What the article doesn’t mention is that pre-privatisation a new reservoir was built every year up to about 1960 and then every few years until privatisation in 1992.
So we are about 30 years behind in adding capacity to the system. This combined with the inadequate levels of investment in the system leading to enormous wastage, is the answer.
Water should never have been privatised. At least not without a framework for a national strategy for water. I suspect that wasn’t done because it would have made water companies and unattractive source of profit.
I think the neglect and failure to invest in infrastructure is the worst because unlike high bills or increasing numbers of people not being served it's more or less invisible to the public while companies and shareholders rake in a lot of money, but doing that causes problems tax payers end up footing the bill for down the road, and it may not always be obvious to the public what the cause was.
A power company who makes profit by neglecting the condition of their power lines can cause a wild fire, but it takes a lot of time, taxpayer money, and luck to identify that the lines were the source of the fire, to discover that the company knew (or should have known) about the problem and done something about it, to get enough proof of those things that a lawsuit is possible, and to fight it out in court in order to hold the company accountable. It's not just the cost of fire the public is on the hook for in that case, but the costs of everything else too.
Cumulative capital investment by water companies in England and Wales since privatisation: £250bn.
The infrastructure they inherited was never designed for the things it's being asked to do today, and it has a life expectancy. It would literally cost trillions to upgrade the entire sewerage system.
This isn't apologia, it's just reality. The road network will also face the same fate since much of it was built >50 years ago and has a life expectancy of roughly 50 years. The country simply can't afford to replace it.
I too am a customer of PG&E.
In the UK, owning a utility company is nothing easy. Shareholders are definitely not stuffing their pockets. The biggest owner is Ontario pension fund (32%). I guess, poor retired Canadians are not very happy about this investment.
So I would say, your framing sounds interesting, until one digs deeper into facts.
You said correctly that the private utility monopolist can choose from the menu of raising prices, delivering a subpar (cheaper) service for the same price, or can "defer" (aka skip) maintenance indefinitely. All ways they can extract cash to pay shareholders or even worse, pay management fees to private equity.
But the government-owned utility that we idealize, which provides the reasonable service at a breakeven price, may not be realistic. Government has its own incentives: Some politicians want to take funding from your utility to pay for their pet project. Others (political operatives or even civil servants) may sneak in a corrupt overpriced contract to benefit their corrupt associates. Public unions are known for negotiating unreasonable work rules and contracts that preserve jobs that are not actually needed.
All of the above together create a drain on finances of a government-owned utility, which is the public counterpart of the drain on finances that "the need to make a profit for the owners" places on investor-owned utilities.
I hate my local investor-owned utilities with a fiery passion and can't believe most governments could do worse, but I think we shouldn't overlook how easy it is for nationalized entities to engage in similar amounts of shenanigans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abingdon_Reservoir
Looks like Thames Water (a private company) proposed the development nearly 20 years ago, but it was turned down by the Environment Agency, a government body.
> Plans for a £1bn reservoir in Oxfordshire to supply more than eight million people over the next 25 years have been rejected by the government.
> Thames Water wants to build a site on four square miles of land near Abingdon to help ensure future demand is met.
> The bid went to a public inquiry but the secretary of state said there was "no immediate need" for such a site.
"Abingdon £1bn reservoir plan rejected by government"
You can make this a requirement by law.
The idea private companies don't invest is just Labour propaganda. Another commenter has already pointed out your belief about reservoirs is wrong, as is the idea they wouldn't make other forms of investment.
And all this has happened despite the government imposing socialist price controls on the industry, a move usually guaranteed to kill investment!
At the other end of the pipe they have opened/upgraded many waste water treatment plants recently too, large EU fines being a motivator, including one in Arklow which took nearly 4 decades to get over the line (its planning predating the existence of IW).
However, as a further point. If national priorities change then a nationalised water industry can respond (relatively) quickly. But what can be done with a bunch of potentially foreign owned profit-seeking companies?
