Water mess

There is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats

Imagine if you will, that most bucolic of images: Cambridge/Oxford, boater-wearing Sebastian Flyte-types punting their way along the Cam/Isis, impressing the tea-frock wearing girlfriend languidly trailing her hand in the river water as they glide along…then realising that her hand is covered in stuff that definitely isn’t river water.

Moving on with the Oxbridge connection, another most English of images is the Oxford Cambridge Boat Race, held every April  in which teams of students and academics race each other from Putney Bridge to Mortlake.  Rowers have long been aware that the water they traverse can cause illness if they imbibe too much of it – My Dad (who won over that course in 1956) never used to finish a competitive race without a cheeky over-the-side chuck-up – but this year the warnings issued were far more severe.  It’s not just the odd morsel of goose-poo that the coxes might have swallowed had they been chucked in the river in their usual celebratory fashion.

A yukky River Thames is nothing new. It was declared biologically dead in 1957, yet just three years ago, thanks to decades of improvement work, it was declared ecologically active again, and even one of the worlds cleanest rivers running through a city.

Now, thanks not just to the incompetence of Thames Water and the toothless Environment Agency, and the less-use-than-a-chocolate-fireguard OFWAT, we are starting to worry again about the health of our biggest river.

However, the Thames aside, it’s not as though the picture is any less murky with any of the other rivers and streams that traverse our green and pleasant land. What has gone on with our rivers waterways and seas is scandalous. The discharge of raw sewage into rivers, streams and our coastal waters just goes on and on. Thousands upon thousands of hours’  discharge, with no sign of an investment to prevent it. It’s not just the water that’s toxic, it’s the whole way the sell-off of the UK water industry has been handled in the years since it happened.

Thames Water is in the headlines most at the moment, but the other privatised water companies are equally bad. Thames’ shareholders have thrown a hissy fit and are threatening to withhold more investment unless customers’ bills are raised by about 40%, thought the Regulator has said no to that.

When the water companies were sold off in 1989 by the Thatcher Government, it was because there was a recognition that the huge amount of investment in bringing a Victorian sewage and water system up to 21st^h century standards would be better coming from private coffers. In other words, the country simply couldn’t afford to do it (although we’ve afforded plenty of other stuff since then: bailing out the banks, the furlough scheme, the covid loans…). In came, not really privatisation, but a sort of privatised monopoly. I can’t choose who supplies my water and water treatment services, I’m stuck with Southern and South-East by virtue of geography. And while the initial water sell-off was six times oversubscribed in 1989, with thousands of private investors taking their chance to be “an H2Owner” as the ad slogan went, the under-valuing of the sector in order to boost the attractiveness of the offer meant that most of, though by all means not all, the smaller shareholders simply cashed in their shares pretty quickly, (see also: British Gas, Halifax, TSB) leaving the privatised water companies in the hands of private equity and pension funds.

Lord Rees-Mogg has suggested – and to my horror I find myself understanding where he is coming from – that Thames Water be left to the market, be allowed to go bust. “Both foreign and domestic investors know some investments go wrong, some are bad, some are mistakes. Thames Water became a bad investment because of the greed of its shareholders and their own bad decisions. They deserve no quarter and the consequences of insolvency will be perfectly routine,” he told GB News (I know, I know).

If that were to happen, and if there were no unintended consequences of it, then I would say, yes, crack on with it. However, the shareholders are not simply huge equity funds, trousering the dividends like latter-day Gradgrinds. There are pension funds invested in that company. Big pension funds. For every fat cat moving funds around to try and make their pension provision work better for them, there’s someone who ended up in a scheme because of their job, who is just trying to put enough by to see them through retirement.

This situation is capitalism as its very worst. It’s government oversight at its very worst. OK, so maybe the Post Office Scandal was that, but the way that successive government have ignored the pillaging of the privatised water companies, putting dividends ahead of decent water standards is at the bottom of that barrel.

I’ve written far more than I intended to on this, and I’m not sure it’s ended up where I thought it would when I started. I’ll leave you with the incomparable Marina Hyde in the Guardian, who says this stuff so much better, and more succinctly, than I do 

 

Just a year later, the River Thames would be declared biologically dead.