Posted by xrayarx 7 days ago
What the article doesn’t mention is that pre-privatisation a new reservoir was built every year up to about 1960 and then every few years until privatisation in 1992.
So we are about 30 years behind in adding capacity to the system. This combined with the inadequate levels of investment in the system leading to enormous wastage, is the answer.
Water should never have been privatised. At least not without a framework for a national strategy for water. I suspect that wasn’t done because it would have made water companies and unattractive source of profit.
I think the neglect and failure to invest in infrastructure is the worst because unlike high bills or increasing numbers of people not being served it's more or less invisible to the public while companies and shareholders rake in a lot of money, but doing that causes problems tax payers end up footing the bill for down the road, and it may not always be obvious to the public what the cause was.
A power company who makes profit by neglecting the condition of their power lines can cause a wild fire, but it takes a lot of time, taxpayer money, and luck to identify that the lines were the source of the fire, to discover that the company knew (or should have known) about the problem and done something about it, to get enough proof of those things that a lawsuit is possible, and to fight it out in court in order to hold the company accountable. It's not just the cost of fire the public is on the hook for in that case, but the costs of everything else too.
Cumulative capital investment by water companies in England and Wales since privatisation: £250bn.
The infrastructure they inherited was never designed for the things it's being asked to do today, and it has a life expectancy. It would literally cost trillions to upgrade the entire sewerage system.
This isn't apologia, it's just reality. The road network will also face the same fate since much of it was built >50 years ago and has a life expectancy of roughly 50 years. The country simply can't afford to replace it.
Then dump untreated sewerage in rivers and demand more money from bill payers, because they “can’t afford” to maintain the infrastructure.
In most industries a company so poorly managed would lose customers, go bankrupt, and be replaced by a better run company. But water companies? They have a monopoly, and everyone needs water to live.
My provider is Thames Water. They are losing money.
According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgleg70r7rno
> When Thames was privatised in 1989, it had no debt. But over the years it borrowed heavily and its total debt - which includes all of its borrowings and liabilities - now stands at £22.8bn, according to latest financial results, external.
> Its debt pile increased sharply when Macquarie, an Australian infrastructure bank, owned Thames Water, with debts reaching more than £10bn by the time the company was sold in 2017.
According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41152516
> Macquarie and its investors paid £5.1bn for Thames Water, of which £2.8bn was money Macquarie had borrowed [...] £2bn had subsequently been repaid. Not by Macquarie and its investors, who had originally borrowed the money, but from new borrowings raised by Thames Water through a Cayman Islands subsidiary.
> Martin Blaiklock said: "That letter was a red flag to me because it showed clearly that the debt which Macquarie funds had used to buy Thames Water had been transferred over to Thames Water." [...]
> the total returns made by the bank and its investors from Thames Water averaged between 15.5% and 19% a year. Mr Blaiklock has 40 years of experience in such matters and said these returns were "twice what one would normally expect"
According to https://news.sky.com/story/approval-for-higher-bills-and-loa...
> The company, which has been crumbling under a £16bn debt pile, was due to run out of money in about a month's time. It has now received court approval for another £3bn loan [...] the company's gearing ratio is 80% and its annual debt interest bill is around £900m (about a third of the revenue it gets from customer bills) [...]
> The water regulator has sanctioned bill increases of 35% by 2030.
> However, Thames wants more. It is seeking a 53% increase, which would take the average bill to £677 a year
This stuff's all pretty widely documented and reported, if your idea of fun is getting angry and depressed while also reading about business accounting.
Ofc, that doesn't claw back the billions that the PE pirates made off with, but at least the UK wouldn't have to pay them even more to get its water supply under control again.
[0] even if the UK had to pay market value for it, the market value for a business so drowning in debt would be close to zero.
Are they losing money because costs exceed revenue, or are they losing money because they are servicing massive loan interest on money they already distributed to shareholders?
https://www.thameswater.co.uk/media-library/l13deqmw/thames-...
> £1,271 million of expected credit loss provision recognised against the intercompany loan receivable from TWUL’s immediate parent company, Thames Water Utilities Holdings Limited. This balance is fully provided for, as it is not deemed recoverable
However, any money paid to shareholders while accumulating debt, including deferred maintenance, etc was financial smoke and mirrors not actual profit.
but apparently not if you wrap it in half a dozen companies in various tax havens
(that have no legitimate purpose other than various types of laundering)
Poor shareholders, mainly Ontario Municipal retirement fund pensioners, who are the biggest ones (32%) and retired British academics (20%).
They are a scam operation, frankly.
In 2023 their interest payments were 28% of revenue. They also made the news for dumping particularly large volumes of sewage into rivers.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/dec/18/water-firms-us...
Yes and they have been fined for doing so, thus proving my point. These companies have statutory obligations. See the Water Industry Act 1991 and subsequent legislation.
I'm having a hard time reconciling the theoretical claims made in the thread with the blinding light of what actually happened.
Many people claim these things happen because "shareholders" however it was completely widespread practice to dump sewage before privatisation and the system is literally designed to do so. This doesn't make it OK, however.
Sure, the sewers might not currently be designed that way, but that can be changed. (It's a logistical challenge, but it needs to be done.)
How does it add anything to the conversation?
That’s true for all organizations.
British water companies are in lots of debt because they aren't really private. They're forced to spend huge sums to repair Victorian-era infrastructure whilst the government sets the prices they're allowed to charge. Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment, resulting in a huge accumulation of debt.
This is exactly what would have also happened if the water companies were not privatized, so the fake "privatization" is a red herring. It's the expected outcome of price controls, not whether the utilities are owned by the state or not.
> Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment, resulting in a huge accumulation of debt.
Bloody Tories, the whole problem isn't that they were in charge for 32 years from 1979-2024, it's the 13 years of Blair. They have been powerless to stop the spooky Left and fix the pipes before the water was privatised (or anything afterwards, because obviously it's still the Left)!
Oh boy. That's funny.
> much of their base having defected to Reform.
Yes, they found a party they will say the quiet bits out loud, so they don't feel as uncomfortable being bigots and racists.
They have had plenty of time to replace them.
Bullocks. All of your argument is bullocks
You honestly believe this? If so: Jesus H. Christ!
Turns out I was wrong, all it takes is to no-true-scotsman everything into the "bad wrong left wing" bucket on the quest to move the overton window ever rightwards. Hilarious. The mental gymnastics knows no bounds.
The post office in the United States is not privatized and yet has been able to set prices in a way that sustains the business for centuries. You can't simply assume that all public entities will ignore fiscal reality.
In fact you may run into the opposite problem: when a utility is public, their debts appear on the government balance sheet and legislators are responsible for them. When it's spun off as a quasi-private monopoly, the government can impose debt on the utility without appearing to increase the public debt.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/6407
The US is a very right wing country. It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls. Maybe with Mamdani that's now changing.
The reasons why Western systems often don't recoup even operating expenses, let alone capital costs, from fares are because transit is a public service with public externalities. Drivers on the road contribute to pollution and congestion, especially relevant in dense areas like London. Some level of subsidy is appropriate to account for the positive externalities of discouraging these negative outcomes while still encouraging regional mobility.
This is not to say TfL is as efficient as it could be; there is a well-documented capital costs crisis in the Anglosphere, particularly when it comes to transit. The issues here are more complex, though, than vote buying from an allegedly "socialist" mayor.
The freezes eliminated investment projects needed to keep pace with population growth. There's also just big problems maintaining the stations and doing more than the bare minimum needed to keep the lights on. Travel on it and the stations are dirty, overly hot, etc.
Drivers on London's roads are very heavily taxed already, supposedly to reflect those externalities. Public transport obviously also contributes to pollution and congestion, especially when building underground lines, it's not externality-free.
I don't think TfL has a cost crisis. Crossrail overran but that was mostly due to the software complexities of the signalling tech debt around the Heathrow tunnels and other issues that can affect any kind of project. It's just hard to tell right now because they can't build at all.
The fare freeze was broken by central government briefly, but only by bribing Khan with central government money for upgrades. Exactly the outcome he wanted!
Rather than placing price controls on private companies the US slashes taxes to the point where public services then cannot invest in infrastructure and maintenance - and then use that as an argument why public services should be privatized.
If tax cuts aren't populist policies I don't know what are. The magic trick of the right wing parties has been to sell tax cuts as a great thing to the very people who don't benefit from the cuts and are hurt by the fiscal fall-out. That and attaching themselves to Christianity while not following any of Jesus's teachings.
When a service is a monopoly there is no good reason for turning it into a for profit company outside of feathering the pockets of the rich. If the electricity supply to my house (and by extension my street and my city) is controlled by one company and they own the cabling and infrastructure then what is the motivation for them to not jack up my prices to generate profits to their shareholders, as they should as a shareholder owned company? What is their motivation for encouraging renewables or improving infrastructure when those would reduce profits and reduce shareholder value?
Mamdani hasn't even been voted in yet. Keep sowing that fear so that the people his policies might benefit don't actually vote for him - because he's a scary socialist (in the loosest, most American, definition).
