The BBC recently ran a documentary, Thames Water: Inside the Crisis which took a camera inside the beleaguered water company to observe its day to day running, focusing on the management and workers at the Mogden treatment plant. The idea appears to come from the head of communications, Caroline Murdoch, who thought TV exposure would allow the company to polish its own turds in public. Instead it demonstrated the general chaos at the company, its inability to stop polluting the River Thames and the inherent dishonesty which lies at the centre of so many large corporations that do such a bad job.
The workers at the treatment plant, salt-of-the-earth characters, frequently wonder why there is so little funding for them to run the works properly, to even staff the place adequately. The young manager, keen and hard-working, gives it up as a bad job and quits. For the informed, the answers to these questions have been known for some time. The acute problems all date back to the 1989 privatisation, stemming from the Thatcher government’s ideology that public sector is bad, private good. It didn’t take long for the corporate vultures to descend. Thames Water is an especially egregious example in which the Australian investment bank, Macquarie, dubbed the Vampire Kangaroo, swooped in to set up an opaque and complex company structure, which allowed it to load up Thames Water with billions of debt and funnel the cash to its subsidiaries and other shareholders. This has made the bank very rich and placed the public utilities it owns, particularly Thames Water, in a terrible financial state. It has in effect extracted wealth from bill payers and the environment, while impoverishing the company such that the rivers and coastal seas now have shit regularly pumped into them.
The argument in favour of privatisation was that water utilities could raise the capital to invest in the infrastructure upgrades to treat sewage effectively. As recently as 2023, a Tory MP backed this view when I challenged him about water quality. But instead of investing in the necessary infrastructure to treat sewage, Thames Water paid out all the money to investors. TW is just the worst case; all privately owned water utilities have similar problems. The Vampire Kangaroo has since hopped out of Thames Water but now owns Southern Water.
Financial engineering is the clear reason for TW’s troubles, yet the boss of the company, Chris Weston, refused to admit this in the documentary, waffling on about looking ahead and denying any obvious reason for the disastrous situation. He also fatuously claimed that big pay packages for him and other chief executives are necessary to attract ‘talent’. Well, that talent has done a dreadful job at Thames Water and too many other companies. Remember the financial crisis, never mind the sewage crisis? He comes across as something of a bumbler, spending a lot of time recording pep videos for the staff.
Anglers despair at the deterioration of rivers and everyone is aghast that water bills are going up steeply, 47% in the case of Southern Water (remember who owns it?). It’s nothing less than corruption whereby international corporations can crap on the country, aided and abetted by successive Conservative governments. Unfortunately our current government does not seem likely to change the situation, at least not in the near future. Water companies are now so heavily loaded with debt that taking them back into public ownership will be very difficult.
Rivers have been in decline for decades. It is has speeded up. Where will change come from?
The Secret Angler 