Flushing hell

Water, water, every where
Nor ‘eer a drop to drink

It’s another rant about the water industry I’m afraid. Stop me (actually don’t) if you’ve heard this all before (and I’ve definitely used the quote before), but bear with me, I will get to it.

We’re very used, in this country, to having our holiday plans scuppered by the great British weather. How many photos have we seen of festival-goers resembling creatures from the black lagoon after yet another Glastonbury or Reading fell foul of the rain and wind Gods? How many awful trips to the seaside did we endure as children, shivering on beaches, wrapped in towels, our hair being whipped into our Mr Whippy ice-cream by the wind?

Last weekend was no exception. At least not where I live. A passable, if slightly chilly at times, Sunday segued effortlessly into more rain for the entire bank holiday Monday than we have had in the past month. And that’s saying something.

So, the irony of watching, on one of the wettest days of the year so far, the news footage of the Southern Water customers whose water went missing in action on Thursday. It was restored this morning. 32,500 customers in and around Hastings and East Sussex had no water for six days. Six days. Our local BBC News had images of hoteliers – bearing in mind this was over the bank holiday weekend in a tourist town – staggering up the steps of their properties carrying buckets of seawater so they could flush the loos. In a first world country.

Southern water said that faulty pipe was in a hard-to-reach area in some woodland, so that made it difficult to access and hard to repair quickly. I don’t doubt that the people on the ground were doing all they could to get it sorted out. These issues are usually never the fault of the poor saps who have to sort them out.

However. Seventeen years ago – the year my nearly-adult twins were born – Southern Water was granted planning permission to replace a 12km stretch of the outworn underground piping between the reservoir and the water supply works. The very piece of piping that runs through that hard to access woodland. They didn’t. That project, which the application said  was needed to ‘improve the security of drinking water supply to the Hastings area’ was put on hold. For 17 years.

I did feel a little bit sorry for the poor Southern water head of Customer Services who looked as though he would still have been at school at the time of the planning application, and was just trying to get as much bottled water to as many customers as possible, as quickly as possible. Bottled water. How’s that commitment to the environment going then? Thought so

This isn’t just a Southern water thing either. You could probably insert the name of any of the privatised water utilities and  something similar could happen. Probably has.

I really don’t know what the solution is. Sir Kier Starmer has ideas about renationalising should, if, when, Labour gets elected. Buit can the UK economy afford to take it all back? Pretty sure we haven’t got that much spare cash swilling around. Should we follow the suggestion of Jacob Rees-Mogg (I know, I know, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day), and allow those utilities that are heading that way to fail, taking the investors’ money with them?

It’s capitalism at its worst, and, as usual, it’s the little people who suffer.