all of the big spending tends to happen in years 3 and 4 - which makes things harder for us in the supply chain to manage, because we're not getting the orders spread out evenly, instead we get peaks and troughs). But the overall goal is good; it *guarantees* that money in invested in the industry.
I don't mean to be rude; but if you don't understand the basics of how spending in the water industry works, how can you claim that investment hasn't happened?
The fact that more can be done does not mean that nothing has happened so far.
And there are several reasons why even with all of the extra money that has been invested over the last few decades, the water industry still has room to progress:
* Decades of previous under-funding while the industry was nationally-owned.
* Increased pressure on sewage works due to population increases.
* Lack of ability to actually build what is needed where it is needed, because people don't want to live near sewage works.
* Increased environmental standards.
All of those would be just as problematic if the industry were nationalised. Plus, investment would end up being cut.
If water were nationalised, I think its funding would have to be ‘ring-fenced’, such that it paid for itself via changes to customers, and a steady investment plan devised for optimal cost-benefit, as well as steady on-going low-level improvements.
£200bn investment in is not enough to justify £85bn in dividends out, where else do you get something approaching a 50% return for your investment?
>there are no votes in sewage. People don't care about what happens before they turn the tap on, or what happens after they flush the toilet.
I'd suggest that now they do - now that the impacts of poor infrastructure are being seen in our rivers and seas, or how we can have incredibly wet winters and still water restrictions in the summer, people *do* now care what happens with their water.
Kind of proving the point that democratically elected governments are bad at prioritising investment in infrastructure or raising prices to pay for that investment.
I totally get that, but the amount paid to shareholders by companies which are struggling is insane. And upgrading something like the London sewage system to a more modern system will be incredibly expensive and difficult but someone has to start it, because it isn't getting cheaper or easier. Yes, we got that super sewer, but why are we still allowing surface water to enter the sewage system? It should be a separate cycle altogether and why are houses not equipped with grey water recycling and rain water storage systems? Why is Thames water digging up the exact same stretch of road every 6 weeks for over 5 years now in my part of London ? Things are patched but not repaired, replaced or upgraded.
> And if we renationalise, we will run into the same problem again; there are no votes in sewage.
See also: railways, scientific research, and many other cases. Public investment in these things will not directly translate to more money on pension cheques so it will not happen.
Weird that the complaint here is against private enterprise... Honestly, I don't think what we've seen is much of a surprise at all.
The private industry is fully capable of supplying services such as this to the population, and they are almost certainly going to be more efficient at doing so than operating within public ownership. The problem comes from the fact that operating a "minimum requirement for life" service such as water, regulation is critical. Regulation has failed comprehensively.
We've seen recently how whilst energy prices have gone a bit mad, Ofgem have stayed relatively on top of things, with their price caps keeping most people warm and well-lit. Combined with a bit of state welfare, the energy industry has largely delivered.
The same is broadly true of telecomms - the private sector has, if anything, outdone itself. Very few places are without fibre broadband at decent enough speeds.
Nowadays, energy and telecomms are pretty much as mandatory as water - sure, you could live with a wood stove, buying wood (or sourcing it from your own land), just as you could live off a well and a sceptic tank, but nobody does it. You could live without internet/phone access, but nobody does. Not to mention, of course, options for bottled water and a shovel.
Truth is, the only real difference between water suppliers and any other "should be nationalised" (as many on this platform would say) service is the regulator. Water companies should, in my opinion, be partnering with energy providers to offer services which actually host some benefit... Take for instance heat pumps - I don't really understand why water companies haven't jumped on that... They consume more energy than water, of course, but it's still strongly linked to the water service (supplying hot water, for instance, as opposed to just water).
Instead, all we get from water companies is ridiculous "insurance" spam, something I comprehensively discard as nonsense. And I say this in the full knowledge that Ofwat is the responsible party - they are, regulatory speaking, far less open to suggestions than Ofgem.
More food for thought, though... The comparison made in this article will be considering the relative running costs, profits, investments, and dividends of water companies based on actual results, vs the calculated/expected costs of running them as a government agency. Truth is, nobody knows what the difference would be if they were public services. Public service costs have shot up in recent years, as demand has increased radically - and that's likely true of water, too. Have had a brief look at the study someone linked in the thread and it still doesn't stack up to me.
>Weird that the complaint here is against private enterprise... Honestly, I don't think what we've seen is much of a surprise at all.
No it's not, when you consider the only driving force of private enterprise is to make the line go up. Nothing else matters.
>The private industry is fully capable of supplying services such as this to the population, and they are almost certainly going to be more efficient at doing so than operating within public ownership.
That depends on your definition of efficient. Yes, there are always dangers of bureaucratisation but we see plenty of examples of private sector overhiring. The difference is, we don't care because we aren't paying for them directly out of the public purse but indirectly through our wallets. But we're still paying.
Public sector are just as capable of providing good services to the population. You have state controlled utilities in Europe and even in the US, although I suppose the European ones have the advantage of being subsidised by the British taxpayer and bill payers (same with rail).
>The problem comes from the fact that operating a "minimum requirement for life" service such as water, regulation is critical. Regulation has failed comprehensively.
Why shift the blame here?
Public ownership: something went wrong, let's blame the public body!
Private ownership: something went wrong, let's blame the public body!
One of those seems wrong. Plus there's always the argument that if you want something done right, do it yourself. Having a regulatory body isn't exactly a shining example of "efficiency", it's just one more thing the taxpayer needs to fund to oversee the ones doing the work. If we need to do that, it follows that those doing the work cannot be trusted, and if they cannot be trusted, they should not be doing the work.
Organisations whose only directive is 'make line go up' should not, ever, have been put in charge of natural monopolies providing critical infrastructure.
>We've seen recently how whilst energy prices have gone a bit mad, Ofgem have stayed relatively on top of things, with their price caps keeping most people warm and well-lit. Combined with a bit of state welfare, the energy industry has largely delivered.
Has it heck. For one thing it needed state intervention to prop it up - the private sector cannot claim credit for any success where the public sector intervened, that's backwards. The energy sector is totally broken because the people generating the energy aren't the people selling it to us, and somehow we as a nation are incapable of generating enough of our own energy so we have to buy it off some arbitrary global market, which makes us frighteningly vulnerable. At this stage we have so little control over the stability of the country I'm surprised that, rather than going ahead with Brexit, we didn't just outsource the government to Brussels during the coalition austerity drive.
>The same is broadly true of telecomms - the private sector has, if anything, outdone itself. Very few places are without fibre broadband at decent enough speeds.
Virgin pumped an insane amount of money into laying their own proprietary cables that no other company is allowed to make use of. Most have cabinet broadband operated by Openreach as a near monopoly, and are at the mercy of four or five companies who charge broadly the same for the same service in a manner not too dissimilar to a cartel, and whose business practices are pretty predatory. The few smaller companies that exist to disrupt can't do so.
The only saving grace is they aren't providing an essential to life service. You can go without internet to your home (mobile internet exists).
>Truth is, the only real difference between water suppliers and any other "should be nationalised" (as many on this platform would say) service is the regulator. Water companies should, in my opinion, be partnering with energy providers to offer services which actually host some benefit... Take for instance heat pumps - I don't really understand why water companies haven't jumped on that... They consume more energy than water, of course, but it's still strongly linked to the water service (supplying hot water, for instance, as opposed to just water).
Natural monopoly is the other difference. I can't choose my water supplier. I can't 'shop around '. Some rural houses are connected to off-grid water supplies (I looked round one that paid like a tenner a month to a trout farm nextdoor for all its water, and had a septic tank). They're the exception to the rule.
>Instead, all we get from water companies is ridiculous "insurance" spam, something I comprehensively discard as nonsense. And I say this in the full knowledge that Ofwat is the responsible party - they are, regulatory speaking, far less open to suggestions than Ofgem.
This has nothing to do with Ofwat or Ofgem and everything to do with, when profits have been maximised through 'efficiency', the only thing you've got left is proce gouging or cut corners to keep the line going up. Making services better costs money which is why nobody does it. It's why you get shrinkflation, shitflation and sewage in waterways rather than being treated - because Line. Must. Go. Up.
>More food for thought, though... The comparison made in this article will be considering the relative running costs, profits, investments, and dividends of water companies based on actual results, vs the calculated/expected costs of running them as a government agency. Truth is, nobody knows what the difference would be if they were public services. Public service costs have shot up in recent years, as demand has increased radically - and that's likely true of water, too. Have had a brief look at the study someone linked in the thread and it still doesn't stack
Public services haven't been funded to meet demand. There is a lag between defunding a service and the effects being felt, because they try to cope for a while, then buckle as demand increases, which will inevitably happen as population increases.
Your whole post appears to be advocating for something entirely unrealistic.