State ownership is not a panacea either.
State owned Scottish Water has more sewer leaks than the privatised companies in England and Wales do.
If they can't do their job, then we shouldn't pay our taxes ?
Water companies will build new resevoir capacity, but since the extra money they already bill your for, for maintaining the infrastructure, has been paid out to shareholders, it will of course require an additional fee on your bill.
At least that has been my experience with everything privatized in the past couple of decades. The private investors scoop up every bit of value, and when it's time to pay the bill, it's the customers that must pay (again).
Fortunately we have regulations in place, but that doesn't help when all value has been siphoned from the company and all there's left is debt.
And that means their interest is to but a modern branding onto an operation that has been stripped for wires as long as it works.
I grew up during a privatization wave in my country and the promise of the proponents always was that private ownership means waste is cut. Now all these sectors that produced decent services before have gone to shit. Be it postal, trains, highways, whatever. Everything is broken, underfunded, services less people for more money.
10 years ago when I said the same thing I would get a lot of counter arguments that all boiled down to: "Trust it bro" or "But governmental is more waste". Now these arguments don't come up nearly as much. Everybody can see it.
The thing is, if you want to avoid waste then literally the best strategy is to go into a desert where there is no service. No service means no waste. But it also means no service.
Like most neoliberal nonsense, it's not just a lie, it's a misdirection. What it really means is "Government money is being spent on providing a service for poor people, when it should be handed out to rich people."
It's driven by entitlement, not generosity.
You can see this very clearly in the way privatised CEOs are paid. The water companies quite obviously and literally prioritise CEO pay rises and dividends over service quality.
That's not an accident. It's the true meaning of privatisation.
That is what privatisation is.
The "customer" in privatised industries isn't the public, it's upper management and other big shareholders.
Responsible for putting a pin in development and turning Britain into a museum, with insufficient water or power.
It should urgently be reformed.
If the infrastructure isn’t there, we haven’t received what we paid for. Worse, without EU regulation these companies are now blasting sewage into lakes and rivers. Ofwat can’t do anything.
At this point I feel there’s no solution other than nationalising the infrastructure again and ploughing billions of tax payers money into yet another failed Thatcher initiative.
Of course that will never happen, because we’ve not had a government willing to make sweeping changes like that since Thatcher. Except maybe Liz Truss with her exceptional grasp of economics.
Of course not. The water company was in terrible shape (read: lacking funds) before it was dumped on a commercial company that does not have deep pockets like Chevron. Thames Water owes £16.8 billion. That money is already gone.
No one is going to swoop in to save the day. Taxpayers will eat the bill, and invest even more to reverse decades of neglect. All of those hard decisions labour committed to make are unnecessary when nothing is done and they are made for you. The country has limited funds, and is spending funds it doesn't have on things like billions on hotels for 29,000 unauthorized travelers so far this year.
UK external debt is £2.7 trillion, and whats her name said yesterday it may be necessary to ask the IMF for a loan? Water company indeed.
Why does privatisation mean that the government can't build infrastructure? I think the answer is more likely nimbyism than privatisation.
I personally think it makes no sense to privatise infrastructure for which no competition can reasonably take place, and I'd include distribution networks of many sorts in that: water distribution, rail lines, electricity distribution.
But I'm not aware that privatisation means that the state can't take on reservoir projects. The problem is that development of all kinds in the UK is utterly crippled by nimbyism. The article mentions the proposed Abingdon reservoir but links it to the boogyman of data centres rather than call out what the picture obviously shows: it's being stalled by nimbys.
A few months ago the government reclassified the project as Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project to allow Thames Water to to take the proposal out of the hands of the local authority, potentially allowing the project to go ahead. [2]
If it goes ahead as planned it will be the second largest reservoir in the UK.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abingdon_Reservoir [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz9kp2d4d0vo
"Thatcherism" does, however. It is a warped [Ayn] Randian view of capitalism and those who drive it. State intervention into the machinery of capital, even when it comes to essential infrastructure, is considered a corrupting influence.