So, governments of any color have to work with that as a constraint. Given that nobody has worked out how to convince everyone to accept big increases to their tax bills, you can either pay for new expenditures with borrowing or with cuts elsewhere. Sometimes cutting elsewhere is also hard, so either:
1. Everything gets put on the credit card. This ends badly.
2. Stuff is privatized. This yields an immediate cash influx, and voters are usually happy with the results which is why very few privatizations have been rolled back. The reason is that outside of very left wing spaces most people trust private companies on pricing much more than governments. Private companies run special offers, sales, sometimes cut prices even in the face of inflation and can be visibly seen competing on price. Government owned organizations never do this.
It's also (quietly) popular with governments on both left and right for another reason - it means they have less stuff to manage and less stuff that can blow up. If there's a problem with a privatized industry they can just tell you to switch to a competitor instead of needing to campaign on it and promise to do better.
Natural monopolies do exist and sometimes governments just have to bite the bullet and run such things themselves. But there's a lot of room to debate what is and isn't a natural monopoly.
They should try it. We desp3rately need to move the Overton window on this.
Tax is good. We need more of it. A screamingly obvious fact. Give us a chance, please, to vote for it.
In the US we have a problem with fantastically underpricing public roads. We don't expect their books to break even, much less generate a profit. Meanwhile everyone asks why train systems are not profitable.
> The US is a very right wing country.
Yeah, at least compared with most of Europe.
> It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls.
You didn't notice when the current president (somewhat successfully) bullied retailers into swallowing tariff-caused price increases, so they wouldn't damage his popularity? That almost seems right-wing socialist.
It's true that the US subsidizes its road network. The effect is somewhat different though. If TfL doesn't get enough money in due to price controls then the network just degrades. If the US subsidizes its roads, the network can be maintained using subsidies. For it to be equivalent, roads would have to be privately owned but unable to charge the true cost of maintenance.
I'm just going off what you said above:
> The US is a very right wing country. > It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls.
I don't think he is a traditional conservative either, but rather a right-wing nationalist ethno-socialist.
However, the fact is that he has the near unanimous support of most "textbook conservatives", both in Congress and in the broader Republican party, as evidenced by their voting for and supporting a massive debt-exploding budget and their silence in the face of his ethno-nationalist executive actions.
If he isn't a textbook conservative, neither are they.
> a textbook conservative, especially not economically
Wtf is a text book conservative supposed to be, exactly? And have we ever had one?
All the republicans in my life have raised the national debt and spent their time passing laws about culture war issues.
This is a myth that has the effect (intended or not) of normalizing Trump's economic policies with Bernie supporters.
Bernie Sanders only says that Trump speaks politically about the same working class struggles that he speaks about. That's it.
Bernie opposes 99% of Trump's actual economic policies, including the broad tariffs that are hitting the working class the hardest.
The only other economic policy Trump has done is tax cuts for the wealthy and cutting social safety net programs. Those are in direct conflict with everything Bernie stands for, but they are wholly supported by nearly all pre-Trump Republicans. If you have any doubts about that, just review the vote tally from the big beautiful bill.
But US politics plays out in many ways, including at the local level. For water supply who the POTUS is doesn't matter that much, it's not handled at the federal level. American political outcomes vs the rest of world are the result of long term social trends beyond any one man.
Only rhetorically, but that's just fodder for his blue collar base.
In practice he's done the opposite. His massive tax cuts for the wealthy and gutting of the social safety net is Reaganism/Thatcherism at its most explicit, and his broad tariffs are a tax on people who spend most of their income in survival.
This clearly isn't always true and when it does happen the public has the ability to require the transparency from their government to catch it happening quickly and the ability to hold the elected officials responsible for it accountable by voting them out and replacing them. Private corporations don't allow the level of transparency the public needs and aren't accountable to the public either.
Maybe the government could work out some deal that gives the public the right to put webcams in every meeting/board room of the private company, force their bookkeeping to be published to the internet, allow the public to request internal email and other communications, require independent audits/reports, and grant the public the ability to fire and replace any and all employees or executives at the private company who fail to do their jobs, but even then you'd still have the problem that private companies demand extra money on top of what is required to do the job just to line their own pockets. Why should we accept that?
The overwhelming majority of people would disagree that the Conservative Party can be described as "left". Since 1979, the Conservatives have been in power for all but 14 years.
I thought it was on the basis of the whole Nazi thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany#Neo-Na... Everyone except Nazis agrees that Nazis are inherently evil.
So far as I can make out, here in the UK the near-universal view is that the Conservatives are a centre-right party, Labour are somewhere between a centre-left and a just-plain-centre party (unsurprisingly, people who are further to the left see it as further to the right and vice versa), and Reform are a not-so-centre right party. (People who aren't Reform supporters would mostly describe them as far-right. Not many people like to use that sort of terminology to describe themselves, so people who are Reform supporters would say other things.)
Pretty much no one other than extreme rightists would describe the Conservatives as a centre-left party. Likewise, some people further to the left would describe Labour as a centre-right party. I think more people would do that than would describe the Conservatives as centre-left, but that may just reflect the people whose opinions I happen to be most exposed to.
(I mean, specifically, in the UK. Other countries have different overall political leanings. Someone in the US, comparing with the parties there, might accurately describe the Conservative Party as centre-left. But in terms of the UK political landscape: no, of course they are not a centre-left party.)
If an election were called tomorrow your next government would be Reform with a massive majority of 339 seats. It is the most popular party in the country by far. It would collect 33% of the vote vs Labour's 18% and the Conservatives would get only 17%, translating to their near-total destruction (only 35 seats).
Reform's popularity is driven by the belief that the Conservatives have become so captured by left wing "wets" that they cannot be fixed. Otherwise it makes no sense to split the right, and right wing voters there resisted doing so for a long time. The most commonly cited reason for switching to Reform is a belief that the Tories won't actually enact any right wing policies no matter what they say, and so that's a third of the country saying through their votes they think the Conservatives are a center-left party.
The fact that you believe "pretty much no one other than extreme rightists" has this view and that Labour is seen as a "centrist" party indicates that indeed, your gut feel is correct, and the people you know aren't a representative slice of the population. How many people do you hang out with regularly who read the Telegraph or Daily Mail? Maybe it's none?
If centrism means anything it means trying to adopt mid-way positions that appeal to the majority, but Labour's support for far-left ideology is so intense they're reacting to continuously dropping approval numbers by doubling down. That's not what centrists do, they chase votes, doubling down is what ideological extremists do. They'd rather drive their own party into the ground than compromise on modern left wing goals like unlimited mass immigration.
(Just remarking in passing on what a terrible electoral system we have in the UK. But, also, precisely because we have this terrible system, it is likely that a lot of the 67% who would prefer Reform not to win would, if there were actually an election tomorrow, vote for parties other than their first preference in the hope of keeping them out. Voters who don't like Reform often really don't like Reform.)
> that's a third of the country saying through their votes they think the Conservatives are a center-left party
Assuming for the sake of argument that it's actually true that 1/3 of voters would vote Reform if there were an election tomorrow (polled voting intentions far away from actual election dates aren't super-reliable) and that all those people agree with Reform about everything, that's 1/3 of the country who are to the right of the Conservatives.
That is not the same thing as 1/3 of the country thinking that the Conservatives are a centre-left party.
(There are plenty of people to the left of the Labour Party but wouldn't call them a centre-right party.)
Also, by your own numbers, we have: 33% to the right of the Conservatives; 17% to the left of the Conservatives; 60% voting for other parties, mostly the Lib Dems and Greens who are also to the left of the Conservatives, typically followed by the SNP and Plaid Cymru, also to the left of the Conservatives, and a few percent of random others most of whom are also to the left of the Conservatives.
A party that is to the right of (let's say) 55% of the electorate is not in any useful sense a centre-left party.
> Labour's support for far-left ideology is so intense they're reacting to continuously dropping approval numbers by doubling down
This is laughably different from anything that is actually happening. For instance:
> They'd rather drive their own party into the ground than compromise on modern left wing goals like unlimited mass immigration
Here is an instance from each of the last five months of the Labour Party demonstrating, or at least claiming, that it does not want unlimited mass immigration.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wgrv7pwrzo "Sir Keir Starmer has promised the government's new immigration measures will mean net migration falls "significantly" over the next four years." and https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/starmer-immig... "Sir Keir Starmer unveiled drastic plans to slash migration on Monday (May 2025; these are about the same white paper)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/starmer-small... "Sir Keir Starmer has signalled a new hardline approach to tackling illegal immigration by limiting visas for countries which did not do enough to tackle the irregular migration crisis, like taking back failed asylum seekers." (June 2025)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/10/starmer-and-... "Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron will announce a “one in, one out” migration deal on Thursday that will involve the UK accepting some cross-Channel asylum seekers but returning others to France." (July 2025)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/04/starmer-hires-of... "Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, announced a £100 million investment in border security which will pay for the NCA to get an additional 300 officers to work on organised immigration crime." (August 2025)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y5379djl3o "Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed for the first time the government is looking at digital ID as a way to tackle illegal immigration." (September 2025)
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting that these are all things that would please or satisfy your, or the typical Reform voter's, preferences around immigration. I am sure it is true that the Labour Party is less opposed to immigration than you would like it to be. But it is flatly untrue that they would do anything rather than compromise on unlimited mass immigration; if they want unlimited mass immigration at all (which all the evidence suggests they don't) they are compromising on it rather a lot. In other words, doing exactly what you say centrists do and far-leftists don't do.