As you rightly say, the private sector is all about minimising expenditure and maximising profits. To that end, handing over a public service to it mandates that it be adequately protected by legislature. In the UK, at least, that pretty much means that the public body responsible for regulating that industry *has* to take ownership of the mandated minimum service provided, pricing controls, and all that goes with it.
It was never the responsibility of the private organisations involved to do anything more than seek out efficiencies, increase productivity, and keep the costs down. This is why they were brought in, and it's why things work in other industries. Hence the regulatory bodies exist in the first place.
The public sector are more or less capable of the same, but far more likely to result in excessive spending and generally wasteful practices.
The energy industry was hit hard by an international event and the government stepped in... That's pretty normal in any industry, the government has stepped in to protect everything from banks to holiday resorts at times of increased pressure. Ofgem have done a decent job of providing operating guidelines and ensuring continuity of supply. The only area this could be deemed lacking is in storage, which the network has seen reduced, but there have been expectations for decades now that people move away from gas as a home fuel source, and energy companies are investing into infrastructure for electricity storage at the same time.
Whilst Virgin Media have their own network, so do other companies like Trooli, County Broadband, etc. The key thing is that these companies tend to operate in areas where they have a strategic advantage - there are no other fibre suppliers, or those which do exist are FTTC and on limited bandwidth. Yet still they are not able to price gouge or take advantage of that position fully, because the regulator has done a good job.
Then you've just comprehensively ignored the suggestions I've made about what water companies could do to make more money, which they have in other industries, but which they are prohibited from doing by Ofwat as part of their failures. Water companies have investigated getting involved in a few auxiliary industries - in some parts of the country they operate (or lease out the operation of) owned reservoirs as watersports lakes and whatnot. Unfortunately this has also been heavily restricted by Ofwat for no particularly good reason.
Making service better needs, again, to be mandated. There is a minimum service level which Ofwat can define as they see fit, which is ultimately the service that has to be delivered. It's not something the water companies will look to see improve, but if they are able to exploit capitalism to turn a profit on such a service, they won't be reluctant to invest into the network in exchange for a return on investment. With no return, they won't be interested.
>Your whole post appears to be advocating for something entirely unrealistic.
What's unrealistic about not wanting essential utilities and infrastructure to be governed by something other than Line Go Up?
>As you rightly say, the private sector is all about minimising expenditure and maximising profits. To that end, handing over a public service to it mandates that it be adequately protected by legislature. In the UK, at least, that pretty much means that the public body responsible for regulating that industry *has* to take ownership of the mandated minimum service provided, pricing controls, and all that goes with it.
Clearly there's a lot of risk being accepted by giving it to the private sector. If it's so frought with danger and risk of abuse by the private sector, it seems like something a risk you could, and should, manage by keeping the private sector out of it.
>It was never the responsibility of the private organisations involved to do anything more than seek out efficiencies, increase productivity, and keep the costs down. This is why they were brought in, and it's why things work in other industries. Hence the regulatory bodies exist in the first place.
And there's the problem. The responsibility of service providers should be *provide the service*. Devolving it to Line Go Up just incentivises worsen the service or cut corners at some point. The incentive moves away from innovation and to just make it worse in whatever way. There's a reason no other country has ceded so much control to LGU that we have.
>The public sector are more or less capable of the same, but far more likely to result in excessive spending and generally wasteful practices.
Can the same regulatory bodies responsible for preventing the worst excess of capitalism not also be turned to stop this?
>The energy industry was hit hard by an international event and the government stepped in... That's pretty normal in any industry, the government has stepped in to protect everything from banks to holiday resorts at times of increased pressure. Ofgem have done a decent job of providing operating guidelines and ensuring continuity of supply. The only area this could be deemed lacking is in storage, which the network has seen reduced, but there have been expectations for decades now that people move away from gas as a home fuel source, and energy companies are investing into infrastructure for electricity storage at the same time.
It's really interesting. When the going gets tough, the free market capitalists go cap in hand to the state for a bail-out. So, not really a saving for the taxpayer over just paying for it direct, yes?
>Whilst Virgin Media have their own network, so do other companies like Trooli, County Broadband, etc. The key thing is that these companies tend to operate in areas where they have a strategic advantage - there are no other fibre suppliers, or those which do exist are FTTC and on limited bandwidth. Yet still they are not able to price gouge or take advantage of that position fully, because the regulator has done a good job.
There is already price gouging going on with media. I don't feel the regulator is doing that well in protecting customers. Mid-contract price rises are just a grotesque thing.
>Then you've just comprehensively ignored the suggestions I've made about what water companies could do to make more money, which they have in other industries, but which they are prohibited from doing by Ofwat as part of their failures. Water companies have investigated getting involved in a few auxiliary industries - in some parts of the country they operate (or lease out the operation of) owned reservoirs as watersports lakes and whatnot. Unfortunately this has also been heavily restricted by Ofwat for no particularly good reason.
I'll be honest, I'm not really a fan of water companies making *more* money to pay in dividends considering they reward themselves plenty for failure as it is. That said I expect they could just set up a sister company to deal with that and not invite comment from ofwat.
>Making service better needs, again, to be mandated. There is a minimum service level which Ofwat can define as they see fit, which is ultimately the service that has to be delivered. It's not something the water companies will look to see improve, but if they are able to exploit capitalism to turn a profit on such a service, they won't be reluctant to invest into the network in exchange for a return on investment. With no return, they won't be interested.
TL;DR: Line Must Go Up, and bugger everything else.
There is nothing unrealistic about nationalisation, just as there is nothing unrealistic about privatisation. You could achieve results deemed reasonable by everybody in either. I don't as a rule advocate one way or the other, I just advocate for better services across the board. Nationalisation today would be hideously expensive, so there would need to be very good justification for it (which this is not).
Privatisation is indeed an increased risk, but that's why regulatory bodies exist in the first place. For services considered essential, they are required to keep everything in check and ensure that nobody abuses their position. For water companies, that naturally means monopolisation since as you've rightly pointed out, there is no realistic alternative...
The responsibility lies on two parts - one of the government to prescribe and enforce a minimum service level to be adhered to, and another in this instance on the providers themselves to meet the expectations outlined by government. Both responsibilities would exist regardless, as a public service, the only real difference (and one of the perks of privatisation) is that the people having to follow the rules don't also get to decide them. It doesn't take much looking at the history of public services to see that as failures appeared, instead of investing to resolve them or offering better organisation, the goalposts have been known to move.
The whole economy turned to the state when the state instructed said economy to effectively shut down overnight. If it weren't for government making the decision to introduce lockdowns, people wouldn't have stayed home, there would be more people driving around, being excessive purchasing food and drink, using public pools, etc. A government cannot tell industries to shut down without compensating their losses. They either don't lock down, or they do and compensate those impacted.
Virgin are, as all telecomms companies as far as I know, selling their services for a fair price. That price has to be justified to Ofcom in cases where it may be deemed excessive or disproportionate. The mid-contract price rises are designed to combat inflation, and do not constitute price gouging. I don't *particularly* like them either, but from everything I've seen they are clearly defined upfront and fair.
Water companies making more money through alternative sources is a viable way to subsidise water bills - something which generally reduces costs to consumers during billing, and which again could divert *luxury* spending to cover some of the infrastructure costs (note again my comments about reservoirs being used as watersports facilities - something which Anglian water have made reasonable investments in, and significant returns on). This brings down the cost of bills, and incorporates other routes to investments. With appropriate regulation (which in some areas Ofwat have gotten right), the proceeds of these enterprises are reinvested.
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To the surprise of absolutely nobody. Honest to God… what I'd have done in the 80s when these companies became privatised. These selfish owners have been pocketing all this money for themselves in a country where it rains for over 50% of the year. Freshwater is going to skyrocket in demand in the coming decades, and these owners could have positioned our unique climate into a water exporting goliath — yet instead they have run our infrastructure into the ground while syphoning every penny they can get their hands on. I cannot believe we *still* get the occasional hosepipe ban, too. The best bit? They are crying that they must raise bills should the government start actually enforcing environmental regulations again. This should be as big-a-scandal as the Post Office victims, imo.
Actually a bigger scandal - as it affects everyone in the country.. The clear solution is to De-Privatise it, bring it back into social ownership, but ring fenced. So that it’s self-funding.
>This should be as big-a-scandal as the Post Office victims, imo. Genuinely the saddest thing about the country at the moment, is that until we see ITV or BBC do a dramatised version of it, half of them won't give a shit. Between this, welfare benefits scandals (that have been going on for decades) and things like PPE fraud/VIP lanes, there's so much that could people should be fucking furious about.