Nobody able to change national policy within Downing Street or even ministries in Whitehall, at the time - or since - has had the gumption to say it's not working and we need to do something about it.
You are however right, that NIMBYism has also worked remarkably well - the planning process in the UK is the reason we can't build HS2 cheaply or quickly, and that is relatively painless compared to wind farms, solar farms (also often blocked), never mind building a dam and flooding an entire valley, which was the old way of creating new capacity.
And we Brits don't revolt – even protesting is highly legally-risky these days.
Is there a better country to do such things? I don't think so
And there'll be commercials - Scotland - Heavy rain (horizontal) - A woman totally drenched (with baby in hands) - In panic - Warning about the impending water crisis.
The UK (as only one example) is simply not the same thing as it was in 1960. Why would we expect the same results as if it’s just a matter of catching up from being behind, all while the ability to do so has changed?
If the UK wasn’t able to keep up with water storage capacity between 1960–1989, and has not built any capacity whatsoever since 1989; what makes one believe that somehow the UK, with massive headwinds blowing right into its face, could not only maintain the current capacity but expand it by about 50% (pop growth plus backlog), at the same time that the population has increased by ~1/3 and the nature of the people in the UK has changed significantly from a people that was able to do that in the past, but clearly could not do so since 1960, and while the finances of the country are inverting?
It is a gamblers fallacy. It is the aging man who still thinks he is in his prime, but also after decades of neglect and abuse of his body on advice of a devil on his shoulder, the serpent whispering assurances in his ear to indulge in harmful things and to win back his loses.
Age? Ethnic makeup? Urbanisation?
The population is older, less white, more in cities, fewer kids, but I'm not sure what any of that has to do with our water consumption or ability to build for it - other than maybe older people, especially the ones that moved out of the cities to live some LOTR-inspired faux-rural lifestyle, tend to be more NIMBY?
But equally though our appliances and lifestyles aren't the same as 1960. Showers are massively more efficient than baths, but we use them daily instead of once a week. Industry has mostly disappeared, and thermal power stations are on the way out (both extremely heavy water users), but agriculture has become more intensive.
For example the Abingdon Reservoir has been in planning for 19 years[1]. It is opposed by GARD[2], the Group Against Reservoir Development. It's hard to see how this is the fault of privatization.
„Water should not be human right”
But one can make a very fair argument where you can have a strong regulatory framework to ensure investment goals, exit clauses, and penalties in case of missing goals, no?
People have this propagandized view that the "free market" (which isn't real) is responsible for innovation.
All capitalism does is build enclosures and engage in rent-seeking. With the tendency for profits to decrease, ultimately it comes down to cutting costs and raising prices. So why would a water company invest in a new reservoir? That increases supply. That might lower prices.
The UK is going to neoliberal all the way into being a developing nation.
In the last century and a half, we went from candle light and horse and buggy, to the lowest level of global poverty in the last 5,000 years of recorded human history.
If capitalism wasn't responsible then what was?
Climate change means societal change. There was a time that Northern Africa was one of the best places in the world to grow crops. They were at the top of civilization for thousands of years. Climate changed, what people could grow and do changed too.
The difference this time is that we did this to ourselves. Even worse that we continue making our future prospects worse on purpose so a few oil countries can squish some extra money from earth. It is baffling the lack of foresight.
I would argue that a small minority of the human race did this to the rest.
> the lack of foresight
Everybody on the planet is well aware of what is happening and why. Its not lack of foresight, it is pure ignorance and apathy of those who are making money off the backs of these tragedies.
You yourself haven't got a model. If we stop using fossil fuels today, billions die. The energy from fossil fuels has generated widespread benefit and allows our current wealth. And also heats the atmosphere.
The emissions of the bottom 90% globally, and the emissions in the products they use are more than enough to sustain global warming.