> the Labour Party demonstrating, or at least claiming, that it does not want unlimited mass immigration
Yes, they lie about it because they know it's incredibly unpopular. And then they refuse to do anything that'd actually solve it. That's what non-centrist parties look like. A centrist party would be panicking over their immense unpopularity and trying to actually stake out the center ground with real policy movement.
Your list of links is a good example of my point. In turn:
- Publishing a white paper.
- "Vowing to take tougher action".
- An announcement that didn't have any effect on the ground (there is no one-in-one-out happening in reality).
- A commitment to spend more money! This is at least a believable commitment from them. It's been tried many times before and doesn't work. They know this already.
- An announcement to look at something.
Announcements that they will study the possibility of taking action, one day, possibly, is what it looks like when a government likes a situation the voters don't. Here are some things you didn't include which show their actual position:
- Arguing before the court that the rights of migrants take precedence over the rights of native Brits.
- Saying "of course we do" when an interviewer asks a minister if they really believe that.
If. But since the Labour government has a massive Labour majority that doesn't have to hold another election until 2029, that's not going to happen any time soon. Four years is a long time in politics.
For non-European readers, Reform are the equivalent of Germany's AfD or France's RN - or America's MAGA. It's a populist culture war party.
In response, far from doubling down, Labour has swung dramatically to the political right (by UK standards) of their normal political position in terms of the culture war issues like immigration and transgender rights that have been driving support for Reform.
We're having bad times in the UK, and no-one likes the incumbent government during bad times. (Never mind that the bad times are largely due to factors beyond their control, as is generally the case until a party has been in power for long enough to start turning the ship.)
Reform, meanwhile, are currently playing on easy mode; voters can say anything they like at the moment, and Reform are picking up the fantasy-football protest vote based on making wild promises they are unlikely to be able to fulfil.
None of this is to say Reform are not a serious threat. But the concept that their victory is inevitable is part their schtick, and should be resisted.
Only if you believe propaganda. What is the sample size of this poll projection, and what are the election policies being put forward for this election ?
It's clear that Labour are unpopular, but an actual election is not something that anyone is thinking about right now, because it is so far out. Reform would like to suggest they are, but they have yet to show any actual policies other than the usual right-wing rhetoric that may be populist but doesn't fix anything.
Shouting loudly like certain Americans, and pretending you have answers, may be good for headlines, but doesn't convince many real voters.
Ahh and there we are. It's the immigrant's fault. Once all those illegals are out the of the country we'll be great again - the world will once more bend to Queen Victoria's will and Bobby Charleston will again lift the world cup for England, it's rightful owners (hard /s btw).
No major party on either side of the Atlantic are pro-illegal immigration or advocating unlimited mass immigration (or anything close to unlimited).
Labour following their desires instead of trying to boost their polling numbers isn't "centrism" by any definition.
As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, the planning system is also a huge obstacle to infrastructure investment, with numerous important projects being blocked due to spurious environmental concerns.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/687dfcc4312ee...
The economy always goes through these cycles - people find a way to scam/‘extract economic value’ from something no one is worried about at the time. They weren’t worried at the time, because it was well run and ‘what is the worst that can happen’.
Over time, what was working well gets blown up as part of the resource extraction, leading to the thing being a giant expensive scandal now.
The issue starts getting resolved - in the case of a public service often by necessary price increases because of stuff that wore out/deferred maintenance/disasters caused by the prior situation. If it’s a private company, bankruptcy.
Eventually, even the dumbest of the population realizes the prior attitude was wrong and they got scammed. The thing starts maybe not being terrible for awhile.
Scammers move onto another part of the economy as people are looking for them now.
After a generation or so, people forget. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Very little in our world was designed to do what we need it do 50 years later. It's unlikely that anyone will even know what our needs 50 years from today will be. This is why the expectation is that systems we build will be constantly maintained, upgraded, modified, expanded, and redesigned as needed and with the next several decades in mind (to the best of our ability).
It's what we've always done with all infrastructure and even our cities themselves. Neglecting things like sewer systems until they are overwhelmed, failing, and prohibitively expensive to fix isn't inevitable. It's just bad governance. It doesn't matter if it's private companies or governments, neglecting infrastructure so that a few people can line their own pockets until the situation becomes critical should be criminal, but at the very least nobody should accept them throwing their hands up and saying it's just too expensive to fix now.
"Perhaps a better plan would be to replaces cranes with horses and ropes such that we can once again afford windows" was my first thought when I read that in my turn of the century starter apartment with giant windows in every room.
Like, GDP and productivity has tripled since that apartment was last renovated, let alone constructed. The idea that we can't afford a 20th century living standard anymore is nothing but absurdist propaganda.
No - just bring back window taxes
And that's not to mention rooms like kitchens and bathrooms. Older houses invariably have windows for kitchens too since you need to open the windows to let out the fumes from gas cooking. And they would have windows in the bathroom to let out moisture. These days newer houses are already designed not to have windows in either kitchens or bathrooms.
You can buy curtains, you can't retroactively insert a window as easily nor should you have to my lord.
I can't imagine living in a dark, centrally ventilated container. Most Swedes agree (massive pushback when this happened, gov backtracked).
So is the suggestion of less light and more isolation in Sweden. One of the darkest and most lonely countries in the world. There is already no requirement for windows in bathrooms and kitchens, as you can't regularly open windows in winter anyway.
I am not British, but this is confusing. Was private capital forced to take on the burden of privatizing the water system? Or did private investors err in their economic analysis? (Or did those investors just assume the problems would happen long after they personally had gotten paid?)
The water system is like the electricity system. It's perfectly possible to have inflows and outflows be fully private, as long as the government keeps its hands off the pricing. The network itself can also be run privately, as both supplier and buyers want supplies to flow. The trick is to ensure there are numerous different companies with the expertise to maintain pipework and then allow local communities to quickly change to different contractors.
You need a counterbalance to efficient resource use, usually competition ensures they don't skimp, that doesn't work with natural monopolies.
It seems like the voters actively encouraged this kind of behavior.
Eventually people figure it out (maybe) and go all fire and pitchforks - but that sounds like a problem for ‘future me’ eh?
And if you’re good at structuring everything, maybe they’ll never even have anyone concrete to blame but themselves! (Classic referendum/politician behavior there)
Focusing on Thames Water's particular example, if we assume malice as the cause, what would be the potential consequences? While the government could impose fines, the possibility of non-payment exists and what would happen in that case? Instead of debt collectors taking action, like ripping pipes from the ground or causing pension fund collapse, the government would act as a last resort investor, potentially providing further funding for a few additional years before the situation likely repeats.
In theory, with privatization the gov’t can arrest people or the like. The gov’t very rarely does that to itself.
Politicians can be swapped out of course, but most smart ones setup scape goats and a lot of levels of abstraction so they can claim successes and point the finger elsewhere if it goes wrong.
It might be a rounding error vs the scale of investment needed for water, but that investment is needed regardless of public or private ownership.
It's not a rounding error in terms of gov investment elsewhere — imagine an extra £85bn invested in, say, social housing? Even as a single one-off
https://www.water.org.uk/about-us/our-board
We must look at the reality more critically.
We already know that the investment is open to profit extraction, the companies doing the work are owned by the same investors and there's low oversight, they have occasionally been caught using inflated prices. We don't know the extent though as OFWAT has been criticized for only really catching the really obvious ones.
All that investment is our own money, it's now apparent they've not taken on debt to pay for that investment. They claim they have, but it's now turned out that they've taken on that debt simply to pay for dividends to shareholders. Debt is around £60 billion, while share holder dividends over the years are about £80 billion (this figure varies depending on who you believe, but it's always higher than the debt). And that's without accounting for the inflated cost of "investment".
And that debt is now apparently tax-payer guaranteed because it's all to people who are too big to fail.
So they've basically made off with £20 billion in 35 years, plus however untold billions in profits from related companies in "investment", and we've got a water crisis developing, constant sewage discharge into rivers, etc.
Now divide that by C-suite wages + monies paid as profits.
Well the estimated industry profits of ~£20B pa over the last 30+ years would have got us some way to replacing the worst of the sewage system. Instead that money went to yachts and pushing up rental costs, or whatever.
You can set up a system where companies are involved in the delivery of water in a way that let's them compete. For example, national entity owns the pipes and needs to provide a given service, companies compete for pipe maintenance, IT services, etc. It's hardly difficult to think up a system that is mostly free market and better in every way than what the people from the UK have to suffer through.