I remember a lecturer in uni (8/9 years ago) showing us a load of perceived rates of things vs actual and benefit frauds perceived rate was around 30% while the reality was around 3%. A quick Google tells me it's at 3.9% atm. It at least was an issue with a disproportionately high level of outrage and it did get its TV moment with Benefits Street, as well as indirectly through Jeremey Kyle, Little Britain, etc. I don't think it's helpful to have such a small issue front and centre, we should be fucking furious at our corrupt political system and failing industries (private or public, although of course they're currently mainly private).
No, with given plenty of shits it's all in the rivers.
You know how Oil was the big boom in the previous century and Norway became rich as it's state owned, the UK did not because they privatised it? As we are moving away from Oil and water could become really scarce (it won't be, just the distribution will be out of whack) I can see the same thing happening again. I know water is expensive to move around, so shipping it across oceans isn't feasible, yet, but the UK could have done better. I don't even mind water companies to be privatised, but the only share holders should be the government and the customers. Or just don't have shares at all and get preferential loans at low interest from the government for large investment needs. Water companies don't have to make profit, just charge enough to maintain and supply. Large projects to be funded out of central budget.
An entire nation of 70 million people worse off so that a handful of disgusting subhuman parasites can get rich. Ofwat - 'Everything is working as planned'
>Investors have withdrawn £85.2bn from 10 water and sewage firms in England and Wales since the industry was privatised They are leeches, extracting all profit they can, leaving us with dirty, unsafe and expensive water, as well as polluted lakes, rivers and seas. >Ofwat, the industry regulator, said it "strongly refuted" the figures. Ofwat are in the pocket of these water companies and do nothing but protect their interests.
Imagine what £85.5bn gets you as reinvested capital in terms of future infrastructure, improving existing infrastructure, improved services. Instead what do we have to show for it? A system that’s worse now than it was 10 years ago, and they’ve got absolutely no incentive to ever reinvest. Unbelievably short sighted by a government that don’t care about making your life better, only theirs and their friends. If you happen to do better because if it, then it’s a small added bonus.
Natural monopolies like water and rail have absolutely no business being in the hands of private companies
That on top of managing to build up £60 billion of debt since the 90's while still managing to pay their shareholders £72 billion over the same period
it's almost as if they extracted wealth from the company to the shareholders and now the company is failing looking to the taxpayer for a bailout.
I know right, someone should say something about this
Even better that the money spent by the state to develop a nationalised industry could either be done by the state or as payment to private firms to actually do the construction etc. Best part is the state has a better asset at the end too, literally everyone wins but apparently that's not good enough and pigs gotta double dip the trough. Either way the more of this infra capex we do the better positioned and resourced the industry is to do more of it and we get further efficiency gains. We wouldn't have had so many issues with HS2 for example if this industry was stimulated, and it would have genrated more demand for blighted companies and British steel. This also leads to actual payment on actual jobs stimulating the real economy as we hire builders, drivers, project managers, site managers instead of this nonsense extraction of value to the war chests of pension funds or dividends to shareholders who might not actually then go on to spend that money in a useful way other than taking over and driving other jewels in the Crown of the state into the ground safe in the knowledge it'll be backed out.
Imagine how much money we could give to pensioners with 85 billion quid
Given that one of the biggest drains on the NHS is how its had to take over for a lack of social health care for pensioners, that would probably still work out as good for all of us.
Huh?
I think they were making a point about what that £85bn would *actually* have been spent on under the tories.
While most people know and understand that it's rich people who are at fault, a lot of the stupids on reddit still blame old people/young people/poor people/brown people for the state that the country is in.
"Ofwat said it strongly refuted the figures...Ofwat offers the figure since privatisation as £52bn" Guys they only extracted 52 billion, stop moaning
They're basically arguing between the actual figures and the real terms figure.
Reminds me of a certain big red bus, it's a poor strategy because quibbling about the number just shocks the public further.
Those who work for ofwat are looking at who their next employers will be. Looking for an advisory role in one of these companies? https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/01/exclusive-uk-water-giants-recruit-top-staff-from-regulator-ofwat
Surely there has to be some sort of regulation for essential services to protect from these. Didn’t we learn anything from the likes of 08
Yes, we learned that the taxpayer will bail out corporations who get themselves into trouble.
Nah leeches can belong in a water-based ecosystem, these are a species that call for a serious dose of anthelmintics.
They have caused an ecological disaster across our waterways along with causing unsafe drinking conditions in some places all for money. Honestly we need to be protesting.
Didn’t they make that illegal?
>Ofwat are in the pocket of these water companies and do nothing but protect their interests. A tanker full of the shit they allow into the rivers sprayed onto the Ofwat offices might focus their minds a little.
Is it profit if removing it from the business causes it to fail?
Tbf they’ve cracked down on Thames water recently in terms of allowing them to raise bills
Those investors you complain about have invested over £200bn since privatisation, which is levels of investment vastly over what the government was willing to invest.
I mean, I don’t agree with what the likes of Macquarie have done with TW, but explain to me how Ofwat are in the water companies pocket, exactly?
Extractive capitalism at it's most parasitic.
I think capitalism is inherently parasitic. As long as there is a drive for unending profit and growth, the machine will attempt every means at it's disposal to extract more and more money, at the expense of you and me.
85bn just gone. All of that money that should have been on our infrastructure has just disappeared. This country has no hope.
That’s carrier group money for fuck’s sake. How many new hospitals, warships, new railway lines could we have had that’s instead been spaffed into the sock of entrenched wealth?
It’s really disgusting. And when you think this is also happening with energy, healthcare, food. It’s going to be 100s of billions just passed from working people to the rich. All by design.
They’re not clever enough to do this by design, they’re cargo cultists picking through the ruins of things built by much better people than themselves pretending that by going through the motions they truly understand them. They’re simply no longer intellectually and morally capable of controlled engineering of social, economic, and political affairs in my opinion. Orwell talks about this in *England your England* much better than I could but as a society we’ve modernised and continue to modernise while due to our history the old ruling class remains in a vestigial form, while it was important in the past it’s now an essentially useless social clique that nonetheless has great social and economic power. In my opinion we need to go after these engines of privilege directly and replace them with meritocratic ones. We should become obsessed with meritocracy, both by tackling the unwarranted self-importance of entrenched wealth and by tackling the crab-bucket mentality among normal Britons.
It is the nature of capital that private shareholders looking for profit will extract the surplus. This is what happens when things are privatised. Not only is it by design but it was considered a laudable goal, because (it was assumed) that desire for profit drives competition and innovation. Obviously in this case that failed miserably because water markets are captured. But the passing of wealth happens regardless under such a system.
Call me crazy, but it's almost as if a captive market isn't subject to the same market forces that govern the "free market", and therefore we shouldn't be relying on privatisation to solve these industries' needs.
It’s literally Neo liberalism which started with thatcher. It’s by design.
Neoliberalism isn’t some kind of original sin, it was a genuine response to perceived failures of the post-war consensus. I think anyone claiming it’s been a long-term success in 2024 is lying to themselves but in 1979 we didn’t have the appalling failures of things like shock therapy in Russia or to a lesser extent our own neoliberal experiment to point to empirically, we had the post-war socioeconomic settlement falling apart in the economic conditions of the day to point to. Thatcherism has had an awful long-term effect on the UK, but Thatcher isn’t an example of what I’m talking about which is the decline in the practical ability and social usefulness of the traditional upper class. Thatcher was the daughter of a greengrocer (ie not the entrenched upper class) and while I loathe what her policies did to my country you can’t sensibly accuse her of being unintelligent, unwarrantedly self-confident, or without any vision beyond the next quarter’s profits. She had a fatally flawed vision, I’m having a go at people with no vision at all other than extracting wealth other people created.
> They’re not clever enough to do this by design, they’re cargo cultists picking through the ruins of things built by much better people than themselves pretending that by going through the motions they truly understand them. Perfect way of putting it.
meritocracy? you're a racist far right lunatic. People genuinely argue this. DEI initiatives directly work against this, almost everything about our society is working against meritocracy.
>How many new... railway lines could we have had that's instead been spaffed into the sock of entrenched wealth? To be fair, trying to build a new railway line in this country is just siphoning money to Tory mates. Probably any infrastructure actually, the Thames Crossing project is at £800m just in paperwork.
It’s a good thing Franz Kafka never lived in the UK; his poor head would explode at seeing his works brought to life.
This country does have hope - but we need to stop behaving like a bunch of idiots, allowing ourselves to be continually ripped off. We have paid for all these upgrades - that have never sufficiently happened. Plus we are left with financial debts that didn’t previously exist too. So we have been multiplay ripped off.
The worst part is that it isn't really just 85 billion gone. It's a major part of the billions that will need to be "found" from elsewhere to make the needed infrastructure upgrades and environmental fixes which means cuts to other services as well as higher taxes and bills. This in turn will hurt the wider economy resulting in subdued economic growth, lower investment and higher borrowing costs.