Fobbing the problem onto "the other", however you define them, is another way to justify doing nothing.
Yes, just the people that use fossil fuels to drive, heat their homes, power their electrical lines, and so forth. /s
You can't dodge responsibility by pushing the blame upwards on everything. Are you posting these comments from a computer powered by solar panels?
so none of the users of those oil, who paid for it willingly, had any responsibility at all then?
I’ve converted my car to run on renewable wood pellets, stop moaning start fixing.
It’s all about individual choice, the oil companies are simply responding to demand.
My next step is to build a railway through our local high street so I can decarbonise my commute.
Take responsibility for your own actions, stop expecting governments to do everything for you. The oil companies aren’t the problem, you are.
- Ecologists and native-right defenders being killed in many countries.
- Politicians being paid off by corporations to fight against wind and solar energy.
- Newspapers paid to mislead the public.
But you blame the guys that cannot make ends meet and buys the only thing that they can afford.
Stop blaming the victims. This is something that needs to be solved at the state level, blaming citizens for the crimes of oil producers is false, morally wrong and unproductive.
To blame others than the oil producing companies that bribe politicians and lie to the public is just a stalling tactic to continue destroying the world while most people is actually trying to stop that destruction.
An absurd satirical play. Due to extreme water shortages, private toilets are unthinkable, public toilets are managed by a corporation. Yes, it's pay to pee...
Articles like this, with subtle mentions of how it was all our fault and all the water companies were doing was prioritising low cost for the consumer, are the equivalent of 'were the nazis really that bad or were they just a bit sad and lonely', but national infrastructure edition. They exist only to soften up and distract public opinion so that we're less likely to want any of the people involved to be held to account.
An honest request for enlightenment:There's the structural problem. There are the structural aspects of a potential solution. There's some mapping around the problem. Given that, why does the England government not provide a definitive solution?
As a former 3rd world resident, one thing that I noticed in Europe is that several basic problems do not have the right incentives or willingness to be solved, even if there are the "raw materials" in place, like capital, human talent, a need, and so on.
I know that some can think like the "Why Didn't I Think of That?" meme template [1], but I have been in worse places where you have several headwinds like corruption, lack of capital, etc.; I see that in England and in continental Europe you can see a lot of those "basic problems" happening and piling up. I wonder if those issues will be solved gradually or if those societies will need to have their “burning platform” moment [2].
[1] - https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/139781746/Why-Didnt-I-Thin....
Selling public infrastructure lets you give tax cuts now, and you'll be long gone before people recognise that they are paying more and getting less. It's much like MBAs making cuts - you can boost the bottom line in the short term and be gone before the blame starts gathering
We have a fptp electoral process, which means there are a lot of safe seats in parliament. In battleground seats, a vote for the third party is effectively a vote for the first. People who want not-the-incumbent cannot choose which party they actually do want. I personally have been disenfranchised all my adult life, MEP votes excluded. (If I could change only one thing, I would abolish fptp.)
Moreover, like most populous Western countries, most of the electorate is not well educated on politics or economics; they get their political news from limited sources, and they don't seek information that challenges their prior beliefs.
These facts combine to reduce electoral accountability.
Having flogged the public infra, renationalisation is tricky. You either buy it back at market value, which means imposing a tax burden and playing into your opponent's electoral strategy, or you seize it and spook capital markets, which also plays into your opponent's electoral strategy.
* the UK's economic growth has been poor since the 2008 financial crisis, so government resources from taxation have similarly not been growing as much as they used to
* demographics (more elderly people) mean that spending on pensions and healthcare has been steadily growing
* so the spending on every other aspect of government and other public-realm type things has been steadily squeezed: there are no resources for improvements on either the big scale or the small
* plus we have (like the US) a setup where many people and organizations have an effective veto or delaying ability on building things (houses, public infrastructure, etc), which makes fixing public infrastructure problems very expensive and time consuming.