The claim competition is not possible is therefor false. We can debate if we want it, but it is incorrect to claim it cannot work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail#...
Traffic dropped a lot in the Great Depression but stabilized immediately after, and remained stable right up until nationalization in 1948 at which point the network entered a period of continuous decline, eventually falling to a level of ridership last seen in 1865. That is a staggering failure.
The moment the railways were privatized ridership starts going up again, despite the privatization not being complete and being unable to roll back the huge damage done under the decades of state ownership (before nationalization the railway companies were entirely self sufficient, which they no longer are).
So to argue that privatization makes "no sense" you have to ignore the fact that when privately managed usage of the railways goes up and when run by the state it goes down. If the goal of the railway is to be used, then it does make sense.
Except when they merge/consolidate and say they can find savings (which of course will be passed onto consumers) through "efficiencies" and "synergies".
That isn't really the case with water and power (or even internet access). Water is water. Electricity is Electricity. There's no artisanal organic Electricity made from the finest ingredients that powers your stuff any better. You either have a safe, functioning product or it isn't. Everyone needs the exact same stuff, it makes sense for the government to supply it. Not everyone needs, or even wants, the same foods.
Food distribution networks might be infrastructure, but POS stores aren't, generally. Drinking water supplies are infrastructure; drinking fountains aren't.
Food distribution as not, and again in my country we are having constant investigations into monopolistic anti consumer behaviour by the large supermarkets.
I too am a customer of PG&E.
In the UK, owning a utility company is nothing easy. Shareholders are definitely not stuffing their pockets. The biggest owner is Ontario pension fund (32%). I guess, poor retired Canadians are not very happy about this investment.
So I would say, your framing sounds interesting, until one digs deeper into facts.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/30/in-charts-h...
Overall the debt held by the company has ballooned since the 90s, meanwhile large dividend payments went out to shareholders. This appears to be extraction of value out of Thames Water (TW).
It's hard to see those graphs and then take TW seriously when they complain they need money for investment.
You said correctly that the private utility monopolist can choose from the menu of raising prices, delivering a subpar (cheaper) service for the same price, or can "defer" (aka skip) maintenance indefinitely. All ways they can extract cash to pay shareholders or even worse, pay management fees to private equity.
But the government-owned utility that we idealize, which provides the reasonable service at a breakeven price, may not be realistic. Government has its own incentives: Some politicians want to take funding from your utility to pay for their pet project. Others (political operatives or even civil servants) may sneak in a corrupt overpriced contract to benefit their corrupt associates. Public unions are known for negotiating unreasonable work rules and contracts that preserve jobs that are not actually needed.
All of the above together create a drain on finances of a government-owned utility, which is the public counterpart of the drain on finances that "the need to make a profit for the owners" places on investor-owned utilities.
I hate my local investor-owned utilities with a fiery passion and can't believe most governments could do worse, but I think we shouldn't overlook how easy it is for nationalized entities to engage in similar amounts of shenanigans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abingdon_Reservoir
Looks like Thames Water (a private company) proposed the development nearly 20 years ago, but it was turned down by the Environment Agency, a government body.
> Plans for a £1bn reservoir in Oxfordshire to supply more than eight million people over the next 25 years have been rejected by the government.
> Thames Water wants to build a site on four square miles of land near Abingdon to help ensure future demand is met.
> The bid went to a public inquiry but the secretary of state said there was "no immediate need" for such a site.
"Abingdon £1bn reservoir plan rejected by government"
> Campaigners had fought the plan, claiming there was no need for such a large reservoir and that it would damage the environment.
> Leader of the Vale of White Horse Council Tony de Vere said: "We are delighted with this decision.
> "Local residents were very worried about the impact of such a large reservoir and we share their relief that the plan has been axed."
Was it the crocodiles or the immigrants in small boats in the reservoir they worried about most?
So I don't know what the objections were about. You can easily ignore them, and just as easily enjoy them. But they are hardly going to "destroy the environment".
That said, they would of course destroy "some" environment. I'm not aware of the specific objections in this case. So I'll leave an open mind until I do.
https://oxfordclarion.uk/water-why-abingdons-mega-reservoir-...
https://oxfordclarion.uk/abingdon-reservoir-is-there-an-alte...
https://oxfordclarion.uk/abingdon-reservoir-what-are-the-ris...
https://oxfordclarion.uk/abingdon-reservoir-how-much-will-it...
But for something like water supply, there should be more competition via legally mandated unbundling, like with Internet service providers and energy suppliers who use the same delivery infrastructure while competing with each other.
We have come a long way in computer generated images in 14 years.
The ultimate power, including violence, lies with the federal government. Thames water can't shoot dead protesters or council members but the government definitely can and will.
You can make this a requirement by law.
I tend to favor that approach instead because it allows more room for innovation and makes it much easier to quantify exactly how much you're spending by distorting the market in that way.
The idea private companies don't invest is just Labour propaganda. Another commenter has already pointed out your belief about reservoirs is wrong, as is the idea they wouldn't make other forms of investment.
And all this has happened despite the government imposing socialist price controls on the industry, a move usually guaranteed to kill investment!
At the other end of the pipe they have opened/upgraded many waste water treatment plants recently too, large EU fines being a motivator, including one in Arklow which took nearly 4 decades to get over the line (its planning predating the existence of IW).
However, as a further point. If national priorities change then a nationalised water industry can respond (relatively) quickly. But what can be done with a bunch of potentially foreign owned profit-seeking companies?
The problem here is financial illiteracy - the alternative to paying dividends isn't that the same money all gets spent on the water network. Large scale investment is rarely funded from general revenues as it'd require spending years accumulating a huge cash pile that sits around doing nothing, and governments see such piles as pigs to slaughter. So the alternative is that the government borrows the money and then has to pay interest on it. From your perspective the UK "wastes" 8% of its spending on interest payments, and it's rising rapidly, but of course if it didn't pay interest then nobody would lend it money and all funds would have to either come from taxes or via inflation.
This also doesn't consider "debt recapitalisation" where these private companies draw down new debt on promise of future cash inflows from consumers and then suck out dividend cash "de-risking" their holding in the company. The government can bail it out or the can close it then, it's not their problem as they received the cash upfront.
> private companies draw down new debt on promise of future cash inflows from consumers
This is what governments do too.
Of course government do that, but they're left holding the bag regardless, so the incentive is very different.
These are not counterpoints.
A government bailout means nationalization, which means investors lose everything. That risk doesn't suppress interest rates, it increases them. Thames Water's interest costs are around average for corporate debt, implying the market doesn't anticipate a water nationalization anytime soon.
Your first message contradicts your second, which one is it are they paying government risk level interest rates or business risk level interest rates.
Edit: I just went and looked up their rating with one of the big agencies. CCC rated (junk basically) with a negative outlook, they did get an upgrade on a refinance last year, but from CC (so now lesser junk).
UK's last rating was AA (if you're interested).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAA
Thames' debt costs are normal for a company of its type, but for a government this bond yield is danger-level high. That's why there's so much talk in financial circles now about the UK needing another IMF bailout, although I have grave doubts about whether that's actually possible given the sheer size of the UK's debt load compared to the smaller third world countries that normally need IMF help, and the near simultaneous talk in France of a bailout there too. The IMF just doesn't have the resources for even one bailout of that size, let alone two.
Don't pay attention to credit ratings of countries vs companies. They aren't comparable due to political interference and general crapitude at the ratings agencies (remember they rated sub-prime mortgage debt as AAA). They also disagree, S&P rates Thames' class A bonds as Caa3. What really matters is the yield. That's the ground truth.
Note that Thames' interest costs have been all over the place. 5.8% is the current amount it's paying, but the actual bonds it has issued have had a wide range of yields.
The reason it's considered high for a government is because government debt should be much lower risk than a company. Governments can order banks to transfer everyone's savings to themselves, they can print money, they can prevent their citizens from leaving and seize all the assets... they can do things to raise money that would be considered incredibly evil and criminal if companies tried. And of course they can in principle set bond yields to whatever level they like by making the central bank or other financial institutions legally required to buy their debt.
That's why economics textbooks teach that government bonds are the lowest risk possible and so should have yields far below corporate debt.
In reality:
1. Governments can default on their debts just like companies do. History is full of such examples. Bond yields reflect that fact.
2. Governments can sell bonds that are inflation linked, so printing money isn't a way to escape those debts. The UK has an abnormally high amount of such debt that's inflation linked. The only way to pay them back is via cutting spending or increasing tax revenue, but the UK can't do the latter (recent tax rises have failed to come close to expected revenue increases) and can't do the former either because...
3. Governments can be prevented from paying their debts by law. Some countries have "debt brakes" or "debt ceilings" that can block the issuance of new debt to pay old debt, and in other cases (like the UK) the government may rely on ideologically extreme MPs who refuse to pass laws that bring spending in line with revenues.
So you add these things together and something that could in principle be a sure bet ends up looking as risky as an ordinary company.
