[News] Water companies an apology of sorts.

[Guy Fawkes]

With Royal Mail, the industry should be nationalised.

The water companies have failed, despite 34 years in the seat, to end the unacceptable pollution of OUR rivers and coastal waters. It’s not a philosophical thing for me, dividends if the companies had succeeded, would be fine. But they failed.

I wish Starmer had a firm plan and vocalised it.

No, public run services would never try to manipulate the system and hide dodgy practices, misleasing the public because it is all perfect and it is something that can only happen in the private sector.... oh wait

South east Coast Ambulane 999 scandal

NHS accused of 'scandalous' 999 response time policy

Exclusive: Whistleblower from troubled ambulance trust says thousands of calls that appeared to miss eight-minute target are being counted as hit

www.telegraph.co.uk

Police Scotland 999 reponse scandal

Police call handlers ‘used fake system to manipulate response targets’

Thousands of calls to the Bilston Glen control room were given a bogus call sign, known as DUMY, it has been reported.

www.independent.co.uk

 

[chickens]

I'm sorry or have you forgotten that the issue of dumping raw sewage predates privatisation, that many rivers in this country were devoid of life since the inductrial revolution but have seen wildlife return, thanks to the efforts of water companies since privatisation?

English otters back from brink of extinction

Otters can once again be found in all but one English county, after toxic pesticides which damaged their health and food supplies left them facing extinction in the country in 1970s.

www.channel4.com

how about this as another good article that mentions how bad the water industry was pre-privatisation as there seems to be a lot of rose tinted glasses wearing when it comes to how things were under state ownership
https://www.ciwem.org/the-environme...t-firms-tap,-retain-and-promote-female-talent

There were some rotten eggs who should have the book thrown at them for their actions (like those responsible for the deliberate act that led to Southern water being fined) but don't assume because of a few like that, that the whole industry is the same and will always be.

While I agree that it’s possible to have rose-tinted glasses for the good old days of public ownership, I’m not at all convinced that private ownership has proven an improvement. As such, I’d argue that public ownership is the ‘least worst’ option available.

If you feel otherwise, please provide your working out.

 

[Weststander]

No, public run services would never try to manipulate the system and hide dodgy practices, misleasing the public because it is all perfect and it is something that can only happen in the private sector.... oh wait

South east Coast Ambulane 999 scandal

NHS accused of 'scandalous' 999 response time policy

Exclusive: Whistleblower from troubled ambulance trust says thousands of calls that appeared to miss eight-minute target are being counted as hit

www.telegraph.co.uk

Police Scotland 999 reponse scandal

Police call handlers ‘used fake system to manipulate response targets’

Thousands of calls to the Bilston Glen control room were given a bogus call sign, known as DUMY, it has been reported.

www.independent.co.uk

The water companies have had 34 years and vast income to end polluting, but patently haven’t.

Time to try something different, the public model.

I’m not a state ownership zealot. British Rail was shit at every level except fares were cheaper, it was a laughing stock.

But time to get rid of the water companies. Clean rivers is part of their raison d’etre, they arrogantly don’t care.

 

[Guy Fawkes]

While I agree that it’s possible to have rose-tinted glasses for the good old days of public ownership, I’m not at all convinced that private ownership has proven an improvement. As such, I’d argue that public ownership is the ‘least worst’ option available.

If you feel otherwise, please provide your working out.

A lot of the reasoning was posted in that 1st article i posted about

 

[Guy Fawkes]

The water companies have had 34 years and vast income to end polluting, but patently haven’t.

Time to try something different, the public model.

I’m not a state ownership zealot. British Rail was shit at every level except fares were cheaper, it was a laughing stock.

But time to get rid of the water companies. Clean rivers is part of their raison d’etre, they arrogantly don’t care.

As the 1st article i posted stated

Why addressing sewage spills was not a priority for the water industry or for Ofwat

Despite investors being asked to pay for upkeep, it is inevitable consumers will have to pay to stop sewage spills. The regulator's focus for the best part of the last two decades has been on keeping water bills down.

news.sky.com

Many people will wonder what has taken the water industry so long to address the issue of sewage spills in waterways.
One of the main reasons, though, is because Ofwat, the water regulator, has not made it a priority for the industry.

Ofwat's main focus, for the best part of two decades, has been keeping water bills down.
By the time the current five-year regulatory period ends, in 2025, water bills will have been flat or falling, in real terms, for 15 years.

It is why water bills in England and Wales are so much lower than in countries like France, Germany, Italy and the United States.

Further back, in the immediate aftermath of the industry's privatisation 34 years ago, the priority was for investment in other areas - chiefly to upgrade crumbling Victorian water mains to reduce leaks and to improve the quality of drinking water in line with EU standards.

Addressing sewage spills was just not a priority for the regulator or the industry - and that was also because they did not happen so much until relatively recently.