As a water-related example of the last point: there's a proposal for a new reservoir near me which is classified as a "nationally significant infrastructure project". The timeline outlined at https://fensreservoir.co.uk/proposals/process/ started in 2022 with "pre-application consultation" in multiple phases, doesn't even submit the formal planning application until 2027, hopes to get a government decision in 2028, will not start construction until 2030 and might finally get the reservoir up and running by 2036 if nothing is delayed. And this doesn't account for the possibility of legal challenges to it which could add extra delay even if they are dismissed.
The corruption issue is still there, it's just much better disguised and kept away from the general public. Random individuals are not expected or generally safe to pay bribes to police in the UK; we imagine that's all there is to it. But at the higher levels all sorts of problems are not solved because there's a financial interest, or simply an establishment personal connection.
The Fujitsu/Post Office scandal was perhaps the worst recent example.
Every government in the last 20 years has been incompetent when it comes to managing the country. All they know is to make statements to the news about hot-button issues, like Brexit, foreigners, flags, Ukraine, Palestine, trans rights, Lucy Letby, etc. Both the Tories and Labour. They've both been more like teams of social media influencers than governments.
I do share your bitterness. Free-market fundamentalists have flogged assets for years, and the cost to the citizens is some future government's problem.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ofwat-to-be-abolished-in-...
> Free-market fundamentalists have flogged assets for years
Maybe the problem isn't the free market (since one does not in any way exist in this case) but government interventionism.
Legislate that certain public services are to only be managed and administered by the civil service managed and autonomous statutory boards. That's probably the easiest thing to do in a parliamentary system like the UK. Sort of like a "Water Management Board".
Not every function in a democracy needs to be democratic in nature.
Heck, this is how the UK managed colonial territories like Singapore and HK with the civil service run HDBs, and how a lot of the UK was run before Thatcher's privatization.
Let's say that John Doe is a very accomplished visionary individual, and has quite a few revolutionary good ideas around improving the water system. Obviously Mr. Doe needed lots of lab equipment to gain experience and insight into these systems, and realistically needs a lot more if he wants to live to his full potential and benefit the public. He is determined to work towards the greater good, but also needs a lot more power [than the average citizen] to test his ideas.
Therefore in order to [be able to] accept this role, he has to be well-compensated (as a one in the world person). Therefore the payment package must look a lot more like the CEO compensation or a high-end management position, which is contrary to the idea of civil management.
Said differently, money can be a good proxy of the power to bring about changes, and if we truly want to try radical ideas (as we should in challenging problems), we need powerful individuals that can risk [their own fortune of course], not committees of less powerful people best suited for maintaining the status quo. In other words, the average citizen is much too risk averse to accept (or approve the payment package of) John in this position, and this can lead to stagnation.
I believe a better way to manage these systems that simultaneously protects the public from adverse incentives and allows high risk high reward behaviour is a middle ground. For example a risk averse non-profit for day to day operations + prize systems + modest (not too big) government-run research facilities.
Fundamentally speaking, there is always a risk / reward tradeoff, and I believe the current society is too conservative and is missing out a lot of opportunities (compared to let's say the cold war or WW2 era). We need to somehow rebalance this scale to live near a better operating point.
Politicians are simultaneously engaged in a desperate struggle to close down the defunct ones while opening up more, because they are a great way to avoid responsibility, which of course is one of the major operational goals of the civil service.
And just as the executive branch has bloated into a monolith at the expensive of Congress, private enterprise has bloated at the expense of Unions (just as true in the U.K. as far as I can tell).
You have the two primary governmental/economic systems of balance failing in the same way, at the same time, both failing due to the actions of corporations.
This kind of failure may be common with liberal democracies but is not inevitable. We have simply been bad stewards and let corporations vacuum up everything with little resistance.
Of course, I had lived there for 5 years, had been trying to get a visit for 1 year and hadn't changed my water usage. Still no rebate was offered!