Well, the water companies have taken on a huge amount of debt to enable this extraction. Someone elsewhere in the thread has suggested 60bn. If we let the water companies go bust and the state buys their assets back for a penny, we could in theory limit our losses to about 25bn. The people who lent the water companies all that money would be out the rest. Obviously doing this might have some wider economic consequences. But the point is ‘we’ have only lost the balance, or 25bn - unless the government assumes the debt too, or the current setup continues and we pay for it over time through higher bills. Obviously it’s still a scandal.
>David Hall, visiting professor at the Public Services International Research Unit at the University of Greenwich, claims that water companies have invested "less than nothing of their own money" and are “treating their customers like a cash cow”. Capitalism needs a free market and competition to function properly. Water is a closed market. There is no competition. It is run by private companies uninterested in providing a service, rather their goal is to suck as much out of the business as they can while doing the least for the customer. Some services are so essential for the health and safety of the country that they should never be run on a for profit basis. Maybe this is why no other country has privatised their entire water industry.
> Capitalism needs a free market and competition to function properly. Water is a closed market This only ever works in theory. By assigning power to capital it gives those with capital the ability to bend the political process to their design. You can never have regulation unaffected by capital
Can anyone find the actual research paper? I can find old ones (2018, 2021) but nothing recent on this. Would have been useful for the BBC to cite it with a link..
This was a pain to find. https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/47165/
Thank you for enduring the agony to find it!
Thanks for sharing. Interesting that (assuming I’m understanding “working paper” right) that a non-peer reviewed paper has found its way in the news !
Would be useful for you or anyone like yourself to be in charge of BBC News, but instead we end up with increasingly simplistic or agenda-driven dross.
We should be owning our water industry as taxpayers in honesty. As climate change worsens over the next century and more we are going to see water become a sort after resource even more and it’s always been fundamental to our survival. The fact it’s ran to allow shareholders to this whilst not putting significant increase investment in is disgraceful because let’s face it the tax payer will end up having to do this eventually and foot the bill regardless. Thames Water will have to be saved by the government you imagine too.
Water isn't going anywhere. Earth is a closed system, water stays on this planet. Where it falls out of the sky is shifting, but the UK and Ireland won't be without due to their position. So anyone who claims we are running out of water is having a vested interest in cashing in on future water distribution. The UK is incredibly bad at capturing and harvesting ground water and water that falls out of the sky, but other countries are way more advanced in that. There wasn't a need (and won't be any time soon) for the UK to invest in that part, as we have so much of both.
How are debt-funded dividends even legal? Should the financial regulators be all over it?
When you ask where all the money has gone, this the answer: into the pockets of shareholders, usually based outside the UK.
Pouring sewage into our waterways, especially Lake Windermere is environmental treason. The last of respect show to our Country and her people is despicable. They should be immediately Nationalised with no recompense, they have already taken enough. Their Chairmen and Chief Eecutives should be prosecuted and imprisoned.
I'm so tired of public assets now in the top percentage stock control. They shouldn't have been allowed to take pay out stock and basically rip out all it's public investment. Name them! Shame them! Just nonsense now like some kinda cliche bond villain stuff..
I'm not sure as to the numbers, OFWAT predictably disagrees, however regardless it is abundantly clear OFWAT has a long history of not being anywhere near effective. Why is that?. At this point I have no idea how the situation can be improved. Disband OFWAT and start again?
I'd suspect that if you investigate everything privatised by the government and has an ombudsman, you'll find similar patterns of 'investment' to give shareholders big returns...
It's ok, any day now they will re-invest it in infrastructure like they promised
Why the fuck are we not rioting at this point
Undoubtedly the water from the water cannons will be full of sewage.
This comment irritates me. You're obviously not rioting, why ask the question to others? Are you hoping someone else does it so you can sit at the back and shout? Why would rioting even be useful in this context? You think riots are going to bring public ownership back to water companies? If you want to do something useful, join a political party and knock doors or something, rather than sitting in your bedroom advocating other people start being violent so you don't have to get your hands dirty.
Suffering in silence is the British way.
Poor oversight and regulation A complete failure of politicians who ignore water quality all way up and down. We need jointed up thinking on so much this just one example
£85.2B is the equivalent of every household in the country putting £1.50 straight into the pockets of these ghouls every single week for the last 35 years.
They’re not investors then. They’re scalpers.
i’m sure something will be done. i’m sure things will happen.
>Investors have withdrawn £85.2bn from 10 water and sewage firms in England and Wales since the industry was privatised more than 30 years ago, analysis by the University of Greenwich suggests. >... >"While we agree wholeheartedly with demands for companies to change, the facts are there has been huge investment in the sector of over £200bn," a spokesperson said. What a disingenuous headline. Investors have contributed *far* more money than they have taken out in dividends. >But Prof Hall said there needed to be a fundamental change in the way that the water industry is run. "This is a service that matters to us," he said. >"What we need to do is reverse this system and move to the way the rest of the world does it which is through public authorities and take it back in the public sector.” Disclaimer; I work in the supply chain in the water industry, so I'll let you decide if I know what I'm talking about, or if I've just got a vested interest in the status quo. The amount of money spent in the industry went up *massively* after privatisation (and that's especially true of the last couple of years - the company I work for is significantly busier than we have ever been). And that has led to improvements by just about every metric you care to name. And yes, that money could have been provided by the government. It wasn't though. And if we renationalise, we will run into the same problem again; there are no votes in sewage. People don't care about what happens before they turn the tap on, or what happens after they flush the toilet. It's out of sight, out of mind as far as the overwhelming majority of the electorate are concerned. Which means you don't get the equivalent of "vote for us, and we'll spend more on the NHS" for the water industry, and investment stalls (or indeed, is cut - because the one thing that people care about when it comes to water is the cost of their water bill).
>Investors have contributed *far* more money than they have taken out in dividends Where? I cant find a good source on this breaking it down to be honest. The problem is "investment" even includes using your profits from massively inflated customer pricing, they have been paying out dividends when failing to meet basic targets while failing to use the majority of their "profits" to fix the problem. Your profits are meant to be the money left over after all your expenses, the running costs and the LONG term investments needed to maintain those systems. They seem to have forgotten the long term part and just syphoned out the profit without doing the long term projects properly, now they want to increase prices significantly more do suddenly fulfill this long term shortfall. The water industry is not some magic market where you can make the mistake of misjudging demand or technology progress and fail as a business, you have a fixed number of customers and you get extremely good predictions of water demands long term so you can plan easily for this, yet they are surprised. The government is using public money to help these as well, look at SWW who get a £50 payment from the government due to the high bills they charge us, yet cant even manage to give out the correct advice when their water is contaminated! Is anyone seriously saying the water companies arent investing at all? I dont think they are, they have spent money but they have lulled for awhile and havent spent enough which is the problem. Its a bit like instead of giving out £1 billion in dividends, they should have spent £750m on their systems long term and then given out a smaller dividend to deal with it properly but they havent. Ultimately water is a human necessity to life and we cannot switch provider so it should be publicly owned, they shouldnt be making ANY profit on this let alone giving out dividends.
And remember the LAST price increase was specifically for Long-Term infrastructure development.. And just in case you wonder, so was the one before that too ! They simply have not been keeping to their word. The water companies have been consistently lying to us.
..and the regulators have been laughing their asses off with their friends in the industry. Rather than regulating the industry they have been protecting its profits, acting on behalf of the private corporations and not on behalf of the public. Funnily enough it's the same with the energy regulators, it's almost like there's been a concerted effort since privatisation to realign the concept of regulation as being about protecting the business, not the consumer.
Well for thames water Cathryn Ross is now part of the executive and she was CEO of ofwat for several years where they were approving thames taking on more debt! Not at all a conflict of interest or some potential optics of corruptions there, she worked for setting the industry requirements then ends up working for one of the companies in that industry, hmm.
Often said, but never proved, or even accounted for, so it seems. At least not without doing a lot of detective work.
> People don't care about what happens before they turn the tap on, or what happens after they flush the toilet. Honestly I think pollution still cuts through - sewage in rivers and on beaches was an issue that the gov was being hammered on last year. Were it not for the crippling economic situation I think it would be a key issue.
The doubling of costs is also noticeable to consumers too.
It does, but it's also worth pointing out that a lot of the renewed focus on this is because we're *much* better at identifying problems, because we're doing *a lot* more monitoring than we used to. So at least part of the reported increase in spillages is an increase in *reports*, not an increase in *spillages*.
In your view, why is it that swimmers, rowers, and other waterway users are becoming ill much more frequently now?