There was only a finite amount of funding available to be spent, and OFWAT priorised other areas of the water industry that were just as in need and proving lower bills to customers

I seriously question your assumption that water companies don't care nowadays about tackling pollution too. to many, it is now seen as one of their main priorities to tackle, but like everything does, it will take a long time to resolve and it's simply not a case of taing it into public ownership, their clicking their fingers and hey presto, everything is fixed

The cost of addressing this, to meet the government's spill reduction targets by 2050, has been put by the government at £56bn.

Some may say, then, that the £10bn announced by Water UK today to address the issue does not go far enough. The industry body, though, points out that it is more than three times the £3.1bn that the industry has been permitted by Ofwat to invest during the current five-year regulatory period (2020-2025) tackling spills. It is also new money on top of that existing £3.1bn.

So it is a big and meaningful sum - and, more to the point, probably as much as could be put up by the end of the decade.
"We think £10bn in a five-year period is the maximum physical capacity of the sector to make these changes - you're talking about hiring construction experts, scientists, engineers being employed to build huge sewage overflow tanks the size of Olympic swimming pools, thousands of these, underground across the country. "We don't think we can do it faster than this."

So how, especially given the last paragraph above, would it being in public hands speed it up and end the issue any quicker? or is it simply making this claim that public ownership is the answer without having anything to show, to back up that assertion?

 

[chickens]

A lot of the reasoning was posted in that 1st article i posted about

I’m sorry, but what you posted was journalistically illiterate. It seemed to ask “how would we pay for it?”

Surely the answer is incredibly simple, through our water bills? Our water bill is going to come in anyway, would I rather the money I pay went into improving our sewage treatment, or would I rather it went to multi-millionaire Dave in the form of dividends? Oh gosh, it’s too difficult for me. Can anyone else provide an opinion?

 

[Weststander]

As the 1st article i posted stated

Why addressing sewage spills was not a priority for the water industry or for Ofwat

Despite investors being asked to pay for upkeep, it is inevitable consumers will have to pay to stop sewage spills. The regulator's focus for the best part of the last two decades has been on keeping water bills down.

news.sky.com

There was only a finite amount of funding available to be spent, and OFWAT priorised other areas of the water industry that were just as in need and proving lower bills to customers

I seriously question your assumption that water companies don't care nowadays about tackling pollution too. to many, it is now seen as one of their main priorities to tackle, but like everything does, it will take a long time to resolve and it's simply not a case of taing it into public ownership, their clicking their fingers and hey presto, everything is fixed


So how, especially given the last paragraph above, would it being in public hands speed it up and end the issue any quicker? or is it simply making this claim that public ownership is the answer without having anything to show, to back up that assertion?

“Lower bills to customers”.

That never happened in absolute or real terms.

I’ve got water meterage bills going back to the 90’s. Unit prices has risen consistently well above general inflation. The compound effect is that what used to be a tiny household bill in 1994 for example, is now a major outgoing.

From memory, OFWAT were persuaded each year by the water companies that the hikes were required for infrastructure investment. So here we are 34 years later and our rivers/coastal waters are literally teeming with human waste.

 

[Half Time Pies]

Can someone remind me how I change suppliers? As a rule I don't tend to purchase things from companies that have been criminally prosecuted for 'shocking and wholesale disregard for the environment and for 'deliberate, widespread and repeated offending', however I've never got around to switching!

Record £90m fine for Southern Water following EA prosecution

Southern Water sentenced to pay record £90 million in fines for widespread pollution after pleading guilty to 6,971 unpermitted sewage discharges.

www.gov.uk

 

[Guy Fawkes]

I’m sorry, but what you posted was journalistically illiterate. It seemed to ask “how would we pay for it?”

Surely the answer is incredibly simple, through our water bills? Our water bill is going to come in anyway, would I rather the money I pay went into improving our sewage treatment, or would I rather it went to multi-millionaire Dave in the form of dividends? Oh gosh, it’s too difficult for me. Can anyone else provide an opinion?

The current owners of some of these companies - including Southern and Thames - have been going without dividends for some time now.
Those owners, in the case of Thames, include tens of thousands of university lecturers whose pension scheme, USS, owns nearly a fifth of the company.

How many of these rich fat cat muti millionaire owners are there, and how many are things like share holding pension firms, etc......

or are you tallking about dividends on investment which enables these water companies to invest vast sums in infrastructure projects which it wouldn't otherwise be able to afford. who would provide such capital if there was to be no return on their investment? (even Government bonds, which is used to raise some capital to cover the gap between income and expenditure, pays interest to investers) if there was no return for capital investment, why would anyone make that money available? especially when there is a wide world of opportunity to invest and get a return elsewhere

How much interest do UK government bonds pay?
The United Kingdom 10Y Government Bond has a 4.002% yield. 10 Years vs 2 Years bond spread is 0.7 bp. Yield Curve is flat in Long-Term vs Short-Term Maturities. Central Bank Rate is 4.50% (last modification in May 2023).

