The privatisation of the water industry is now quite clearly the most catastrophic of all the privatisations. Turning public utilities into private monopolies and left them under-regulated and fully exposed to the worst of the financial engineering available to private equity and similar industries. They have all been loaded with debt, paid huge dividends to their private shareholders and done th absolute minimum to invest in upgrading the water pipe networks, build new reservoirs and all the other things that a well-regulated public utility might have been expected to do.
The only solutions at this stage will be expensive and I am not sure there is room in the stretched public finances to fund the scale of investment clearly needed. And our water bills are already rising at rates well ahead of inflation. I am sure that restricting dividends, capping interest rates and capping executive pay will all help but will not be enough alone to sort the mess out. The regulators have failed too but they have been quite deliberately under-resourced from the outset. "The unacceptable face of capitalism" indeed! |