WATER UK’S lobbying for steeper rises in bills exposes the private sector’s utter inability to clean up the mess they have made of our water supply.
Public ownership of water is already “common sense” — it’s the norm in almost every country on Earth, including even that “free market” exemplar, the United States, and is backed by a huge majority of the British public every time we are asked.
But a political class in thrall to corporate interests and greedy for the rewards — Water UK’s chair, we should remember, is former Labour minister Ruth Kelly — has a never-ending stream of excuses for leaving this essential resource in private hands.
The industry group’s CEO David Henderson reveals, in his own appeal for higher bills, how this cripples any bid to fix a broken system.
“There is a material risk that the sector is unable to raise the new equity investment required to finance the proposed investment programme … this would hamper the sector’s ability to deliver the environmental and service improvements expected.”
Translated: unless we can offer the mainly foreign assortment of investment firms a handsome profit extracted at ordinary people’s expense, they see no reason to maintain, repair or upgrade the infrastructure (which they did not build) needed to supply us with water (which, needless to say, they do not produce).
Labour in opposition said renationalising water would be too expensive and lump the public with the cost of debt accumulated by the water companies. But relying on the profit motive to attract investment is much more expensive for the public, with the cost of their profits and dividends being added to our water bills.
It’s those that we’re paying for. Global Infrastructure Investor Association chief executive Jon Phillips is deeply disingenuous when he claims regulator Ofwat has traditionally “prioritised low bills at the expense of investing in the resilience of the sector” and “can’t continue to penalise water companies for not meeting expectations without equipping them with means to provide the solution,” the latter apparently a reference to the hundreds of millions in fines issued recently to Thames Water, Yorkshire Water and Northumbria Water for discharging raw sewage into our rivers.
Water bills have risen 40 per cent above inflation since the sector was privatised by Margaret Thatcher. Since bills have not been held down, this cannot be the reason water companies have not had the money to maintain the infrastructure.
That might instead have something to do with the over £70 billion in dividends paid out since privatisation. Fining companies for recklessly poisoning our rivers and seas, polluting ecosystems and increasingly threatening human health, is a nonsense if it has to be combined with letting them charge us more to undo the damage.
The water privateers are holding us to ransom, knowing we need this resource and, with water management and environmental stability growing problems because of climate change, we need these upgrades.
Paying up means imposing yet another compulsory rise in the cost of living on tens of millions of people, to entrust vital work to a bunch of pirates whose track record is proof they can’t be trusted with our money.
How can Labour be made to renationalise? MPs should note last September’s Survation poll, which found 56 per cent said the sewage scandal would affect their vote. And the vote for the then Tory government did indeed collapse, gifting Labour hundreds of seats despite its own vote falling too. Water is Labour’s problem now.
River Action has called a march for clean water on October 26. It’s not a labour movement march: but the left and unions should mobilise for it.
Popular outrage over the state of our water is acute, but that needs condensing into political pressure to take our water back — something only combined union and street power is likely to achieve.
