Thames Water

Thames Water owes debtors 14 billion pounds. The water companies across England and Wales, since being privatised under Thatcher’s government in 1989, have built up £60 billion in debt. In that same time, they’ve paid out £78 billion to investors–a majority of which are foreign firms. Many of these do not even pay tax within the United Kingdom.

If you dispute these simple facts there isn’t much of a point of debate, but I will paint a broader picture of these companies’ incompetence, their blind faced robbery of our citizens, and frankly their disdain for all of us. Water is the most basic human right, it is the foundation for all life on the planet, and I think to be overcharged for it by a company you cannot choose to move away from is akin to a pistol being under your chin while a grinning face and beckoning hand demand £650 per year. You can in fact choose not to pay: you simply won’t live if you do. That’s a pretty good argument for why Thames Water, as well as all other water firms across England and Wales, should be forfeit to the country at a purely symbolic cost of £1 and run by the state.

Much has been made in the media and within the halls of the Transylvanian castle in which the Labour Party presumably resides these days about how important it is to find a new private sector suitor for Thames Water. Defra, Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, has been threatened with costs in the billions to ‘temporarily renationalise’ the company. These would of course be passed onto the billpayers. So, in short, not only would we have paid for these unproductive middle manager thieves to give out over £7 billion in dividends or the £1.5 million in compensation for only 3 executives this year, but also the 14 billion that they’ve racked up in debt while filling every body of water surrounding its 16 million unwilling customers with human excrement. You cannot blame someone for being unwilling to pay their bills if this is what the cost goes towards. In fact, I don’t think you could blame them if they hanged, drew, and quartered those responsible. In a just society these people would be justly punished for robbing millions and poisoning them for personal enrichment, asset stripping initially and then allowing them to dedicate the rest of their life to servicing the community to make amends for a fraction of their wrongdoings. This might sound radical but how else do you prove the point that the British public do not exist to be ripped off until they die just because there is a bottom line to be expanded?

Around the country we are robbed blind in ways that are truly hard to imagine if you didn’t know how unique our water and waste situation is compared to the rest of the world. England and Wales are the only countries in the world to feature a fully privatised water and sewage disposal system. France is the only comparable country to have instituted even semi-privatised water as the other examples worldwide consist of Argentina, Colombia, and specific cities such as Manila in the Philippines and Cochabamba in Bolivia. I would imagine that one’s taxes, should they go to anything at all, should at bare minimum cover necessities. Profiting off of basic needs is not only immoral but allows for a greater degree of scalping as the consumption or use of these types of goods are non-negotiable. Scotland’s water is famously nationalised, they rejected privatisation in no uncertain terms in 1994 when the Strathclyde Regional Authority held an advisory referendum that returned 97.2% of the over one million respondents preferred that Scottish water and sewage remained under national control. In the time since the fruits of this decision have been more than self-evident. According to researchers at Greenwich University between 2002 and 2018, there was 35% more invested into infrastructure per household than by English water companies and beyond that Scottish water bills are also £113 cheaper for our neighbours up north. A great deal of our water bills are, quite obviously, not going towards this maintenance and expansion of necessary infrastructure in England. Instead, this money is going towards servicing debt. Debt which has been proven to be wholly unnecessary within this piece, but also spent in service of the immense wages that the executive class within the water cartel carve out for themselves.

This I’m sure sounds very communistic to those who are of a more free market persuasion but to you too I have an argument. Should an investment in a private company not also be subject to risk? If you decide to place your money within a company whose debts are valued at over 80% of their assets, who cannot turn an operating profit in spite of increasing costs to a consumer base well above others have proven necessary (Scottish Water), why should you be free from risk? I make the same argument about housing—if housing must always increase in value to prevent a societal level crash then it should not be allowed to be a form of pure investment rather than primarily being a place to inhabit. Investing your money into anything is putting that capital at risk, much as the disclaimer before any financial service advertisement must state, and to remove that risk makes all investments more akin to money printing machines and inherently then incredibly inflationary. As individuals we all run the risks of bankruptcy and ruin should we borrow too much or spend beyond our means whereas these firms have an entirely different set of rules they exist under. It is rather, in spite of how harsh it seems, far more reasonable to let these investors and the creditors of these water companies lose their money outright for backing a losing horse than to continuously prop up these companies with bailouts and spaff the public purse on servicing a private institution’s debt. In short, even if you are the biggest proponent of the free market and the growth and efficiencies it’s so often purported to create then you should support this company going insolvent and then the infrastructure being reincorporated into the country’s control due to its sheer importance. CK Infrastructure is the first in line for a potential purchase, a Chinese company that already owns utilities around the world, including water companies in the UK as well as power companies. As a result, this one foreign company would own the water, waste, and energy services to London, the capital and definitive centre of the United Kingdom. From a national security perspective this strikes me as potentially problematic.

All while this rampant profiteering and subpar maintenance has been taking place, it bears mentioning that English water companies are also poisoning our waterways, our beaches, and our people. The direct result of this lack of proper maintenance and preemptive infrastructure construction has been an all time high in major pollution incidents all around the country. The rate has exploded in recent years, 2,801 incidents of pollution in 2024 compared to 2,174 in 2023, and a 60% increase in major incidents in that same time (just one year) from 47 to 75. These 75 incidents are considered to pose a “serious or persistent” risk to human health, fisheries, and the water that we drink. If you’ve seen the BBC documentary Paul Whitehouse: Our Troubled Waters as I did when it was released you’ll be aware that the lack of care for reservoirs and waste management capacity is destroying the ecosystem within the country, filling lakes with thick sludge, and very literally poisoning us all. I, for one, cannot stand to allow this to continue, none of us should. It is offensive in such an abrasive and disgusting way that it does inspire thoughts of violence and retribution against those responsible. That may or may not be reasonable but I’ll argue in favour of a peaceful solution of extensive reform and placing the ability to fix this back in the hands of the people once again and destroy the legacy of Thatcher one piece at a time. To reempower us to first stop drinking shit and then to regain enough dignity to aspire for better still.

For most of the dividends paid by water companies to be sent abroad, as Jeremy Corbyn claimed, is outrageous. To once again sell this essential infrastructure to foreign investors who can profiteer off of the population and not even pay tax on those stolen profits is utterly unconscionable. I’m not a national security alarmist but for a Chinese company to own the water, waste, and a large percentage of the power services supplied to our capital does also feel like an obvious threat to the capital’s existence in times of international strife or conflict. The arguments for privatisation have always been about efficiency and competition keeping prices low, clearly this hasn’t happened. In contrast, Joseph Chamberlain said in Parliament in 1884 that "It is difficult, if not impossible to combine the citizens' rights and interests and the private enterprise's interests, because the private enterprise aims at its natural and justified objective, the biggest possible profit." When initially taking the water companies into public ownership over 100 years ago the pitfalls we find ourselves in now were readily apparent and yet we have allowed ourselves to fall back into them with reckless abandon for the sake of an investment opportunity for private actors. We’ve tried privatisation before the 1980s, it did not work then much as it doesn’t work now. It’s essential we not try it a third time with another private sale of Thames Water. Take our water back, invest some of the public purse into it, and then enjoy safer, cleaner, and cheaper water on which no vampiric executives can drain the life and money from.

I am convinced that the water companies are a microcosm of Britain as a whole, by examining this and other specific instances you can gain a keen insight into what the point of Britain truly is. That might sound like an expansive and hard to pin down question but it’s one I intend on answering in some small way—what is the point? WHY is Britain the way it is, what is the reason for the structures under which we all live, and who does it serve in the end? Hopefully I’ll be back soon with a satisfying answer.