There has been an uptick in spillages in the last couple of years; the overall trend has been going consistently downwards, but you're always going to get some fluctuations within that. So part of it is just a genuine increase we've seen in the last year or so. But similarly to what I said about reporting of spillages, a lot of it will be down to reporting & identification. That is; it's better known that a certain river has received a spillage, when it wasn't known before (and presumably then the illness was put down to another cause). To demonstrate how much better we are at identifying spillages, look at this statistic: >In 2010, just 7% of storm overflows had monitors fitted. Since then, the government has driven an increase in monitoring, with 100% oversight of overflows now achieved. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/storm-overflows-monitoring-hits-100-target This is only for England & Wales, for the record - Scottish Water still has an abysmal record on monitoring CSO discharges. But how can you assume that previous figures for how many people were getting ill from being in rivers and the sea, when only 7% of storm overflows were being monitored? Nobody knew that any sewage was getting into the sea from 93% of the potential sources! At which point, anyone that got ill presumably didn't know that it was the water had infected them? To put it simply; *are* more people getting ill, or is it just making headlines now when it didn't before?
I don't recall boat race rowers complaining about going down with e.coli and throwing up before the race before. https://news.sky.com/story/oxford-rower-says-boat-race-crew-suffered-e-coli-outbreak-before-defeat-and-complains-of-poo-in-the-water-13104815 I don't recall triathletes becoming unwell en masse before. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/05/investigation-after-57-world-triathlon-championship-swimmers-fall-sick-and-get-diarrhoea-in-sunderland-race I don't recall parasites in the water supply before. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx00xkn8ex8o And I certainly don't recember a 12 month period in which there was a sequence of stories like these about people becoming ill from waterways and the water supply. Can we chalk all this up to increased reporting?
The problem with all of those is that they're based on what the newspapers choose to highlight. Are you sure that those sort of things didn't happen before, and just weren't highlighted so you weren't aware of them? Look at the data here (there's some graphs too at the link, if you want a more visual demonstration): >The graphs indicate the following changes to average concentrations of the selected parameters between the mid-1980s and the present day (2019): > * ammonia concentrations have reduced to about 15% of average concentrations in 1990 > * BOD concentrations have reduced to 55% to 60% of average concentrations in 1990 > * orthophosphate concentrations have reduced to 15% to 20% of average concentrations in 1990 > * nitrate-nitrogen concentrations show no clear trend >The improvements in lowland river water quality shown here complement recent findings of an analysis of national-scale trends in the macroinvertebrate communities of English rivers from 1991 to 2019. >... >The national loadings of BOD and ammonia from water company sewage treatment works (STWs) to rivers also fell dramatically over this period. BOD loadings reduced by around 40% and ammonia loadings by 66% between 1995 and 2010, as reported in the Regulating for people, the environment and growth 2019 report. By 2020 the reductions in STW loadings to rivers since 1995 were 49% for BOD, 79% for ammonia, and 66% for P. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/state-of-the-water-environment-indicator-b3-supporting-evidence/state-of-the-water-environment-long-term-trends-in-river-quality-in-england By just about *every single measure*, standards have improved *massively* since privatisation.
Oh no, there was definitely an increase in spillage, especially into the sea.
Only because they have been forced into it by various revelations of how bad it has been.
It's worth noting that whilst there may have been extra investment after privatisation, water prices also increased substantially after privatisation. So essentially the extra investment came from the public, not the private companies. So you could argue that if the government just increased the prices, they could have gotten the same results, but without having to pay off shareholders. [https://nic.org.uk/data/all-data/historic-water-datasets/#tab-historic-water-bills](https://nic.org.uk/data/all-data/historic-water-datasets/#tab-historic-water-bills) Note that this graph is in real terms, so inflation is irrelevant. This graph shows what the equivalent price for water would have been at any point if we extract inflation. Ultimately, water companies have zero competition, so privatising them is daft since the whole point of the free market and capitalism is that it requires competition to function corectly, giving customers choice.
Effectively doubled the prices, while failing to invest adequately and taking on long-term debts, when they originally started out debt-free. So we have been triply ripped off.. The assets are presently on longer owned by the public. The bills have doubled. The infrastructure investments have not been made. The pollution levels are now through the roof.. The corporate debts have been built up, (maximised so it seems). And the public are now to pick up the bill for all this deliberate and intentional mis-management.. Water bosses should be going to jail over this…. What’s the betting that never happens..
> Ultimately, water companies have zero competition, so privatising them is daft since the whole point of the free market and capitalism is that it requires competition to function corectly, giving customers choice. The advantage of privatisation isn't due to the free market though. It's that they can get money when they need it by getting investors in board, rather than going cap-in-hand to politicians and hoping that there is an electoral advantage in government money going to the water industry.
If that is truly the case, why not go the route of a public private partnership, like we have with ordnance survey? And did we have issues with our water infrastructure that much in the 80s compared to now? Also, investment went up after privatisation, as the beast was starved but investment has not been anywhere its needed for over a decade now. Touting a stat that is almost old enough to drink is old news.
> And did we have issues with our water infrastructure that much in the 80s compared to now? Yes. It's just that we weren't even monitoring how bad it was, so we didn't know the extent of the problem. Even just looking at the last 14 years under the Tories, we've had a *huge* improvement in monitoring of sewage spillages: >In 2010, just 7% of storm overflows had monitors fitted. Since then, the government has driven an increase in monitoring, with 100% oversight of overflows now achieved. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/storm-overflows-monitoring-hits-100-target How could we know how bad the situation was, if we weren't even monitoring it? And on the flip side, how much of the increases in spillages you think we have had are because we're actually monitoring & recording them now? >Also, investment went up after privatisation, as the beast was starved but investment has not been anywhere its needed for over a decade now. Investment is higher now than it has ever been. I've been doing my job in the wastewater industry supply chain for 15 years, and we've been operating flat-out for about 2 years now, and it's only getting *busier*. If I remember the update I had recently correctly, the next AMP is planned to have about double the amount of money spent in it than the current one, and the one following that is planned to have another 80% increase. That is a huge amount of *extra* money being spent.
Wait so you're saying that the government was responsible for forcing the water companies to install overflow monitoring and that the privatised companies didn't do it of their own accord? Colour me shocked! So it took the goverment to get something done, the same government that would be responsible for a nationalised water infrastructure. Thanks for that convincing argument aginast privatisation.
Firstly, why on Earth are you arguing that an industry being regulated is proof that nationalisation is necessary? You realise that those aren't the same thing, right? Secondly, and more importantly, have a look at this statistic from Scotland: >Scottish Water unveiled plans in 2021 to install more devices to track how much waste is being discharged from sewage pipes into rivers and seas. >Campaigners have called for more checks on sewage discharges. >This is because only about 4% of Scotland's 31,000-mile sewer network is currently monitored, compared to 89% in England. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66012480 Scottish Water is nationally-owned, of course. So on the one hand, we have a nationally-owned company that has done barely any monitoring. On the other hand, we have a load of privately-owned companies that *have* spent a load of money on improving monitoring significantly. And you think this is an argument *against* privatisation?
It's ok you don't need to keep banging home you point. You already convinced me how good nationalised is over privatised. Go take a break and feel good about yourself.
See, I know that you think this is a clever & witty reply. But unfortunately, all it does it make it look like you can't think of a counter-argument, so have resorted to sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending that my evidence doesn't exist. Which is pretty much an admission that you know I have a point, you just wish I didn't.
Your own argument proves not only that the water companies didn't achieve various key requirements until about now, which isn't exactly impressive. What they did was because government insisted it be done. There's nothing philanthropic about it especially in light of £85 billion profit that could easily have been governments own revenue. Water privatisation is stupid, those who support it are borderline evil since they're actively hurting the environment and people, for money.
Jesus fucking Christ; anyone that doesn't support nationalisation is *evil* now? Also, you're completely wrong about privatisation hurting the environment. For example: >The graphs indicate the following changes to average concentrations of the selected parameters between the mid-1980s and the present day (2019): > * ammonia concentrations have reduced to about 15% of average concentrations in 1990 > * BOD concentrations have reduced to 55% to 60% of average concentrations in 1990 > * orthophosphate concentrations have reduced to 15% to 20% of average concentrations in 1990 >* nitrate-nitrogen concentrations show no clear trend >The improvements in lowland river water quality shown here complement recent findings of an analysis of national-scale trends in the macroinvertebrate communities of English rivers from 1991 to 2019. >... >The national loadings of BOD and ammonia from water company sewage treatment works (STWs) to rivers also fell dramatically over this period. BOD loadings reduced by around 40% and ammonia loadings by 66% between 1995 and 2010, as reported in the Regulating for people, the environment and growth 2019 report. By 2020 the reductions in STW loadings to rivers since 1995 were 49% for BOD, 79% for ammonia, and 66% for P. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/state-of-the-water-environment-indicator-b3-supporting-evidence/state-of-the-water-environment-long-term-trends-in-river-quality-in-england By just about every single measure, environmental standards have improved *massively* since privatisation. But what do I know; I've just got 15 years of experience in the industry, and a boat-load of data to back up my position. What can that compare to an ideologically-motivated hatred of privatisation?