Thames' debt is C-grade because it recently defaulted on its debt. How is that possible given that its debt servicing costs are not unusually high? Normally you'd expect interest costs to go up well before default. Well, on the surface level because it couldn't raise more money from investors to meet rising costs. It couldn't do that because Ofwat keep fining it for "underperformance" whilst also refusing to allow prices to catch up with where they used to be in the past. Investors refused to put more money in unless a 40% price rise was allowed by the government, but the government likes to boast it has forced prices 45% lower since the 1980s (in real terms). Government doesn't budge, investors go on strike = default = downgrade.
There was waste under state ownership but probably not half of every pound spent, which is what forcing prices to nearly halve would have required.
Under the Tories it seems to have been believed by investors that eventually Ofwat would be reigned in and the financial pressure on UK water companies would ease. That didn't happen, instead the Tories imploded and Labour won. Both ratings agencies say explicitly that this is the reason they consider Thames' outlook to be either stable (at best) or negative:
"We revised down our assessment of TWUL's business risk profile to satisfactory because we now consider that U.K. water companies will operate in a less supportive regulatory environment"
Less supportive regulatory environment is ratings-speak for "because we think the left will shaft Thames and its investors".
This outcome is the opposite of the fantasy being peddled in this thread where investors have been extracting great wealth from Britain. It's the opposite: investors are getting hosed by the government. They're literally losing the money they put into Thames Water because the government forced Thames to spend it all on making water artificially cheap in an unsustainable manner.
I'm not sure they're entirely to blame although I'm sure they've played their part.
Look at the shareholding changes (2011-2017 Macquarie) and dividend payout percentage. It seems the current shareholders were left holding the bag, and perhaps we should be pointing fingers at Macquarie. When they left the debt had been increased by £2bln. If you look at their dividend payout ratio, in most of the years it held the investment, this ratio is extraordinarily high. Perhaps they sucked this dry, necessitating a price increase. (Current shareholders have barely paid anything).
Capital expenditure has been flat, only really increasing in 2021-2024. Perhaps chickens coming home to roost?
State ownership is not a panacea either.
State owned Scottish Water has more sewer leaks than the privatised companies in England and Wales do.
If they can't do their job, then we shouldn't pay our taxes ?
The system does not work perfectly though. In the UK big supermarkets have monopsony power over farmers and smaller farmers are being squeezed out by big farm owners (who tend to have lower standards, especially of animal welfare).
Corn ethanal? Gone. Crazy EU stuff? Gone.
Because the massive subsidies we already have the incentive problems too, so it's not like that would be a new can of worms either.
Absolutely agree, it may not need to be government owned, however it should absolutely be government funded.
Does it? Food prices are up, millions of people rely on food banks [0], etc. This may not be entirely down to farms or the governmental oversight thereof, but food security is not a given.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/oct/09/britons-vuln...
But I think the other issue there is that for the past 30 years, there hasn't been an issue with the water supply; it's invisible when it's working well, so it doesn't get attention during voting season.
Water companies will build new resevoir capacity, but since the extra money they already bill your for, for maintaining the infrastructure, has been paid out to shareholders, it will of course require an additional fee on your bill.
At least that has been my experience with everything privatized in the past couple of decades. The private investors scoop up every bit of value, and when it's time to pay the bill, it's the customers that must pay (again).
Fortunately we have regulations in place, but that doesn't help when all value has been siphoned from the company and all there's left is debt.
And that means their interest is to but a modern branding onto an operation that has been stripped for wires as long as it works.
I grew up during a privatization wave in my country and the promise of the proponents always was that private ownership means waste is cut. Now all these sectors that produced decent services before have gone to shit. Be it postal, trains, highways, whatever. Everything is broken, underfunded, services less people for more money.
10 years ago when I said the same thing I would get a lot of counter arguments that all boiled down to: "Trust it bro" or "But governmental is more waste". Now these arguments don't come up nearly as much. Everybody can see it.
The thing is, if you want to avoid waste then literally the best strategy is to go into a desert where there is no service. No service means no waste. But it also means no service.
- what is waste during good times may be essential during bad ones. If your service utilizes 100% CPU during normal operation (no waste), it has zero slack for changes in the environment.
- what is waste for a manager, may be an essential service to the persons using it. So maybe that cell tower in a remote area may be operating at a loss, because few people live there, but to them it is essential (or to you, if you break your ankle during a hike). Privatized services don't have the goal of covering people, but earning money. Covering people may be a side effect, but it isn't necessarily the goal
- cutting waste can make the service less attractive as a whole and make it enter a downward spiral. E.g. if you cut all non-profitable lines in a public transport system your public transport system becomes less usable as a whole, as people now have a harder time fetting where they want to go. That leads to less people using it. That in turn leads to you having to cut more lines, which in turn... You get the idea. No service means no waste, any service has/to have waste
- some waste appears like waste because managers don't understand why it is there. Essentially a Chesterton's fence-type of situation. Like with the OceanGate submarine implosion, that essentially happened because the late owner of the company decided that all these lengthy certification processes the submersible industry had written in blood were waste and could be skipped. He didn't posses the expertise to know why it was there in the first place, so it was waste.
With some services the goal isn't (or shouldn't be) to do "something" as cheaply as possible while extracting value, with some services the goal ought to be to provide the service in a sustainable fashion to everybody ad infinitum, while trying not to waste more money than is necessary and creating budgetary timebombs for future administrations/generations/managers.
Those are entirely different incentives, leading to entirely different results. And depending on which service we talk about the reasonability of chosing one over the other may differ.
That being said, there can be real waste to cut. But cutting everything based on suspicion is very expensive in the long run.
Like most neoliberal nonsense, it's not just a lie, it's a misdirection. What it really means is "Government money is being spent on providing a service for poor people, when it should be handed out to rich people."
It's driven by entitlement, not generosity.
You can see this very clearly in the way privatised CEOs are paid. The water companies quite obviously and literally prioritise CEO pay rises and dividends over service quality.
That's not an accident. It's the true meaning of privatisation.
That is what privatisation is.
The "customer" in privatised industries isn't the public, it's upper management and other big shareholders.
The issue is when there is a monopoly. When you have a government monopoly of a specific industry, it's going to be poor. If the same thing happens in private industry, it's a similar outcome. There is no competition with the government, because they play by rules that makes it impossible to compete as a private business, so it's by default, a monopoly.
When companies compete, it's always better for the customer. Government run Internet (which is what we had before it was commercialized), was stuck in the same place for decades, with no innovation. It's pretty much universal and relatively cheap now.
In the US, you can look at the post office and private companies like UPS and Fedex. I used to run a business for almost a decade where I would ship out 100s of packages/week. The post office always had poor service compared to the rest...and the cost ended up being comparable. If you lost a package? with the post office, there was no real way to get your money back.
There's waste with government-run services because they never have to really worry about profit or losing money. Every government-run service I've ever used has been inefficient.
How much would be enough? 15% of GDP, 20%, 50%?
I'm generally in favour of public services over ruthless privatization but I don't understand how Britain is to survive as a nation of nurses and pensioners supported by a tax base of Uber Eats riders.
Responsible for putting a pin in development and turning Britain into a museum, with insufficient water or power.
It should urgently be reformed.
If the infrastructure isn’t there, we haven’t received what we paid for. Worse, without EU regulation these companies are now blasting sewage into lakes and rivers. Ofwat can’t do anything.
At this point I feel there’s no solution other than nationalising the infrastructure again and ploughing billions of tax payers money into yet another failed Thatcher initiative.
Of course that will never happen, because we’ve not had a government willing to make sweeping changes like that since Thatcher. Except maybe Liz Truss with her exceptional grasp of economics.
Of course not. The water company was in terrible shape (read: lacking funds) before it was dumped on a commercial company that does not have deep pockets like Chevron. Thames Water owes £16.8 billion. That money is already gone.
No one is going to swoop in to save the day. Taxpayers will eat the bill, and invest even more to reverse decades of neglect. All of those hard decisions labour committed to make are unnecessary when nothing is done and they are made for you. The country has limited funds, and is spending funds it doesn't have on things like billions on hotels for 29,000 unauthorized travelers so far this year.
UK external debt is £2.7 trillion, and whats her name said yesterday it may be necessary to ask the IMF for a loan? Water company indeed.
Why does privatisation mean that the government can't build infrastructure? I think the answer is more likely nimbyism than privatisation.
I personally think it makes no sense to privatise infrastructure for which no competition can reasonably take place, and I'd include distribution networks of many sorts in that: water distribution, rail lines, electricity distribution.
But I'm not aware that privatisation means that the state can't take on reservoir projects. The problem is that development of all kinds in the UK is utterly crippled by nimbyism. The article mentions the proposed Abingdon reservoir but links it to the boogyman of data centres rather than call out what the picture obviously shows: it's being stalled by nimbys.
