The state of water in the uk

Siope

Shareholders in a company limited by guarantee have ( the clue is in the name) their liability limited to a guaranteed sum - normally £1 - and that includes the board unless it can be proved that they were negligent and fraudulent.

I would have thought that would be easy to prove.

The board are definitely incompetent and negligent - the boss just been given £195k bonus - what on earth for? Money that should be put into the infrastructure going to pay obscene salaries and bonuses, whilst dumping record amounts of sewage - that’s got to be evidence of their failure.

£195k - for three months "work" vegansrock!

Alastair Cochran, the company’s chief financial officer, received a bonus of £446,000 as part of a total remuneration of £1.33m

It matters not if they are abject failures at their jobs, it seems that money is free-flowing their way however they perform.

This morning it has been announced that the head of TW has been given a £179,000 bonus, despite wanting to increase charges for customers by 60% and despite sewage discharges into rivers doubling.

I get our bills have to go up to pay for the years of neglect , but I object to bills going up to pay these inflated salaries, bonuses and dividends.

Sorry, I was just making a technical point about Cimpanies Linited by Guarantee, Thames Water isn’t one.

Water is just fine here,the victorian infasructure is gradually being replaced,generally we ,in my area,have no issues with our clean fresh tapwater.That'll be why WM wants to pipe it down south!! Along with our electricity...CLEAN electricity .though they appear to have sights on the oil fields too.
Who knew Scotland was so important in the ENGLISH economy.....lol and thats before the 8 billion + from whisky and food
I guess we've been right about being pillaged.its what WM does best.

Pillaging whisky?
I'll get DH on to it

Apparently Scottish people are being kept in the dark about the pollution of their waters.

www.sas.org.uk/water-quality/water-companies-shocking-stats/scottish-water/

Seven stretches of Scottish rivers totalling more than 45 miles (73km) in length are not expected to fully recover due to pollution from sewage, according to data from the environmental regulator.

Figures from the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (Sepa) show the process of improving these sections of rivers has been paused until 2028.

Conservationists said it was “shocking” that the regulator was effectively “writing off” whole sections of Scottish rivers affected by sewage pollution.

inews 2023

It must be wonderful on the Sunlit Uplands north of the border where all is Utopia.

Dinahmo

M0nica

But the assets can then b sold and you do get these sleight of hand arrangements that result in all the debts disappearing and the assets being sold for £1.

Sir Philip Green was/is veyr good at that kind of leger-de-main

In this case the assets are the water pipes, reservoirs and sewage works. probably rather difficult to strip these assets.

Surely the customers, who have no choice of supplier, are also an asset?

paddyann54

Water is just fine here,the victorian infasructure is gradually being replaced,generally we ,in my area,have no issues with our clean fresh tapwater.That'll be why WM wants to pipe it down south!! Along with our electricity...CLEAN electricity .though they appear to have sights on the oil fields too.
Who knew Scotland was so important in the ENGLISH economy.....lol and thats before the 8 billion + from whisky and food
I guess we've been right about being pillaged.its what WM does best.

well, I can assure you that we don't need anymore water here! I had an aunt who had the same opinions as you, blamed Westminster for everything, and somehow lumped all people living in England as being complicit with everything the government did, despite much evidence to the contrary. she used to refer to it as 'Oor watter'. I am a Scot too by the way.

If we want cleaner water we are going to have to pay for it, the regulator is OFWAT, they decide how much is spent on the water industry in the UK.

Successive governments have instructed OFWAT to hold down water bills, that has been the prime cause of poor water quality.
Management of the water companies has been poor, however don’t believe that nationalization will be a quick fix, my guess is if water bills were doubled there would still be a lot of sewage spills. Modern construction separates storm water from sewage, in older areas storm water overloads the treatment works, separating the 2 systems would help a lot.

As for swimming in rivers, the official advice is that inland fresh water is not safe to swim in in the UK, it contains all sorts of bacteria and parasites, that’s not going to change any time soon. By the time the Thames has reached London it’s been flushed 6 times, swim in it if you want I won’t be joining you.