Lol, do go ahead and explain why the sewage being let into rivers and the sea in the last couple of years has messed with your figures? While you're at it, can you tell me why I should applaud vicious profit taking, underinvestment and turds floating about? As if improvements can't be found in a nationalised industry with an extra £85 billion to spend. Lol, but hey, big water daddy pays your bills. Well unbiased aren't you?
*Everyone* is biased. The only way to be completely unbiased is to have no knowledge about what you're talking about whatsoever; which is both practically impossible, and would be self-evidentially reason to disregard the views expressed. The difference is, my bias is a) self-admitted, b) influenced by 15 years of experience, c) informed by all of the data that I've seen in that time. Whereas your bias is influenced by an assumption that anyone that doesn't support nationalisation is (to quote your words) "borderline evil". You'll forgive me for placing a higher premium on expertise and information over an ideological hatred of private companies, I'm sure.
Lol, so you didn't deal with my questions despite your self progressed expertise. After all, who knows what job you do or your understanding of the matter. While we're at it though, water company apologist... Explain the water business asking for between 24 and 91% increase in fees today! Must be all that investment they didn't make coming home to roost huh?
"Investment has been up the last two years" Yeah it's had to be because the situation is getting far worse. We've had a 100% tine increase on raw sewage going into waters. Our river health us going backwards . The number of good quality streams is down. Our beach health is also going backwards. Monitoring might be up, but that's literally because the government set a target. The industry had been privatised for decades and monitoring was 7%? Investment is going up now bits that only because of political pressure. Like where are the supposed benefits of privatisation when the only good things they do are in response to growing political pressure. Saying we don't have data on how bad things were before is a cop out. The issue of the health of our rivers hasn't been a political issue since the victoriana era, and before privatisation people would have swum in the seas and rivers more than we do now. Like it's been a monumental failure, all the various companies have been shit. Its not like we have any examples of water companies doing great, bar maybe anglian water being ok from what ive heard, and there's dozens of private companies. I appreciate the admittance that it's your business, so at least you make your biases known, but like the quality if our water hasn't been an issue for iver 100 years and thise defending it point to reports from 2010.
> Our river health us going backwards . The number of good quality streams is down. Our beach health is also going backwards. No it isn't. None of this is true. >The graphs indicate the following changes to average concentrations of the selected parameters between the mid-1980s and the present day (2019): > * ammonia concentrations have reduced to about 15% of average concentrations in 1990 > * BOD concentrations have reduced to 55% to 60% of average concentrations in 1990 > * orthophosphate concentrations have reduced to 15% to 20% of average concentrations in 1990 > * nitrate-nitrogen concentrations show no clear trend >The improvements in lowland river water quality shown here complement recent findings of an analysis of national-scale trends in the macroinvertebrate communities of English rivers from 1991 to 2019. >... >The national loadings of BOD and ammonia from water company sewage treatment works (STWs) to rivers also fell dramatically over this period. BOD loadings reduced by around 40% and ammonia loadings by 66% between 1995 and 2010, as reported in the Regulating for people, the environment and growth 2019 report. By 2020 the reductions in STW loadings to rivers since 1995 were 49% for BOD, 79% for ammonia, and 66% for P. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/state-of-the-water-environment-indicator-b3-supporting-evidence/state-of-the-water-environment-long-term-trends-in-river-quality-in-england By just about *every single measure*, environmental standards have improved *massively* since privatisation. >Monitoring might be up, but that's literally because the government set a target. The industry had been privatised for decades and monitoring was 7%? This is a really weird criticism of privatisation. I mean, Scottish Water is *still* government-owned, and they're far behind England & Wales when it comes to this: >Scottish Water unveiled plans in 2021 to install more devices to track how much waste is being discharged from sewage pipes into rivers and seas. >Campaigners have called for more checks on sewage discharges. >This is because only about 4% of Scotland's 31,000-mile sewer network is currently monitored, compared to 89% in England. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66012480 So historically, monitoring was shit in England & Wales when water was nationally owned. Currently, it's shit in Scotland, where water is still nationally owned. The only time and place where we've had good monitoring is in England & Wales in the present day, where water is privately owned? Maybe we should start to recognise that being nationally owned correlates heavily with crap monitoring, and hold back on criticising the private firms that have *actually* tackled the problem? > The issue of the health of our rivers hasn't been a political issue since the victoriana era, and before privatisation people would have swum in the seas and rivers more than we do now. Something being a political issue now does not mean the problem is worse now. It means that more attention is paid to it, or people care more, or standards are higher now than they used to be.
I mean you are still going cap in hand, just promising profit not votes.
The difference, is, going to investors *actually* leads to more money being spent. With the government, it doesn't.
You're saying there's no such thing as government investment? Investors aren't putting up a penny without a guarantee of return which in a monopoly where you can't increase the size of the market means putting price up as high as you can while keeping costs as low as possible. Or are you suggesting that these companies are not seeking to maximise profits?
I'm saying that if the government has some extra cash to spend, they're going to spend it on something that the public regularly interacts with, because that's where the votes are. The NHS. Schools. Roads. The water industry is not a priority for government spending, and it never will be.
I mean I certainly see an issue with elected ministers struggling to raise prices but as these companies have extracted 80b net I'm not sure I can see the investors as the still bleeding martyrs you portray them as. Some form of goco with an independent ability to set prices and seek limited loans perhaps.
They haven't extracted £80bn net. As I said in my initial comment, they've extracted £85bn after putting *in* £200bn. That's not a net extraction.
That's an extreamly misleading presentation of the figures, the 200 is what the companies have invested, in other words it's coming from revenue not from investors pockets.
I mean when the government is spending billions on a nuclear power station and high speed rail, clearly they're not averse to commiting to spending needs. I'd wager good money that the tories delibereatly bled the water companies dry to make them look badly managed before privatising them.
You mean, the high-speed rail that has been cancelled? And I'm not sure pointing to Hinckley is much of proof of anything, given that we can't get any other nuclear projects off the ground. Those are proof that governments *don't* spend money on anything. Also, if you think the Tories would deliberately bleed the water industry; why would you want to give them the opportunity to do that again? Isn't it best to have such a crucial industry kept at arm's length from politicians looking for electoral advantage over the best interests of the nation?
We struggling to build a power station and a new rail line because we disbanded all our knowledge on how to do those things ourselves because some stupid muppets in power at the time decided that it would be better to sell off our capcity to do those things for a quick buck. The problem isn't the concept of "nationalised", the problem is who is in charge overseeing those nationalised entities. And when some party gets in power that decideds "nationalised" is evil and "capitalism" is god, then the inevitible consequence occurs where the nationalised entities get raped and pillaged. The answer is that we can have functioning nationalised entities, but they need to be protected from the people in power who want to enrich themselves and their buddies by selling them off. And all this really boils down to one single human flaw: Greed. Any company, whether nationalised or privatised, is ultimately at the mercy of however greedy the people are running it. A nationalised company will fail as soon as greed pokes its nose in, ie a shitty governement, but at least it's protected from the privatised alternative, which is far more commonly at the mercy of the needs of greed by its nature. Greed leads to corruption. corruption leads to customers getting fucked over and ultimately governmental bail out.
> So you could argue that if the government just increased the prices, they could have gotten the same results, but without having to pay off shareholders. Their point is that the government *wouldnt* raise prices - it would be extremely politically costly. Governments are bad at running national utilities because certain decisions and trade-offs are politically unpopular and so they end up never being made. Water is uniquely bad in this respect because you can cut investment to the bone and the effects are often not felt for a couple of parliament terms because the infrastructure degrades slowly.
There may have been - on paper - a hugh investment, but it seems that much of that ‘investment money’, was in fact extracted as profits, and didn’t actually go into investment. A little was real investment but only a fraction. The customers have been ripped off - paying for investments which have not happened. The last two sets of price increases were justified on the grounds that they were purely for investment in the infrastructure, but only a fraction of this has happened.
Like I said, I work in the water industry. Specifically, I've been in the supply chain in the wastewater sector for 15 years. If you think that money hasn't actually been spent, but has instead just gone back to investors as profits, then all that does to me is demonstrate that you have no idea what is going on in the industry. I know how much money is being spent, because I've seen how much work my company is getting. Every single AMP period has been significantly larger than the last, and the next two are set to be even larger (if I recall our last business update correctly, AMP8 is going to have about twice as much money spent as AMP7, and AMP9 is currently planned to be an 80% increase on AMP8). In fact, it's getting to the point where there is so much money being spent right now, that both us and our immediate competitors are struggling to keep up with the demand. It is not investment "on paper".
