When a Prime Minister enters No 10 for the first time he/she is briefed on any immediate domestic crises.
This time the Prime Minister was told that Thames water is in existential crises, not just because it has milked its customers by billions without investing in the infrastructure, but that the company’s infrastructure is near collapse.
Other company’s are identified as being in a similar condition.
Leaving aside the fact the previous government completely failed to get a grip of the situation, I think that frankly we have little choice but to re-nationalise our water system entirely.
Imo this should cost the U.K. nothing as the shareholders have been more than amply rewarded over the decades by money that should have gone into re-building/repairing the infrastructure.
The Prime Minister has, however spoken of labours reluctance to re-nationalise, but I think pressure to do so will eventually be overwhelming.
Over the last couple of days I've noticed that my washing has an unpleasant smell .
I've had to rewash the garments and add Zoflora and the smell is still there .
I don't normally boil my drinking water , but having had an upset stomach yesterday - I shall in future .
I never thought that this would happen in the UK .
There was a very interesting article in the Guardian yesterday by Nils Pratley, their business correspondent. He suggests that permanent nationalisation may not be the answer. He cites HS2 of a classic example of the way civil servants are not most suitable for managing large infrastructure projects. the contractors have done very well ut of it, but the cost has soared.
Instead he suggests the company should come into 'Special Adminstration. In what he describes as a 'debt for equity swap'. the share holders, who have mostly written off their investment in the company are wiped off, and the bond holders, a lot of the investment was drawn in by the sale of bonds, not shares and are owed £15.2 billion, should also suffer a hefty loss by having the bonds downvalued by 30%. This would leave the company for the enough leeway to get the extra investment to keep going.
To my mind this should be accompanied by giving Ofwat a through shake up, giving it more powers and instructions to us them and its remit being clear that it is there, first and foremost to protect consumers. This means far tighter financial supervision, much greater control of directors salaries and bonuses and dividends paid to shareholders. It will definitely mean replacingthe current head of OfWat and its senior management .
Companies are almost always Limited Liability as long as directors don’t break the law they cannot be held accountable, the most likely penalty for incompetence is to be banned from being a director.
Thames would have been given a contract by OFGEM where assets were transferred to the company, some of those were stripped away from Thames, why they were allowed to do that remains unexplained, but it seems it was legal. It would have been reasonable for the value of sales to be reinvested in the company, that obviously was not in the contract.
Its normal practice, a company making best use of its asset's, they don’t have moral duty to customers their duty is to shareholders.
First you have to prove gross negligence. Easy to say though.
The directors of the company need to be prosecuted for gross negligence.
The company is responsible for its debts.
Who is responsible for a company's debts?
Shareholders are not responsible for a company’s debts.
But surely re-nationalisation will off-load Thames massive debts onto the taxpayer?
Funny, innit, but profits always belong to shareholders, whilst debts belong to the public sector......
At regular intervals the water main pipes on the main road burst flooding the road and rendering it unpassable .
On one occasion the back up water flooded onto my father's garden washing away his garden shed ,compromising three trees and washing down a great deal of stones .
I've had the entire area renewed with new garden sheds ,hard-core and railway sleepers .
An increasing number of houses in his road have paved over front gardens and not much garden left in the back area meaning that the area tends to flood when it rains heavily.
Passers -by have seen me forking the lawn and asked me why I do it .
I reply that it's to prevent a flood next time the drain in front of the house can't cope with heavy rain fall .
I welcome changes to our water board .
It's caused me a great deal of expense and hard work .
I'm concerned when I drink tap water and think that it's best to boil it .
I don't use plastic bottles. I reuse glass ones .
I don't want to spend another day in our local A and E .
polnan a statement like that needs explanation.
Personally, I think that with the owners of TW, especially MacQuarrie, having taken £84 billion in dividends out of TW, for example while loading it with, I think £53 billion of debt, any corruption would have to be on an enormous scale to have had any significant effect on the state the waater industry is in. Such a huge scale - £billions - that someone would have noticed.
Added to the failure to update old systems, another problem is customers putting unsuitable things down drains and toilets.
Can you explain what you mean polnan?
I shall very likely be deleted, but the problem is corruption.
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.
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 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.
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.
Thames Water has been put into special measures.
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,.
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..🤦♀️
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.
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.
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
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.
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