A few months ago the government reclassified the project as Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project to allow Thames Water to to take the proposal out of the hands of the local authority, potentially allowing the project to go ahead. [2]
If it goes ahead as planned it will be the second largest reservoir in the UK.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abingdon_Reservoir [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz9kp2d4d0vo
"Thatcherism" does, however. It is a warped [Ayn] Randian view of capitalism and those who drive it. State intervention into the machinery of capital, even when it comes to essential infrastructure, is considered a corrupting influence.
Nobody able to change national policy within Downing Street or even ministries in Whitehall, at the time - or since - has had the gumption to say it's not working and we need to do something about it.
You are however right, that NIMBYism has also worked remarkably well - the planning process in the UK is the reason we can't build HS2 cheaply or quickly, and that is relatively painless compared to wind farms, solar farms (also often blocked), never mind building a dam and flooding an entire valley, which was the old way of creating new capacity.
https://www.ft.com/content/1057f722-75d5-11e1-9dce-00144feab...
A lot of NHS privatisation was done by Blair and Brown - especially to facilitate Brown's use of off-balance sheet debt to fund spending while pretending the government was not increasing national debt.
A lot of privatisations were a good idea. I think most people would agree the government should not own oil companies, airlines, car manufacturers, steel manufacturers, or telecoms, etc. I think the mistakes need to be seen against the backdrop of a necessary correction of a lot of nationalisation.
The problem has also been regulatory. Why were water companies not required to build capacity? Why were they allowed to borrow in order to pay shareholders? This was all entirely foreseeable.
I think the problem is not an ideology, but the lack of a coherent ideology. Privatisation has become an end in itself, backed by politicians who do not seem to understand that its not a magic bullets, and there is no incentive for efficiency in the absence of competition. A private monopoly is usually worse than a state monopoly unless very closely regulated.
People are starting to revisit the idea that oil and steel manufacture should at least be held domestically, if not run by the government outright, given the current geopolitical situation. Let's talk straight: if China and India would close down export for steel, or if OPEC decides to repeat the 70s... the Western world is fucked. And yes, that includes America, because most US refineries need OPEC oil for chemical composition reasons. The US is only net positive on oil imports and exports, it is by far not self sufficient. Add in a major war, we'd not be able to produce ammo, much less vehicles, even if we somehow found enough staff to man the plants.
As for telecoms: the base infrastructure should belong to the government. That is a lesson we in Germany are learning at the moment...
I think you got that backwards, Venezuela needs US refineries because of chemical composition reasons. North America as a whole is self-sufficient.
> People are starting to revisit the idea that oil and steel manufacture should at least be held domestically
Oh good, lets push the inflation button even harder. I can only hope steel manufacture can someday be as efficient and competitive as US boat building.
Better have expensive boats than no boats, particularly when preparing to wage war with a country that can be reached either by air - which means either missiles or nuclear bombers - or by water, the only option allowing for conventional warfare.
That's the thing we all have to prepare for, the inevitable confrontation with China.
In any case, the secret to cheap building is scale. When all you build is a few boats, planes or god knows what a year, of course each will be expensive. But if you build dozens, hundreds or - just look to WW2 - thousands of units, suddenly efficiencies of scale and standardization really kick in.
Which was clearly the case in WW2.
And _might_ be the case if the confrontation with China is proxy wars. Hundreds or thousands of spare units (of tanks, AA, helicopters, fighter jets) would be useful in Ukraine, for example.
But it's hard to see a use-case for hundreds of B-2s, for example. By the time those things are flying in anger, twenty or thirty will do everything you're ever going to do.
Sell them to allies. But ever since both Trump and Biden seriously restricted Ukraine from defending itself... let's say the US isn't among the most trusted arms suppliers these days. A lot of soft power, just gone.
Nationalised water in Scotland is no better than privatised in England and Wales, and has a higher rate of sewer leaks: https://theferret.scot/scotland-behind-england-sewage-leaks/
One thing of note about Scotland is that water is free (i.e. paid for by taxes) there.
So despite the best efforts of critics, they can't really show that Scottish water is any worse in terms of sewage outflows etc - if anything it is marginally better on that metric, and significantly cheaper to run. And the actual water quality is good, although that has a lot to do with incidental geography. Why would I want it privatised?
But it’s unmetered, unlike most of the UK, and, as the other poster mentioned, cheaper.
https://www.fife.gov.uk/kb/docs/articles/housing/council-tax...
I think there is a good argument for metering water - it provides an incentive not to waste it, and potable water is expensive to supply and has a significant environmental impact.
It does need to be affordable even to people on the lowest incomes though.
But if private companies are taking the equity out of the service via profit, then why should the government spend public money to build new infrastructure to support them?
Thatcher's been dead for 12 years and out of power for 35, so I'm not sure why it should take much gumption. All it needs is national leaders who believe in the flourishing of the country, and that that requires infrastructure development, not just banks, software and scientific research. Unfortunately I don't see any such leader on the horizon.
Reagan, Thatcher, all the same, and their ideology kept alive by neoliberals (basically every politician that isn't an out and out socialist or snidely toeing fascism) and the Chicago school of economics.
Find me a national leader that believing in the flourishing of the country (and all the people in it) and I'll find you an entire political apparatus in opposition to that in favor of the flourishing of Capital.
But I can't find one, that's the point.
The US and UK were in terrible shape before Reagan and Thatcher took office. Both improved after they were elected?
Mr. savings and loans crisis? The guy that tripled the national debt?
The epically failed war on drugs guy? That guy improved the united states?
The US and UK economies were terrible. Stagflation, “malaise”.
Reagan ushered in a decade of strong economic growth. I’m sure all races would trade of a higher paycheck despite the media comments.
By what measure? Can you source that claim?
“Since World War II, according to many economic metrics including job creation, GDP growth, stock market returns, personal income growth, and corporate profits, the United States economy has performed significantly better on average under the administrations of Democratic presidents than Republican presidents.”
Reagan was the only Republican that reduced unemployment by a little bit, but he was in the lower half of presidents who did that. But he failed to increase employment significantly, he increased the deficit significantly, and he did damage with the bunk feed-the-rich “Trickle Down” theories.
Even Trump agreed. “During a March 2004 interview, Trump stated: ‘It just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans.’”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_p...
1984 inflation: 4%, GDP growth: 7.4%
Higher growth less inflation is great for us workers
Some other things that are good for us workers include low federal deficits, income growth, low inequality, and job creation. And Reagan scores poorly on all of those metrics. People aren’t even debating these facts, they’re only debating _why_ Reagan and other Republicans seem to consistently bring the economy down despite their confidence in their economic theories...
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat... [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FP.CPI.TOTL.ZG?location...
Again if any politicians today were half the person Thatcher was things might actually get done. Even Blair might be an improvement.
The UK (as only one example) is simply not the same thing as it was in 1960. Why would we expect the same results as if it’s just a matter of catching up from being behind, all while the ability to do so has changed?
If the UK wasn’t able to keep up with water storage capacity between 1960–1989, and has not built any capacity whatsoever since 1989; what makes one believe that somehow the UK, with massive headwinds blowing right into its face, could not only maintain the current capacity but expand it by about 50% (pop growth plus backlog), at the same time that the population has increased by ~1/3 and the nature of the people in the UK has changed significantly from a people that was able to do that in the past, but clearly could not do so since 1960, and while the finances of the country are inverting?
It is a gamblers fallacy. It is the aging man who still thinks he is in his prime, but also after decades of neglect and abuse of his body on advice of a devil on his shoulder, the serpent whispering assurances in his ear to indulge in harmful things and to win back his loses.
Age? Ethnic makeup? Urbanisation?
The population is older, less white, more in cities, fewer kids, but I'm not sure what any of that has to do with our water consumption or ability to build for it - other than maybe older people, especially the ones that moved out of the cities to live some LOTR-inspired faux-rural lifestyle, tend to be more NIMBY?
But equally though our appliances and lifestyles aren't the same as 1960. Showers are massively more efficient than baths, but we use them daily instead of once a week. Industry has mostly disappeared, and thermal power stations are on the way out (both extremely heavy water users), but agriculture has become more intensive.
And we Brits don't revolt – even protesting is highly legally-risky these days.
Is there a better country to do such things? I don't think so
And there'll be commercials - Scotland - Heavy rain (horizontal) - A woman totally drenched (with baby in hands) - In panic - Warning about the impending water crisis.
For example the Abingdon Reservoir has been in planning for 19 years[1]. It is opposed by GARD[2], the Group Against Reservoir Development. It's hard to see how this is the fault of privatization.
„Water should not be human right”
But one can make a very fair argument where you can have a strong regulatory framework to ensure investment goals, exit clauses, and penalties in case of missing goals, no?
I'm not a free market absolutist or a privatization zealot, but I'm curious about the fact that England cannot come up with a privatization model that ensures clawback and exit clauses, measurable goals, and a clear investment plan for it.
