lpm wrote: ↑Tue Aug 16, 2022 11:30 am
That's a confusion of different issues, Ivan.
What matters isn't hosepipe bans, they're inevitable every few years. What matters is that the privatised British water companies fail to do the basics.
- not processing sewage before discharge to rivers and sea
- failing to deliver water to household and business taps
- high leakage levels
- illegal over-extraction and permitted over-extraction from rivers
As an example, this weekend my water went out and came back at low pressure after 24 hours. Some nearby villages were without for three days. Some homes are still out. Pubs and small businesses, already struggling to survive, have to close when they don't have water. The provision of bottled water was at a location 20 minutes drive away. Deliveries of bottles to homes of the elderly were promised but didn't turn up.
And this is the
second outage so far this year. And it's the sixth or seventh outage in the past 5 years. This is nothing to do with temporary drought conditions. It's part of the fundamental way the water companies have chosen to operate.
The major culture change isn't in our use of water. It's in how we as a country choose to run things. We have gone down the route of very low regulation, very high extraction of cash by senior directors and zero long term thinking about what sort of water network we'll want in 2070.
I did try to cover these issues. Let me clarify.
There is a notorious situation in a particular small village in the Thames Water area in the high part of the Chilterns, that suffers what you describe, so I guess that may be where you live. It is small and fairly remote by SE English standards, and one of the highest settlements in the Thames region. So when water pressure falls it is inevitably first to lose its water. Whether it is your village or not, it can stand for your problem.
I agree, and explicitly said, that Southern and Thames have most conspicuously been failing to do the basics. I mentioned their Directors should really have difficulty sleeping at night given what they do, in terms of deliberate omissions. And I said the main problem has been Ofwat failing to enforce on them the delivery of plans they have written - which are compliant plans - with sufficient vigour and pain, so they get away with not delivering their plans. I'm not saying the other companies are angels, but Thames and Southern are conspicuously the worst for this.
In the case of the small village in the Chilterns, I guess Thames Water thinks it can get away with failing to spend the money required to deal with a particularly expensive problem given the small population and (locally) high altitude involved. And so far they have got away with it because the regulator is both lily-livered at enforcement, and also unwilling to supply the full money involved, given the consequences for customers' bills.
Before privatisation, there was much more unprocessed sewage discharge to rivers and coasts, very high leakage levels, and illegal and permitted over-extraction. And indeed widespread poor drinking water quality as well. These issues all got an awful lot better in the early years after privatisation, with a huge amount of investment. Recently, some of them have been getting worse again in some areas, due to certain water companies not wishing to incur the cost of dealing with it properly, and getting away with not doing the spending, even though it has been costed into their regulated plans. And then sometimes Ofwat does a deal that only permits a basic scheme, which doesn't really solve it, because Ofwat doesn't want to agree to the high cost of the proper plan, because then it would have to increase the price to customers to pay for it.
The deteriorating discharge issues - which is a major issue on the Chess Valley where Chesham sewage works regularly overflows near where I live - is a consequence of increasing sewage volumes and a failure to increase the capacity of sewage works to handle it. It has to go somewhere, so it overflows into watercourses. Because it is very expensive to expand sewage works, and also often socially difficult to achieve. As I said, sometimes Ofwat conspires with the water company to do a cheap fix, because otherwise it would be expensive for customers. I tend to think that is what happened here, because they did do an upgrade of Chesham sewage works, but it wasn't enough, because that is all that Ofwat funded. Abuse of watersources is a similar issue, which a bit more leakage control and interlinking would go a long way towards handling.
These issues don't go away by nationalising things. Rather nationalised things can often continue misbehaving with impunity because you can fine them and it has no effect. They don't even always spend all the money they have been given, although the reasons are different. For example, National Highways formerly Highways England formerly Highways Agency has been unable to get its arse into gear to spend the money it has planned to spend. At least shareholders feel the pain of fines. But the problem is that the enforcement hasn't been strong enough to make them feel enough pain such that they think delivering is better than not delivering.
Let us not forget the reason that the water industry was privatised in the first place is that government felt powerless to solve these things in the public sector. And initially it got a lot better because of the privatisation. That's not as true now as it was then, because now government can borrow more easily - at least recently but it will be getting a lot harder with the interest rate likely to follow inflation upwards, and a recession reducing tax income. And let us remember it isn't always a panacea, nationalising things. A lot of crap and impunity goes on there too.