Ofwat has signed off on the investment proposals and limits how much water companies can invest

The cost of addressing this, to meet the government's spill reduction targets by 2050, has been put by the government at £56bn.
Some may say, then, that the £10bn announced by Water UK today to address the issue does not go far enough. The industry body, though, points out that it is more than three times the £3.1bn that the industry has been permitted by Ofwat to invest during the current five-year regulatory period (2020-2025) tackling spills. It is also new money on top of that existing £3.1bn.

 

[raymondo]

“Lower bills to customers”.

That never happened in absolute or real terms.

I’ve got water meterage bills going back to the 90’s. Unit prices has risen consistently well above general inflation. The compound effect is that what used to be a tiny household bill in 1994 for example, is now a major outgoing.

From memory, OFWAT were persuaded each year by the water companies that the hikes were required for infrastructure investment. So here we are 34 years later and our rivers/coastal waters are literally teeming with human waste.

Exactly this. There have been huge bill increases and little evidence of appropriate infrastructure investment.

 

[Guy Fawkes]

Can someone remind me how I change suppliers? As a rule I don't tend to purchase things from companies that have been criminally prosecuted for 'shocking and wholesale disregard for the environment and for 'deliberate, widespread and repeated offending', however I've never got around to switching!

Record £90m fine for Southern Water following EA prosecution

Southern Water sentenced to pay record £90 million in fines for widespread pollution after pleading guilty to 6,971 unpermitted sewage discharges.

www.gov.uk

Even after a change of ownership and have no connection to those who were responsible for that historic action that led to the fine? and the new owners, etc in place now are taking the issue very seriously, are trying to resolve it (but are realistic about the challenge they face in achieving that, and how long it will take) and are trying to be be more open and transparent now to demonstrate that it is not a practice that continues to this day?

The House of Lords recently backed (by 213 votes to 60) a proposal to place a new legal duty on water companies to “take all reasonable steps” to prevent sewage discharges. Do you think that water companies will still ignore this area, and not care about it despite of this new legal duty?

Sounds to be more an inability on your part to trust anyone who isn't in a public sector role

Those responsible for that action that led to the fine for the water company should be held accountable, and face criminal prosecution for it if laws were broken (and if there are not any laws to stop that sort of behaviour, then maybe there should be some introduced to prevent something similar happening like that in the future)

Would you boycott the Albion now or hold it in the same low regard all because of the actions of bellotti and Archer in the 90's? Do the owners and directors have the same motivation now as then (to shut the club down and asset strip it for their own personal gain? or has it changed and the new owners of the club have different plans and you are willing to allow thm to continue and try to deliver their aims?

 

[chickens]

The current owners of some of these companies - including Southern and Thames - have been going without dividends for some time now.
Those owners, in the case of Thames, include tens of thousands of university lecturers whose pension scheme, USS, owns nearly a fifth of the company.

How many of these rich fat cat muti millionaire owners are there, and how many are things like share holding pension firms, etc......

or are you tallking about dividends on investment which enables these water companies to invest vast sums in infrastructure projects which it wouldn't otherwise be able to afford. who would provide such capital if there was to be no return on their investment? (even Government bonds, which is used to raise some capital to cover the gap between income and expenditure, pays interest to investers) if there was no return for capital investment, why would anyone make that money available? especially when there is a wide world of opportunity to invest and get a return elsewhere



Ofwat has signed off on the investment proposals and limits how much water companies can invest

It’s too late in the day for me, but I will try to remember to reply in the morning. Goodnight straw man.

 

[Guy Fawkes]

Exactly this. There have been huge bill increases and little evidence of appropriate infrastructure investment.

How knowledgable were you about the assets and infrastructure that all of the water companies then inherited, before they were sold off? and how knowledgable are you about them all now? including things like all the pipes and so on that are buried in the ground, and not just the big works scattered around the region they cover, for each water company?

How about how new builds during the last 30 odd years were connected to the network (for clean and waste) have sewers been combined, so run offs from roofs and drives, etc are mixed in with household produced sewage before carried through down to the treatment works? which potentially adds massively to the quantity that hits the treatment works at once during a heavy downpour, compared to before they werre all built, and increasing the chance of a legal spill (what's the alternative, hold it until it can be treated, even if it backs up the network and floods houses with raw sewage?)

 

[chickens]

The current owners of some of these companies - including Southern and Thames - have been going without dividends for some time now.
Those owners, in the case of Thames, include tens of thousands of university lecturers whose pension scheme, USS, owns nearly a fifth of the company.