Even Brazil 5 years ago made a Law for the universalization of water and sewage. The goals are given in a clear-cut way:
> The Sanitation Framework standardizes deadlines and criteria nationwide: by 2033, 99% of the population must have access to water. Today, 30 million Brazilians still lack this service. The country also needs to achieve 90% access to sewage collection and treatment, a service currently not provided to 90 million Brazilians. Furthermore, water losses must be reduced from the current 40% to 25%. [1]
> Since 2020, 59 auctions have been held in 20 states, benefiting 1,529 municipalities and more than 73 million people. The contracts provide for R$178 billion in direct investments and R$56.9 billion in concession fees, totaling more than R$234.9 billion committed to the sector (for the private investment). [2]
There the responsibility for water distribution and sewage is within municipalities, and the biggest issue is that small ones cannot finance such a kind of service that demands high upfront investment and maintenance costs.
The point that I want to make here, is that the biggest issue might be the lack of enforcement and regulatory effectiveness, plus bad legal framework and contracts.
[1] - https://www12.senado.leg.br/noticias/materias/2025/09/04/san....
[2] - https://www.gov.br/cidades/pt-br/assuntos/noticias-1/noticia...
Ironically, this is also the argument for privatization in the first place - that corruption and competing interests lead to government inefficiency, that the private sector is incentivised to cut out the bloat in a way that governments cannot, and therefore something that intrinsically is a public rather than private concern should regardless be privatized.
> The point that I want to make here, is that the biggest issue might be the lack of enforcement and regulatory effectiveness, plus bad legal framework and contracts.
Absolutely. I didn't think that this was even up for debate.
Competing forces
People have this propagandized view that the "free market" (which isn't real) is responsible for innovation.
All capitalism does is build enclosures and engage in rent-seeking. With the tendency for profits to decrease, ultimately it comes down to cutting costs and raising prices. So why would a water company invest in a new reservoir? That increases supply. That might lower prices.
The UK is going to neoliberal all the way into being a developing nation.
In the last century and a half, we went from candle light and horse and buggy, to the lowest level of global poverty in the last 5,000 years of recorded human history.
If capitalism wasn't responsible then what was?
[1]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
Climate change means societal change. There was a time that Northern Africa was one of the best places in the world to grow crops. They were at the top of civilization for thousands of years. Climate changed, what people could grow and do changed too.
The difference this time is that we did this to ourselves. Even worse that we continue making our future prospects worse on purpose so a few oil countries can squish some extra money from earth. It is baffling the lack of foresight.
I would argue that a small minority of the human race did this to the rest.
> the lack of foresight
Everybody on the planet is well aware of what is happening and why. Its not lack of foresight, it is pure ignorance and apathy of those who are making money off the backs of these tragedies.
You yourself haven't got a model. If we stop using fossil fuels today, billions die. The energy from fossil fuels has generated widespread benefit and allows our current wealth. And also heats the atmosphere.
The emissions of the bottom 90% globally, and the emissions in the products they use are more than enough to sustain global warming.
Fobbing the problem onto "the other", however you define them, is another way to justify doing nothing.
It's been obvious we're trying to commit mass suicide for a long time now.
That's the sociopathic capitalist dream. Leech off the working class, then gut it until only a skeleton remains to service your needs.
Yes, just the people that use fossil fuels to drive, heat their homes, power their electrical lines, and so forth. /s
You can't dodge responsibility by pushing the blame upwards on everything. Are you posting these comments from a computer powered by solar panels?
> Are you posting these comments from a computer powered by solar panels?
That's precisely the point. It shouldn't be individual responsibility to improve our infrastructure (though, in point of fact, I actually _am_ posting using solar power). A good society is one in which everyone _is_ using solar power _without realizing it_, because those responsible for providing power to society do so responsibly.
So it really does require worldwide grassroots activism, which unfortunately is very slow and incremental. I'm not hopeful... Our ape brains are just not built for what it takes.
so none of the users of those oil, who paid for it willingly, had any responsibility at all then?
In the 1980s, as a child, I remember learning at school about the greenhouse effect, or whatever we called it then. It was not difficult to understand, and neither was the 'nuclear umbrella' that we also had to contend with.
In the mid 1990s I was working in TV weather. We self-censored ourselves regarding global warming, or whatever we called it then. None of us were paid by big oil.
The euphemisms for 'climate change' tell their own story, it seems we need to downgrade the wording for the inevitable catastrophe every decade or so, I think we are on 'climate emergency' now.
As a result of what I learned in school, I genuinely adopted a low-carbon lifestyle which was quite hard to do when everyone was going the other way. If you step inside a car (when you have chosen to not own one) then you are deemed a hypocrite. If you don't eat those cows that create so much methane then you will be called a hypocrite for owning a leather belt. If you read a book then you will be called a hypocrite since trees had to be pulped. Be green and those stuck in the past will get all passive aggressive on you even if you aren't preaching to others.
When all is done we could collectively blame the oil companies for obfuscating the evidence of climate change. Similarly, when all is done with the current genocides going on, we can blame the politicians or the media for not letting us know the truth. Yet we are all a few clicks away from seeing how our alleged enemies 'report our crimes'. Yet, consciously or unconsciously, we censor ourselves.
Care to elaborate what you were doing?
When the adverts that go with the weather are for the likes of Land Rover or British Airways, you know the deal.
As for colours, we had those graphic designers that wanted to do their own 'mark' on the product, so the maps made by them were artist impressions with stupid colours such as blue for land and yellow for the sea. This makes things difficult if the animated gifs for the icons use yellow and blue, for things like the sun and the rain and it is your job to encode those gifs. That one was resolved by sacking the designer and making base maps the more scientific way, with AVHRR vegetation index, a bathymetry dataset and so on.
You would not believe the battles that have to be had to have maps that are fit for purpose rather than 'graphic designed'.
Other mundane tasks included setting the clocks at 2 a.m. twice a year, which would be easy, had it not been for the clocks costing £40k each, with them paired up for redundancy, and that pair paired-up for even more redundancy.
The clocks worked fine, however,timings could move around during the changeover from summer time since the clocks try and correct themselves. Change one and the other clocks would gang up on it and it would acquiesce. Costing £40k the clocks obviously did not show the time as that would be too obvious, there was just the timecode on wires going around the building. Then the only way to adjust them was to solder your own lead, plug it into a laptop and then telnet in.
As for deception, look at weather forecasting as more like gambling. Forecasters have gambling mentality and a very different way of understanding the weather to mere mortals. The behind the scenes chat on a daily basis is what you want, not the forecast. You get the bigger picture listening in to their chats.
But, when it comes to oil production what I would say is that due to the overlapping geography of the foundation and consequent spread of Islam and largest and easiest to extract oil resources in the world being very large combined with human tendency to overfit pattern matching that it is all too easy to see why some would conflate the two.
But Islamic majority nations aren't the only "oil countries", and not all "oil countries" are corrupt (but I'd guess the overwhelming majority of "oil countries" are corrupt, not least because of Dutch Disease).
I'm aware that there are non Islamic "oil countries" of course and I don't think the GP comment was equating oil with Islam. It's just something that does happen in other contexts and that we should be aware of when speaking, because there are very real real would consequences.
I’ve converted my car to run on renewable wood pellets, stop moaning start fixing.
It’s all about individual choice, the oil companies are simply responding to demand.
My next step is to build a railway through our local high street so I can decarbonise my commute.
Take responsibility for your own actions, stop expecting governments to do everything for you. The oil companies aren’t the problem, you are.
Personally, I've largely replaced my car usage with walking and biking, installed insulation in uninsulated parts of my home, got more comfortable with less heating/cooling (sweaters and fans), and am planning to upgrade to a heat pump when the time comes.
It's good to live your values without falling into scrupulosity, both for yourself and others.
And have you seen how hydrogen burns or how easy it is to trigger an explosion? I wouldn’t live anywhere near a “jerry rigged” hydrogen storage facility.
- Ecologists and native-right defenders being killed in many countries.
- Politicians being paid off by corporations to fight against wind and solar energy.
- Newspapers paid to mislead the public.
But you blame the guys that cannot make ends meet and buys the only thing that they can afford.
Stop blaming the victims. This is something that needs to be solved at the state level, blaming citizens for the crimes of oil producers is false, morally wrong and unproductive.
To blame others than the oil producing companies that bribe politicians and lie to the public is just a stalling tactic to continue destroying the world while most people is actually trying to stop that destruction.
> Take for example this distribution of age at death in Sweden in 1900. You will see, that in 1900, life expectancy was 52 years. However, the median age at death (the age above and below 50% of the population die respectively) is 63 years. Although the life expectancy is only 52 years, an individual has thus a chance of 50% to live past 63 years. Thus, if you went across a Swedish graveyard from 1900 (I'm not sure if the data relates to people born in 1900, or mortality data from 1900, but this is not the point of my comment), you would see that more than half reached an age past 60 years. (https://old.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/zzy2bh/no_avera...)
Antibiotics weren't widespread until after WWII, as were most of the vaccines we currently consider standard.
Medicine as a whole is an astounding example of diminishing returns to innovation.
An absurd satirical play. Due to extreme water shortages, private toilets are unthinkable, public toilets are managed by a corporation. Yes, it's pay to pee...