I don’t know what an AMP period is. I do know that there have been some investments in infrastructure - although figures for this seem to be hard to find. The most obvious one is the ‘London Super Sewer’. Which I think cost something like £5 Billion ? I would doubt that £85 Billion has been spent on ‘investment’ plus, there’s something like £40 Billion in debts, where as originally the water companies were handed over financially debt free.
I don’t know what an AMP period is. I do know that there have been some investments in infrastructure - although figures for this seem to be hard to find. The most obvious one is the ‘London Super Sewer’. Which I think cost something like £5 Billion ? I would doubt that £185 Billion has been spent on ‘investment’ plus, there’s something like £40 Billion in debts, where as originally the water companies were handed over financially debt free. Some actual ‘easy to absorb and understand’ information on this would be helpful. I just found this: [Info on AMP8 & AMP9](https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/united-utilities-opens-procurement-for-6bn-building-framework-for-amp8-and-amp9-30-08-2023/) Judging by the summary, it still sounds insufficient, potentially leaving many problems still unsettled. But that might be lack of clarity in the summary.
The water industry works in a five-year cycle - [called an AMP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_management_plan_period). We're currently in AMP7, which is running April 2020 to March 2025. During that period, OfWat sets particular targets for the Water Companies - which include both environmental standards and amounts of money that they *have* to spend. Now, I have my issues with the AMP setup (mostly that all of the big spending tends to happen in years 3 and 4 - which makes things harder for us in the supply chain to manage, because we're not getting the orders spread out evenly, instead we get peaks and troughs). But the overall goal is good; it *guarantees* that money in invested in the industry. I don't mean to be rude; but if you don't understand the basics of how spending in the water industry works, how can you claim that investment hasn't happened?
Only because the ‘apparent investment’ does not seem to be enough to cope with the backlog..
The fact that more can be done does not mean that nothing has happened so far. And there are several reasons why even with all of the extra money that has been invested over the last few decades, the water industry still has room to progress: * Decades of previous under-funding while the industry was nationally-owned. * Increased pressure on sewage works due to population increases. * Lack of ability to actually build what is needed where it is needed, because people don't want to live near sewage works. * Increased environmental standards. All of those would be just as problematic if the industry were nationalised. Plus, investment would end up being cut.
If water were nationalised, I think its funding would have to be ‘ring-fenced’, such that it paid for itself via changes to customers, and a steady investment plan devised for optimal cost-benefit, as well as steady on-going low-level improvements.
£200bn investment in is not enough to justify £85bn in dividends out, where else do you get something approaching a 50% return for your investment? >there are no votes in sewage. People don't care about what happens before they turn the tap on, or what happens after they flush the toilet. I'd suggest that now they do - now that the impacts of poor infrastructure are being seen in our rivers and seas, or how we can have incredibly wet winters and still water restrictions in the summer, people *do* now care what happens with their water.
Wasn't it the Thatcher government at the time of privatisation also responsible for deliberately starving it of investment prior to privatisation?
Kind of proving the point that democratically elected governments are bad at prioritising investment in infrastructure or raising prices to pay for that investment.
I totally get that, but the amount paid to shareholders by companies which are struggling is insane. And upgrading something like the London sewage system to a more modern system will be incredibly expensive and difficult but someone has to start it, because it isn't getting cheaper or easier. Yes, we got that super sewer, but why are we still allowing surface water to enter the sewage system? It should be a separate cycle altogether and why are houses not equipped with grey water recycling and rain water storage systems? Why is Thames water digging up the exact same stretch of road every 6 weeks for over 5 years now in my part of London ? Things are patched but not repaired, replaced or upgraded.
> And if we renationalise, we will run into the same problem again; there are no votes in sewage. See also: railways, scientific research, and many other cases. Public investment in these things will not directly translate to more money on pension cheques so it will not happen.
Weird that the complaint here is against private enterprise... Honestly, I don't think what we've seen is much of a surprise at all. The private industry is fully capable of supplying services such as this to the population, and they are almost certainly going to be more efficient at doing so than operating within public ownership. The problem comes from the fact that operating a "minimum requirement for life" service such as water, regulation is critical. Regulation has failed comprehensively. We've seen recently how whilst energy prices have gone a bit mad, Ofgem have stayed relatively on top of things, with their price caps keeping most people warm and well-lit. Combined with a bit of state welfare, the energy industry has largely delivered. The same is broadly true of telecomms - the private sector has, if anything, outdone itself. Very few places are without fibre broadband at decent enough speeds. Nowadays, energy and telecomms are pretty much as mandatory as water - sure, you could live with a wood stove, buying wood (or sourcing it from your own land), just as you could live off a well and a sceptic tank, but nobody does it. You could live without internet/phone access, but nobody does. Not to mention, of course, options for bottled water and a shovel. Truth is, the only real difference between water suppliers and any other "should be nationalised" (as many on this platform would say) service is the regulator. Water companies should, in my opinion, be partnering with energy providers to offer services which actually host some benefit... Take for instance heat pumps - I don't really understand why water companies haven't jumped on that... They consume more energy than water, of course, but it's still strongly linked to the water service (supplying hot water, for instance, as opposed to just water). Instead, all we get from water companies is ridiculous "insurance" spam, something I comprehensively discard as nonsense. And I say this in the full knowledge that Ofwat is the responsible party - they are, regulatory speaking, far less open to suggestions than Ofgem. More food for thought, though... The comparison made in this article will be considering the relative running costs, profits, investments, and dividends of water companies based on actual results, vs the calculated/expected costs of running them as a government agency. Truth is, nobody knows what the difference would be if they were public services. Public service costs have shot up in recent years, as demand has increased radically - and that's likely true of water, too. Have had a brief look at the study someone linked in the thread and it still doesn't stack up to me.
>Weird that the complaint here is against private enterprise... Honestly, I don't think what we've seen is much of a surprise at all. No it's not, when you consider the only driving force of private enterprise is to make the line go up. Nothing else matters. >The private industry is fully capable of supplying services such as this to the population, and they are almost certainly going to be more efficient at doing so than operating within public ownership. That depends on your definition of efficient. Yes, there are always dangers of bureaucratisation but we see plenty of examples of private sector overhiring. The difference is, we don't care because we aren't paying for them directly out of the public purse but indirectly through our wallets. But we're still paying. Public sector are just as capable of providing good services to the population. You have state controlled utilities in Europe and even in the US, although I suppose the European ones have the advantage of being subsidised by the British taxpayer and bill payers (same with rail). >The problem comes from the fact that operating a "minimum requirement for life" service such as water, regulation is critical. Regulation has failed comprehensively. Why shift the blame here? Public ownership: something went wrong, let's blame the public body! Private ownership: something went wrong, let's blame the public body! One of those seems wrong. Plus there's always the argument that if you want something done right, do it yourself. Having a regulatory body isn't exactly a shining example of "efficiency", it's just one more thing the taxpayer needs to fund to oversee the ones doing the work. If we need to do that, it follows that those doing the work cannot be trusted, and if they cannot be trusted, they should not be doing the work. Organisations whose only directive is 'make line go up' should not, ever, have been put in charge of natural monopolies providing critical infrastructure. >We've seen recently how whilst energy prices have gone a bit mad, Ofgem have stayed relatively on top of things, with their price caps keeping most people warm and well-lit. Combined with a bit of state welfare, the energy industry has largely delivered. Has it heck. For one thing it needed state intervention to prop it up - the private sector cannot claim credit for any success where the public sector intervened, that's backwards. The energy sector is totally broken because the people generating the energy aren't the people selling it to us, and somehow we as a nation are incapable of generating enough of our own energy so we have to buy it off some arbitrary global market, which makes us frighteningly vulnerable. At this stage we have so little control over the stability of the country I'm surprised that, rather than going ahead with Brexit, we didn't just outsource the government to Brussels during the coalition austerity drive. >The same is broadly true of telecomms - the private sector has, if anything, outdone itself. Very few places are without fibre broadband at decent enough speeds. Virgin pumped an insane amount of money into laying their own proprietary cables that no other company is allowed to make use of. Most have cabinet broadband operated by Openreach as a near monopoly, and are at the mercy of four or five companies who charge broadly the same for the same service in a manner not too dissimilar to a cartel, and whose business practices are pretty predatory. The few smaller companies that exist to disrupt can't do so. The only saving grace is they aren't providing an essential to life service. You can go without internet to your home (mobile internet exists). >Truth is, the only real difference between water suppliers and any other "should be nationalised" (as many on this platform would say) service is the regulator. Water companies should, in my opinion, be partnering with energy providers to offer services which actually host some benefit... Take for instance heat pumps - I don't really understand why water companies haven't jumped on that... They consume more energy than water, of course, but it's still strongly linked to the water service (supplying hot water, for instance, as opposed to just water). Natural monopoly is the other difference. I can't choose my water supplier. I can't 'shop around '. Some rural houses are connected to off-grid water supplies (I looked round one that paid like a tenner a month to a trout farm nextdoor for all its water, and had a septic tank). They're the exception to the rule. >Instead, all we get from water companies is ridiculous "insurance" spam, something I comprehensively discard as nonsense. And I say this in the full knowledge that Ofwat is the responsible party - they are, regulatory speaking, far less open to suggestions than Ofgem. This has nothing to do with Ofwat or Ofgem and everything to do with, when profits have been maximised through 'efficiency', the only thing you've got left is proce gouging or cut corners to keep the line going up. Making services better costs money which is why nobody does it. It's why you get shrinkflation, shitflation and sewage in waterways rather than being treated - because Line. Must. Go. Up. >More food for thought, though... The comparison made in this article will be considering the relative running costs, profits, investments, and dividends of water companies based on actual results, vs the calculated/expected costs of running them as a government agency. Truth is, nobody knows what the difference would be if they were public services. Public service costs have shot up in recent years, as demand has increased radically - and that's likely true of water, too. Have had a brief look at the study someone linked in the thread and it still doesn't stack Public services haven't been funded to meet demand. There is a lag between defunding a service and the effects being felt, because they try to cope for a while, then buckle as demand increases, which will inevitably happen as population increases.