How many of these rich fat cat muti millionaire owners are there, and how many are things like share holding pension firms, etc......

or are you tallking about dividends on investment which enables these water companies to invest vast sums in infrastructure projects which it wouldn't otherwise be able to afford. who would provide such capital if there was to be no return on their investment? (even Government bonds, which is used to raise some capital to cover the gap between income and expenditure, pays interest to investers) if there was no return for capital investment, why would anyone make that money available? especially when there is a wide world of opportunity to invest and get a return elsewhere



Ofwat has signed off on the investment proposals and limits how much water companies can invest

I’m sorry, but your first point is incorrect. Southern Water is owned by an Australian conglomerate called Macquarie, who have recently recorded record profits and provided a healthy dividend of A$4.50 per share. Macquarie do a lot of things, Southern Water will only be a contributor to the overall profit, but dividends (and good ones) are being paid.

Secondly, I don’t really care who’s invested in Macquarie, capitalism is a great system where there can be genuine competition, but essential infrastructure is not the place for it.

There is no genuine competition, it’s artificial. We don’t have eight different sets of water pipes connected to our houses and the ability to choose between eight different suppliers. There aren’t competing companies all building their own reservoirs and sewage treatment plants in the same geographical area, it’s a nonsense.

Sometimes public ownership is the most efficient model. I’m not anti-capitalist by any stretch, but it’s not always the best tool for the job.

Coming on to your final points, again, government has the ability to sign off on large infrastructure projects. It’s absolutely equally possible for governments to underfund infrastructure as it is for private companies to, and I’ve no doubt that this current government would have been just as catastrophic with water as it has been for every other public service, but that’s down to the incompetence and ideological blindness of the incumbent government, not an argument against public ownership.

Ofwat states that its role is to challenge investment plans to ensure they are value for money, and strike the right balance between investment and not allowing bills to rise too fast. However, none of this changes the fact that we’ve all paid our water bills for the past forty years, bills which the water companies have set. In that time they’ve paid out vast sums in dividends, and colossal salaries to a succession of managers and executives, who have not done their jobs.

To ask us to pay again for something that we’ve already paid for, quite rightly angers a lot of people. Nothing that you’ve posted changes that.

 

[Half Time Pies]

Even after a change of ownership and have no connection to those who were responsible for that historic action that led to the fine? and the new owners, etc in place now are taking the issue very seriously, are trying to resolve it (but are realistic about the challenge they face in achieving that, and how long it will take) and are trying to be be more open and transparent now to demonstrate that it is not a practice that continues to this day?

The House of Lords recently backed (by 213 votes to 60) a proposal to place a new legal duty on water companies to “take all reasonable steps” to prevent sewage discharges. Do you think that water companies will still ignore this area, and not care about it despite of this new legal duty?

Sounds to be more an inability on your part to trust anyone who isn't in a public sector role

Those responsible for that action that led to the fine for the water company should be held accountable, and face criminal prosecution for it if laws were broken (and if there are not any laws to stop that sort of behaviour, then maybe there should be some introduced to prevent something similar happening like that in the future)

Would you boycott the Albion now or hold it in the same low regard all because of the actions of bellotti and Archer in the 90's? Do the owners and directors have the same motivation now as then (to shut the club down and asset strip it for their own personal gain? or has it changed and the new owners of the club have different plans and you are willing to allow thm to continue and try to deliver their aims?

This has nothing to do with an inability to trust people who aren't in a public sector role, don't make this in to a socialism vs capitalism argument because it really isn't relevant in this instance! The companies I purchase from I trust because they have proven to me that they can do the job that I am asking them to do. But water companies aren't like normal companies because they are not subject to normal market forces and as a consumer I can't choose not to purchase from them. There is no incentive for them to earn my trust.

1000's of people stopped supporting the Albion in the 90's because of the mismanagement of the club and supporter numbers only grew again when the club started to be run well and performance on and off the pitch improved. The club proved to its supporters that it was worth turning up and paying the money and buy the kits etc. The current management has worked out what it needs to do to maximise profit and keep people happy and is constantly working to improve things because it knows that if it doesn't its customers will vote with their feet.

Even with the other previously privatised monopolies there is a element of choice, you can shop around for gas and electricity, telephone and broadband. You can choose to drive or take the bus instead of a train. With water I am swimming in shit filled seas and still being forced to pay the company responsible for their services.

 

[dazzer6666]

Thread is worth a read….

 

[dazzer6666]

Down the drain: how billions of pounds are sucked out of England’s water system

Visualised: where does the money from your bills go?

www.theguardian.com

 

[Neil]

Water companies spend nothing on infastructure
Get huge profits to give to shareholders to profit
The water bosses get massive bonuses for making the profits
When infastructure is needed they get us to pay with increased bills so not to have a dent in profits

 

[Cotton Socks]

Well, as they've apologised the prospect of paddling in raw sewage in the holidays is so much more appealing!