Scotland's water is nationalised but we do pay for it. It is added to our council tax separately and we pay it that way.

So Thames Water want to increase customers’ bills by 59% for improvements, yet thee have already been paid for by consumers.
From a Guardian article today:
Ash Smith, the founder of the campaign group Windrush Against Sewage Pollution, said customers had already paid for the projects to upgrade ageing sewage treatment works, and were being asked to pay again.

“Thames Water failed to deliver around 108 schemes that were funded in the last spending cycle and we question whether that a deliberate act to keep it financially afloat. A proper investigation into this company is long, long overdue.”

Full article:
www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jul/10/thames-water-fails-to-complete-108-upgrades-ageing-sewage-works-legal-pollution-limits

David49 I thought like you until I heard the R4 Briefing Room episode on the water industry www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001yxl5 . I recomend it to everybody as a listen. It left me so angry I was shaking with anger. It is outrageous what successive governments and a totally spineless OfWat have let these companies get away with.

When the water industry was privatised there was, in most cases enough customer revenue coming in to finance all planned investment. Once privatised the new owners decided to pay themselves dividends from customer revenues and borrow for investment.

In all they have taken £78 billion in dividends out of the water companies and loaded the companies with £53 billion of debt to pay any investment in the water infrastructure.

That’s what companies do if you let them, it was Mcquarie that asset stripped the industry, but what’s gone has gone, OFWAT is totally incapable of regulating the industry.

We need to bite the bullet and nationalize the whole industry starting with Thames, then we know who to blame when things are not done.

Wether that will happen is another matter, Thames and others owe too much, the debt would have to be taken on to prevent others going bankrupt and to give confidence to future lenders.

Susan Davy,boss of south west water has just had a PAY RISE of £300,000, despite the fact that a lot of people were made ill with contaminated water, especially around the Brixham area..
It just beggars belief..🤦‍♀️

The water should never have been privatised in the first place. It is vital to us all and the disgraceful shambles of the whole system to pay off investors instead of ensuring that we all have decent drinkable water and at the moment the major problem of sewage being allowed into our streams and rivers risking sickness and even death to humans and animals is an absolute disgrace, which should be tackled immediately for everyone sake. an immediate large fine for each discharge should scrap the dividends from most of the companies and that in turn should allow it to be nationalized and belong to the people of this country. If you are joined up in one company there is not the ridiculous situation where some piping is very good until it meets another boards dreadful leaking pipes etc. Same applies to the railways. If you only care that your own trains work well there is no give an take between groups and who loses out ? The passengers of course!1 It is no good saying you want the country to become greener , when you do not make transport and water and the utilities in general joined up in an overall plan for the whole country and not in competition with each other to ony benefit the investers to the detriment of everyone,.

Thames Water has been put into special measures.

We should get away from blaming “investors” without them we will have no improvement, the government will have to attract “investors” if it decides to nationalize the industry.

The blame lies with OFWAT which is a government agency that was supposed to be regulating the water companies.

The biggest problem is building more and more houses. They get planning permission without increasing the infrastructure to support it. Hence we have water shortages, water contaminated, sewage discharged into sea and rivers, lack of GP appointments, hospitals overloaded, children travelling miles to a school as local ones are full etc.
You can't vastly increase the population without increasing the infrastructure. What was great for 2 million won't be great for 6 million. But still they build more.

Where I live Thames Water is notorious for not objecting to house building on the flood plain. Nor do they comment on the nth proposal to convert detached houses into flats - 8 or so extra showers/baths etc, an extra 4 washing machines, dishwashers etc. As a result (1) the developers use the non-objections of TW as ammunition for the planning committee; (2) the constant need to dig up roads to repair leaks is piously explained by the need to repair narrow Victorian pipes that can’t carry all this extra demand.

The problem is not sewage, that is pretty constant, the problem is storm water getting into the sewage system. New developments have separate storm water drainage a balancing area and restricted flow to a water course. It’s older properties that have roof and driveway water overloading the drains that are the problem.

I shall very likely be deleted, but the problem is corruption.