Flatrate is the default, but you can get a metered water connection installed if you want, and it is often cheaper than the flatrate.
It's just our housing stock being so old and decrepit, where nobody can be bothered updating anything even if it's provided for free by the utility companies, that the majority of houses simply do not have a water meter!
There's a general sentiment that smart meters and metered water will make costs skyrocket or somehow hold you ransom to abrupt and unfair price changes, as if that somehow wasn't the case today...
I think you mean stereotypically rainswept. 25m people, >40% of England, live around London where it actually doesn't rain very much at all.
> The UK is one of the rainier places in Europe
Yeah, that includes Wales, Scotland and NI, where it really does rain all the bloody time.
The rain that falls across the Thames basin has historically been distributed relatively evenly across months, compared to regions with monsoon seasons. That makes management easier.
I do expect supply to meet current demand. And afaics, it would, if the pipes didn't leak.
As a far distant example: Tony Blair sails into opulent old age as a 'respected statesman' having lied about weapons of mass destruction incurring the deaths of 150K - 1 million.
:D
Thames Water: pooposterous! we must pay bonuses, or it'll affect investor morale! Haven't you heard, your water is the best in the world, be happy :)
Consumer: grumble okay, here's our money
Thames Water: gives money to execs
Consumer: the infrastructure needs repair
Thames Water: we need to raise bills to fund the infrastructure repair/upgrade
But we need to lower the taxes on the wealthy and corporations (and reduce or eliminate regulations) so they can distribute their capital to make new water!
Don't you know anything about modern economics?
:D
https://fullfact.org/economy/do-top-1-earners-pay-28-tax-bur...
The good news is that not all that '1% of the rich' are leaving. However unless this 28% of all tax figure is wrong, inevitably there will be an increase to counter the loss.
Of course, the narrative suits the wealthy owners of the media, so the story gets repeated anyway.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2025/07/the-british-we...
Though as we are aprox half the size of England, with 1/56th the population the the urgency in a drout will be less acute. 4 years ago we had unpresedented rain and floods with people getting washed away and killed, roads and bridges destroyed and comunities cut off with damage from that still evident, which would be truely devastating if it were to happen now.
Civil engineering calculations were based on max rain bieng 1”/hr, and now there are regular reports of twise and three times that, and I am sure that drout planning was based on now irrelivant tables of average rainfalls and resevoirs sized acordingly. The issue for England is if the will and capacity to build better infrastructure is there, as hydrology is governed by geography and cant be put just anywhere, ie:we are talking water frontage here, dams to raise lakes, and other popular types of projects.Given that it's England, some of the water rights will be written into ancient law, and will be essentialy impossible to override, and then require buy outs of breathtaking proportions. Which leaves tunnel boring machines, sand hawgs, epic infrastructure that has to be built to last forever, and not one but of it suitable to pose in front of.
I think the question should really be, how can it not be out of water? There's literally only 48x48 metres per person.
I would prefer it was metered so companies that use a lot of water are charged commensurately. Council tax in itself is a regressive tax, so adding water charges to that makes things worse.
It's not like they're bringing water from Scotland to England by pipeline.
But I was in Scotland a few years back (from Colorado) and I was constantly surprised by the incredible amount of water that came out of each faucet whenever I turned it on. Like, I get that nobody wants to wash their hands in a fine mist, but there's a point beyond which more means nothing.
In many places in Europe it is ironically the sewage system that actually depends on high rates of flow to function properly and retrofitting them is effectively not plausible, while also causing sewage issues because water has been made expensive, which then causes lower usage. In other places in Europe you aren’t even able to flush toilet paper because the system cannot handle it. In America, because of the nature of our development we don’t really have the antiquated sewage problem as much, but we have things like septic systems and private wells that are still widely used in places because they are so sparsely populated or even just because connecting into the public sewage system is getting increasingly financially infeasible as the financial chickens come home to roost after squandering ~$100 trillion dollars over 25 years.
