Discharge of sewage into waterways is simply caused by the overflow of storage tanks. This is currently attributed by the industry to warm weather causing unexpectedly rapid runoff. This is supposed to happen only extremely rarely. Southern Water is reported to have made four such dumps in the English Channel in the space of a week. A total of 373,000 sewage disposal cases were reported in 2021, even before this year’s heat wave. Something went wrong. The spread of rationing through pipe bans and the explosion of sewage into rivers and seas suggests an industry that has languished too long in the private sector cupboard. Under the Victorians, water was the noble face of municipal socialism. Now he is the unacceptable face of capitalism. The success of privatized industry depends on the effectiveness with which the state regulates its natural monopolies. Under Whitehall’s Ofwat, water regulation has failed. His most radical suggestion for dealing with the current crisis seems to be for people to turn off their taps while brushing their teeth. Since privatization in 1989, some £72 billion has been allowed to leak out of the industry in dividends, money that should clearly have gone into investment, plugging leaks and building overflow tanks. As it stands, around a quarter of England’s fresh water never reaches the consumer, but escapes through unrepaired pipes. Meanwhile, contamination means UK bathing sites are so dirty they ranked last in Europe for water quality in 2020. Even the government’s own Environment Agency has called for water company directors to be jailed for alarming drop in performance, after an increase in 62 labeled ‘serious incidents’ of pollution last year. Campaigners are also taking Ofwat to court for regulatory failure. The industry, by all accounts, stinks. The talk now is of renationalisation, although the sight of the water companies walking away with even more money in compensation would be hard to fathom. The real problem lies less with privatization itself than with its regulators. As with another crisis, that of the private care home sector, lax oversight has been exacerbated by the slide of these industries into private equity or the murky world of offshore finance. This is where public utility falls by the wayside. Short-term profit is what matters, dividends are everything and outrageous wages create a revolving door between companies, regulators and Whitehall. The result is that egregious polluters such as the poultry industry are allowed by planners to drain sewage into the River Wye and turn it into an open sewer. Water companies vent our own waste into the sea. And meanwhile a proposal for a national network to transport water from the abundant West to the parched East is sitting idle. Its £10bn cost is about a tenth of Boris Johnson’s vanity project HS2. A train was considered a higher priority.