Articles like this, with subtle mentions of how it was all our fault and all the water companies were doing was prioritising low cost for the consumer, are the equivalent of 'were the nazis really that bad or were they just a bit sad and lonely', but national infrastructure edition. They exist only to soften up and distract public opinion so that we're less likely to want any of the people involved to be held to account.
An honest request for enlightenment:There's the structural problem. There are the structural aspects of a potential solution. There's some mapping around the problem. Given that, why does the England government not provide a definitive solution?
As a former 3rd world resident, one thing that I noticed in Europe is that several basic problems do not have the right incentives or willingness to be solved, even if there are the "raw materials" in place, like capital, human talent, a need, and so on.
I know that some can think like the "Why Didn't I Think of That?" meme template [1], but I have been in worse places where you have several headwinds like corruption, lack of capital, etc.; I see that in England and in continental Europe you can see a lot of those "basic problems" happening and piling up. I wonder if those issues will be solved gradually or if those societies will need to have their “burning platform” moment [2].
[1] - https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/139781746/Why-Didnt-I-Thin....
Selling public infrastructure lets you give tax cuts now, and you'll be long gone before people recognise that they are paying more and getting less. It's much like MBAs making cuts - you can boost the bottom line in the short term and be gone before the blame starts gathering
We have a fptp electoral process, which means there are a lot of safe seats in parliament. In battleground seats, a vote for the third party is effectively a vote for the first. People who want not-the-incumbent cannot choose which party they actually do want. I personally have been disenfranchised all my adult life, MEP votes excluded. (If I could change only one thing, I would abolish fptp.)
Moreover, like most populous Western countries, most of the electorate is not well educated on politics or economics; they get their political news from limited sources, and they don't seek information that challenges their prior beliefs.
These facts combine to reduce electoral accountability.
Having flogged the public infra, renationalisation is tricky. You either buy it back at market value, which means imposing a tax burden and playing into your opponent's electoral strategy, or you seize it and spook capital markets, which also plays into your opponent's electoral strategy.
* the UK's economic growth has been poor since the 2008 financial crisis, so government resources from taxation have similarly not been growing as much as they used to
* demographics (more elderly people) mean that spending on pensions and healthcare has been steadily growing
* so the spending on every other aspect of government and other public-realm type things has been steadily squeezed: there are no resources for improvements on either the big scale or the small
* plus we have (like the US) a setup where many people and organizations have an effective veto or delaying ability on building things (houses, public infrastructure, etc), which makes fixing public infrastructure problems very expensive and time consuming.
As a water-related example of the last point: there's a proposal for a new reservoir near me which is classified as a "nationally significant infrastructure project". The timeline outlined at https://fensreservoir.co.uk/proposals/process/ started in 2022 with "pre-application consultation" in multiple phases, doesn't even submit the formal planning application until 2027, hopes to get a government decision in 2028, will not start construction until 2030 and might finally get the reservoir up and running by 2036 if nothing is delayed. And this doesn't account for the possibility of legal challenges to it which could add extra delay even if they are dismissed.
The corruption issue is still there, it's just much better disguised and kept away from the general public. Random individuals are not expected or generally safe to pay bribes to police in the UK; we imagine that's all there is to it. But at the higher levels all sorts of problems are not solved because there's a financial interest, or simply an establishment personal connection.
The Fujitsu/Post Office scandal was perhaps the worst recent example.
Every government in the last 20 years has been incompetent when it comes to managing the country. All they know is to make statements to the news about hot-button issues, like Brexit, foreigners, flags, Ukraine, Palestine, trans rights, Lucy Letby, etc. Both the Tories and Labour. They've both been more like teams of social media influencers than governments.
I do share your bitterness. Free-market fundamentalists have flogged assets for years, and the cost to the citizens is some future government's problem.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ofwat-to-be-abolished-in-...
> Free-market fundamentalists have flogged assets for years
Maybe the problem isn't the free market (since one does not in any way exist in this case) but government interventionism.
When one government, for its own reasons, sells a service, intervention is required to return it to public hands. The cost of that intervention was created by the government that sold the service.
The intervention could be more or less problematic, but it isn't the problem.
Legislate that certain public services are to only be managed and administered by the civil service managed and autonomous statutory boards. That's probably the easiest thing to do in a parliamentary system like the UK. Sort of like a "Water Management Board".
Not every function in a democracy needs to be democratic in nature.
Heck, this is how the UK managed colonial territories like Singapore and HK with the civil service run HDBs, and how a lot of the UK was run before Thatcher's privatization.
Let's say that John Doe is a very accomplished visionary individual, and has quite a few revolutionary good ideas around improving the water system. Obviously Mr. Doe needed lots of lab equipment to gain experience and insight into these systems, and realistically needs a lot more if he wants to live to his full potential and benefit the public. He is determined to work towards the greater good, but also needs a lot more power [than the average citizen] to test his ideas.
Therefore in order to [be able to] accept this role, he has to be well-compensated (as a one in the world person). Therefore the payment package must look a lot more like the CEO compensation or a high-end management position, which is contrary to the idea of civil management.
Said differently, money can be a good proxy of the power to bring about changes, and if we truly want to try radical ideas (as we should in challenging problems), we need powerful individuals that can risk [their own fortune of course], not committees of less powerful people best suited for maintaining the status quo. In other words, the average citizen is much too risk averse to accept (or approve the payment package of) John in this position, and this can lead to stagnation.
I believe a better way to manage these systems that simultaneously protects the public from adverse incentives and allows high risk high reward behaviour is a middle ground. For example a risk averse non-profit for day to day operations + prize systems + modest (not too big) government-run research facilities.
Fundamentally speaking, there is always a risk / reward tradeoff, and I believe the current society is too conservative and is missing out a lot of opportunities (compared to let's say the cold war or WW2 era). We need to somehow rebalance this scale to live near a better operating point.
I'm not talking about "non-profits" or NGOs. I'm talking about legislating autonomous organizations within ministries with full autonomy and remit to execute on their jobs and only report directly to the Minister or the Permanent Secretary.
This is what Singapore does, which itself is based on the British colonial model.
At some point, too much democracy is delerious, and Tom, Dick, and Harry need to know their place. Not everything needs to be politicized and democratized.
> Therefore the payment package must look a lot more like the CEO compensation or a high-end management position, which is contrary to the idea of civil management
What country are you from? Even the UK has begun developing statutory boards like the FCA and SFO that pay market rate salaries for critical roles.
And until the Thatcher era, civil service pay was comparable or slightly better paid compared to other white collar roles.
Albeit, we elect the commissioners
Politicians are simultaneously engaged in a desperate struggle to close down the defunct ones while opening up more, because they are a great way to avoid responsibility, which of course is one of the major operational goals of the civil service.
Quangos are a half assed attempted at doing something similar while trying to include some "inclusion", but with none of the checks and balances.
The reality is, not every Tom, Dick, and Harry should have a say on water management or R&D prioritization.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_boards_of_the_Sing...
And just as the executive branch has bloated into a monolith at the expensive of Congress, private enterprise has bloated at the expense of Unions (just as true in the U.K. as far as I can tell).
You have the two primary governmental/economic systems of balance failing in the same way, at the same time, both failing due to the actions of corporations.
This kind of failure may be common with liberal democracies but is not inevitable. We have simply been bad stewards and let corporations vacuum up everything with little resistance.
Of course, I had lived there for 5 years, had been trying to get a visit for 1 year and hadn't changed my water usage. Still no rebate was offered!
Flatrate is the default, but you can get a metered water connection installed if you want, and it is often cheaper than the flatrate.
It's just our housing stock being so old and decrepit, where nobody can be bothered updating anything even if it's provided for free by the utility companies, that the majority of houses simply do not have a water meter!
There's a general sentiment that smart meters and metered water will make costs skyrocket or somehow hold you ransom to abrupt and unfair price changes, as if that somehow wasn't the case today...
I pay £190 per year for unlimited water.
However I rent in a new build block of flats so maybe it doesn't apply to me, or is included in rent.
https://www.fife.gov.uk/kb/docs/articles/housing/council-tax...
I think you mean stereotypically rainswept. 25m people, >40% of England, live around London where it actually doesn't rain very much at all.
> The UK is one of the rainier places in Europe
Yeah, that includes Wales, Scotland and NI, where it really does rain all the bloody time.
The rain that falls across the Thames basin has historically been distributed relatively evenly across months, compared to regions with monsoon seasons. That makes management easier.
I do expect supply to meet current demand. And afaics, it would, if the pipes didn't leak.
South East England is a defined statistical region, using it like that could be confusing
Which is why we are picking you up on saying the area 'around London' has that population. I could also say that the enirety of Europe is 'around London'. Its ambiguous at best and has no real meaning.
> Its ambiguous at best and has no real meaning.
You're miles from the point, which was that much of England lives in the driest corner, which is relevant for water infra. Did you understand that from what I wrote?
As a far distant example: Tony Blair sails into opulent old age as a 'respected statesman' having lied about weapons of mass destruction incurring the deaths of 150K - 1 million.