This is something that was intentionally done and the argument was had and, agree or not, people didn't want it to happen. It happened anyways. Of course, the policy can be reversed.
Rainfall over all of the UK has been increasing since 1840 accord to the Met Office [1]. How is a drought a clear signal of collapse if they've been happening since before the industrial revolution? [2]
[1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/...
[2] https://iahs.info/uploads/dms/13708.88-483-489-81-308-Cole-F...
Previous government sold off the land on which gas storage once sat to private developers to build houses and business parks.
Roll forward 25–30 years later, UK is something like 65% dependent on gas imports from the EU who kept the majority of their gas storage ... quite an ironic position in the post-Brexit era.
Turns out climate change means you end up with a lot of rain in a short time followed with long periods of draught. Not a single Northern European country is equipped for this situation.
You have to start building reservoirs up the wazoo.
Another news article recently made a huge story, that we're running out of sand. I wonder what will be next.
Water is a human right, not a commodity.
That is not what happened. The government simply introduced plans to charge for water usage. As you say, there was a backlash, albeit only from certain sectors of society. While it did cause the authorities to shelve the charges, it's not correct to say that "everyone" was destroying the new meters; as I recall, there was very little vandalism.
The result of this mob rule is that, like Britain, we have been left with an underfunded, ageing, leaky water network that is essentially incapable of supporting further expansion.
For example 0-4 residents have an annual allowance of 213,000 liters. Anything above that is charged at €1.85 per 1000 liters.
Note : The average amount of water used by a household in Ireland is 125,000 litres per year
These are majority unmetered at the household level so it's not clear to me at least how it's measured.
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/water-and-coas...
But as an example, one of the first actions taken after Brexit was to stop monitoring and treating sewage discharges into the English Channel.
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62670623
- https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62626774
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9kz8ydjpno
Another major success for the privatisation of services such as the postal service, railways and electricity in the UK.
The Soviet Union had constant problems with insufficient food production. The successor countries didn't.
> Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1tn litres of water through leaky pipes each year.
Seems like there's most of a solution here, just staring us in the face, no? Problem being of course, that the privatised water companies have little incentive or investment in order to tackle the problem.
Are we ready to admit that selling off critical national infrastructure was a stupid idea, yet?
It's the same story with power and gas, wherever they get turned over to the private sector, things get worse. Fundamentally I don't give the first shit about choosing an energy provider. I don't want to find a new deal every few years. I don't give a shit about choice, I just want someone to do it well and charge reasonably. Instead you get stuck in a market offering discounted signup rates and you have to switch every year, while the companies draw their earnings from the minority of people who forget or otherwise can't be bothered to switch.
I don't miss that from the UK. Here in communist Western Australia we maintained ownership of the water, power and gas infrastructure, where other parts of the country set up privatised energy marketplaces. When the UK and the rest of Australia were screaming about rocketing bills, we were protected from some of the fluctuations in international energy prices over the last few years and any profits got ploughed back into infrastructure or the state coffers rather than heading off to private hands. It's just better...
Unfortunately, the water system doesn't work that way. It has been parcelled off to various private companies, giving them a natural monopoly.
The price-discovery aspect of supply seems a bit broken as well - suppliers bid daily on their price to supply power, and the cheapest X units are selected (where X is the daily demand), then they all get paid out at the level of the most expensive provider in the selected mix. Seems to me that it leaves the consumer significantly overpaying, though it must be a nice little earner for those that can provide cheap power.
But you’re right that water is in a worse state due to the monopoly side of things.
I have no clue how UK's "privatized water companies" work though. I'm not going to be too surprised if UK's system somehow manages to combine all the disadvantages of private ownership with all the disadvantages of state ownership in a single system.