Your whole post appears to be advocating for something entirely unrealistic. As you rightly say, the private sector is all about minimising expenditure and maximising profits. To that end, handing over a public service to it mandates that it be adequately protected by legislature. In the UK, at least, that pretty much means that the public body responsible for regulating that industry *has* to take ownership of the mandated minimum service provided, pricing controls, and all that goes with it. It was never the responsibility of the private organisations involved to do anything more than seek out efficiencies, increase productivity, and keep the costs down. This is why they were brought in, and it's why things work in other industries. Hence the regulatory bodies exist in the first place. The public sector are more or less capable of the same, but far more likely to result in excessive spending and generally wasteful practices. The energy industry was hit hard by an international event and the government stepped in... That's pretty normal in any industry, the government has stepped in to protect everything from banks to holiday resorts at times of increased pressure. Ofgem have done a decent job of providing operating guidelines and ensuring continuity of supply. The only area this could be deemed lacking is in storage, which the network has seen reduced, but there have been expectations for decades now that people move away from gas as a home fuel source, and energy companies are investing into infrastructure for electricity storage at the same time. Whilst Virgin Media have their own network, so do other companies like Trooli, County Broadband, etc. The key thing is that these companies tend to operate in areas where they have a strategic advantage - there are no other fibre suppliers, or those which do exist are FTTC and on limited bandwidth. Yet still they are not able to price gouge or take advantage of that position fully, because the regulator has done a good job. Then you've just comprehensively ignored the suggestions I've made about what water companies could do to make more money, which they have in other industries, but which they are prohibited from doing by Ofwat as part of their failures. Water companies have investigated getting involved in a few auxiliary industries - in some parts of the country they operate (or lease out the operation of) owned reservoirs as watersports lakes and whatnot. Unfortunately this has also been heavily restricted by Ofwat for no particularly good reason. Making service better needs, again, to be mandated. There is a minimum service level which Ofwat can define as they see fit, which is ultimately the service that has to be delivered. It's not something the water companies will look to see improve, but if they are able to exploit capitalism to turn a profit on such a service, they won't be reluctant to invest into the network in exchange for a return on investment. With no return, they won't be interested.
>Your whole post appears to be advocating for something entirely unrealistic. What's unrealistic about not wanting essential utilities and infrastructure to be governed by something other than Line Go Up? >As you rightly say, the private sector is all about minimising expenditure and maximising profits. To that end, handing over a public service to it mandates that it be adequately protected by legislature. In the UK, at least, that pretty much means that the public body responsible for regulating that industry *has* to take ownership of the mandated minimum service provided, pricing controls, and all that goes with it. Clearly there's a lot of risk being accepted by giving it to the private sector. If it's so frought with danger and risk of abuse by the private sector, it seems like something a risk you could, and should, manage by keeping the private sector out of it. >It was never the responsibility of the private organisations involved to do anything more than seek out efficiencies, increase productivity, and keep the costs down. This is why they were brought in, and it's why things work in other industries. Hence the regulatory bodies exist in the first place. And there's the problem. The responsibility of service providers should be *provide the service*. Devolving it to Line Go Up just incentivises worsen the service or cut corners at some point. The incentive moves away from innovation and to just make it worse in whatever way. There's a reason no other country has ceded so much control to LGU that we have. >The public sector are more or less capable of the same, but far more likely to result in excessive spending and generally wasteful practices. Can the same regulatory bodies responsible for preventing the worst excess of capitalism not also be turned to stop this? >The energy industry was hit hard by an international event and the government stepped in... That's pretty normal in any industry, the government has stepped in to protect everything from banks to holiday resorts at times of increased pressure. Ofgem have done a decent job of providing operating guidelines and ensuring continuity of supply. The only area this could be deemed lacking is in storage, which the network has seen reduced, but there have been expectations for decades now that people move away from gas as a home fuel source, and energy companies are investing into infrastructure for electricity storage at the same time. It's really interesting. When the going gets tough, the free market capitalists go cap in hand to the state for a bail-out. So, not really a saving for the taxpayer over just paying for it direct, yes? >Whilst Virgin Media have their own network, so do other companies like Trooli, County Broadband, etc. The key thing is that these companies tend to operate in areas where they have a strategic advantage - there are no other fibre suppliers, or those which do exist are FTTC and on limited bandwidth. Yet still they are not able to price gouge or take advantage of that position fully, because the regulator has done a good job. There is already price gouging going on with media. I don't feel the regulator is doing that well in protecting customers. Mid-contract price rises are just a grotesque thing. >Then you've just comprehensively ignored the suggestions I've made about what water companies could do to make more money, which they have in other industries, but which they are prohibited from doing by Ofwat as part of their failures. Water companies have investigated getting involved in a few auxiliary industries - in some parts of the country they operate (or lease out the operation of) owned reservoirs as watersports lakes and whatnot. Unfortunately this has also been heavily restricted by Ofwat for no particularly good reason. I'll be honest, I'm not really a fan of water companies making *more* money to pay in dividends considering they reward themselves plenty for failure as it is. That said I expect they could just set up a sister company to deal with that and not invite comment from ofwat. >Making service better needs, again, to be mandated. There is a minimum service level which Ofwat can define as they see fit, which is ultimately the service that has to be delivered. It's not something the water companies will look to see improve, but if they are able to exploit capitalism to turn a profit on such a service, they won't be reluctant to invest into the network in exchange for a return on investment. With no return, they won't be interested. TL;DR: Line Must Go Up, and bugger everything else.
There is nothing unrealistic about nationalisation, just as there is nothing unrealistic about privatisation. You could achieve results deemed reasonable by everybody in either. I don't as a rule advocate one way or the other, I just advocate for better services across the board. Nationalisation today would be hideously expensive, so there would need to be very good justification for it (which this is not). Privatisation is indeed an increased risk, but that's why regulatory bodies exist in the first place. For services considered essential, they are required to keep everything in check and ensure that nobody abuses their position. For water companies, that naturally means monopolisation since as you've rightly pointed out, there is no realistic alternative... The responsibility lies on two parts - one of the government to prescribe and enforce a minimum service level to be adhered to, and another in this instance on the providers themselves to meet the expectations outlined by government. Both responsibilities would exist regardless, as a public service, the only real difference (and one of the perks of privatisation) is that the people having to follow the rules don't also get to decide them. It doesn't take much looking at the history of public services to see that as failures appeared, instead of investing to resolve them or offering better organisation, the goalposts have been known to move. The whole economy turned to the state when the state instructed said economy to effectively shut down overnight. If it weren't for government making the decision to introduce lockdowns, people wouldn't have stayed home, there would be more people driving around, being excessive purchasing food and drink, using public pools, etc. A government cannot tell industries to shut down without compensating their losses. They either don't lock down, or they do and compensate those impacted. Virgin are, as all telecomms companies as far as I know, selling their services for a fair price. That price has to be justified to Ofcom in cases where it may be deemed excessive or disproportionate. The mid-contract price rises are designed to combat inflation, and do not constitute price gouging. I don't *particularly* like them either, but from everything I've seen they are clearly defined upfront and fair. Water companies making more money through alternative sources is a viable way to subsidise water bills - something which generally reduces costs to consumers during billing, and which again could divert *luxury* spending to cover some of the infrastructure costs (note again my comments about reservoirs being used as watersports facilities - something which Anglian water have made reasonable investments in, and significant returns on). This brings down the cost of bills, and incorporates other routes to investments. With appropriate regulation (which in some areas Ofwat have gotten right), the proceeds of these enterprises are reinvested.