The free market approach seems to require allowing water companies to even build and maintain parallel infrastructure that can't be shared, if they consider it to be economical. That would require immense capital investment, meaning the barrier to entry would likely be very high. The "efficient" case, where joining an existing pipe infrastructure is cheap, due to competition, would entail having several parallel networks of pipes running between reservoirs and people's homes. This was viewed as profoundly wasteful, even by the Thatcher government that privatised water, and that's why it's forbidden by regional monopoly.
The companies seem to operate on a model of doing as little maintenance as they can get away with while taking on debt and paying out to shareholders and the C-suite whenever possible. This has been done in complicity with the regulatory body who wanted to keep bills as low as possible for as long as possible, so played along with the zero-investment model.
It is a clusterfuck.
It's incredibly expensive to have the population increase this fast.
Weird that they are to blame, even though water abstraction has been trending downwards for close to 30 year.
If you add millions of people over the last 25 years (say) then of course water will become much scarcer. And it's not like, say, food supply, which scales up and down relatively nicely with demand. Additional water provision is a massive capital investment each time to provide a load more provision in a big chunk.
Implying migration is 'unnatural'. Which it isn't, humans have migrated as long as they've existed, and without migration the population in the UK would be trending down, which is a very bad problem to deal with.
Population growth in the UK is roughly in line with other developed countries. The past few years have been a bit choppy due to global events like the pandemic, but the UK is not an outlier in its population growth.
Oh there will be plenty of new technology invented, but it will either be underinvested, or bought out and buried by competition.
Just like how the electricity companies buried Nikola Teslas perpetual motion machines. /s
All of this requires lot of electrical power, large pumps, cleaning, corrosion-resistant materials, etc. Desalination is generally the last resort when there are no other options.
It is much simpler, more efficient and less expensive to properly manage freshwater resources, maintain networks, eliminate losses and leaks, etc.
Uhhhh that seems pretty cheap and affordable?
> can cost from just under $1 to well over $2 to produce one cubic meter (264 gallons) of desalted water from the ocean. That's about as much as two people in the U.S. typically go through in a day at home.
What am I missing here? Even if you triple the cost, people will pay a $180 water bill before living in a water scarcity situation.
2. Tax base plateaus
3. Import refugees and give them free money to increase tax base
4. Run out of natural resources
5. ?
6. Profit
This particular issue is imho mostly related to a lack in investment in water infrastructure (reservoirs and pipes). I don't see how migrants factor into this equation (not to mention that the "free money" given to migrants is scarcely a drop in the bucket). Please spread your hatred elsewhere.
We have not run out of natural resources, the issue is we have not built appropriate infrastructure to harness it for a very long time.
No results.
And our beautiful private companies did what they do best. Rinsed every pound they could from those companies, and saddled the water companies with debt in order to rinse even more money.
And now they're going bankrupt ... or, at best, just staying afloat.
Needed capital investment? Long forgotten about ...
To do that they'll need to, you know, not raise debt to pay for the capital investment, there isn't any capacity for that. No, they'll need to double peoples water bills to pay for it.
And all of this over happened under the watchful eye of a "Regulator".
Has been one of the most absolutely disgraceful episodes in UK capitalism.
Thanks, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. You're a hero to some ... an absolute disaster to others.
> While famously rainswept, climate crisis, population growth and profligacy mean the once unthinkable could be possible
Also from the article:
> No new reservoir has been built in 30 years despite significant population growth
The industry has said that about 20% of all treated water is lost to leaks.I see the same in my own country. Population growth with no end in sight, infrastructure thoroughly stressed, nobody does anything about it.
which one is grown and which one is imported ???
Tories think government is the problem, thus when they govern, they break the government, which in turn results in situations like this, which the tories can use to argue that government is the problem.
So next time you think war spending is fiscally insane, remember: it’s not waste, it’s water strategy. World-class ingenuity from the people who once ran an empire.
Would it solve everything? No. But it would solve a whole lot and the fact that someone that specialises in environmentalism doesn't even mention it shows just how far we are from solving this.
70% of the UK is farmland and I'm willing to bet much of that is non-irrigated pasture.