How can England possibly be running out of water? • Hacker News Board

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#171

Post by AussieCoder » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 10:43 AM UTC

zarzavat wrote: post #132

tome wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to agree that privatisation is bad for long term planning, but the history of the Abingdon Reservoir proposal seems to be counter evidence: 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…

Good find, I admit I had jumped on the Thames Water is Evil bandwagon, and for the record they are evil, but in this case they have been out-eviled by that other driver of British societal regression: > Campaigners had fought the plan, claiming there was no need for such a large reservoir and that it would damage the environment. > Leader of the Vale of White Horse Council Tony de Vere said: "We are delighted with th…

I have friends in the Abingdon area and the primary objection, from what they've told me, is that locals objected to a reservoir that would mainly be used to supply London. Little Englanders at their worst.

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#172

Post by mhh__ » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 10:44 AM UTC

sandbags wrote: post #34

As the article mentions, privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity and relied on drawing from rivers and other sources. 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 i…

You're not taking into account how hard it is to get regulatory/planning approval to build anything in Britain.

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#173

Post by bilekas » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 10:44 AM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #149

bilekas wrote: post #138

I remember they tried to privatize water in Ireland a good few years ago and there was so much backlash that it had to be binned. Basically everyone was destroying the meters that were being installed. Water is a human right, not a commodity.

Is there not currently a charge for it (other than general taxation)? Metering is orthogonal to privatising - you can be metered or not in the UK, it's usually cheaper to be on a meter.

No, so each household has an allowance, to avoid obviously exploitation.

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...

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#174

Post by teamonkey » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 10:49 AM UTC

graemep wrote: post #122

arethuza wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the problem with ideological thinking - from what I can see some privatisations worked well (e.g. Rolls Royce) and others went terribly (rail, water in England) - unfortunately they tend to get treated as all bad or all good.

I disagree about rail - nationalised British Rail was pretty terrible, had more accidents per distance travelled, and carried far fewer people. It think it made little difference. Nationalised water in Scotland is no better than privatised in England and Wales, and has a higher rate of sewer leaks: https://theferret.scot/scotland-behind-england-sewage-leaks/

From the same site: https://theferret.scot/water-pollution-scotland-england-most...

One thing of note about Scotland is that water is free (i.e. paid for by taxes) there.

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#175

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 10:51 AM UTC

I'm aware that England is not Scotland...

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.

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#176

Post by master_crab » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 10:51 AM UTC

krona wrote: post #145

autoexec wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to things like utilities every penny of profit comes at the expense of the public. Either prices are raised so that a small number of people can stuff their pockets with extra cash above what it costs to deliver the service and maintain the system or they get that extra money by failing to deliver the service or they do it by failing to maintain the system itself. I think the neglect and failure to inve…

> I think the neglect and failure to invest in infrastructure is the worst 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 r…

And yet we are still in this position in the UK. Flip the question: What were the dividends paid out by the companies over the same time period? Assuming they gave out $100bn in dividend, then we wasted money that should have been spent on more infrastructure.

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#177

Post by jemmyw » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 10:51 AM UTC

mhh__ wrote: post #170

autoexec wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to things like utilities every penny of profit comes at the expense of the public. Either prices are raised so that a small number of people can stuff their pockets with extra cash above what it costs to deliver the service and maintain the system or they get that extra money by failing to deliver the service or they do it by failing to maintain the system itself. I think the neglect and failure to inve…

By definition every penny of profit always comes at someone's expense but I don't think we'd advocate for nationalising Tesco's?

That's true, but supermarkets compete with one another on price and other factors. They are motivated to do things to get more customers. Yes, there are many cases where supermarkets have been bad actors, but that's solvable with competition regulation. Water service is very different, and the current setup in the UK seems pretty insane - you can't have competition on who supplies water to your house. People aren't going to move location because of the quality of the water supply until things get very bad. They are motivated to spend as little as possible.

You can set up a system where companies are involved in the delivery of water in a way that let's them compete. For example, national entity owns the pipes and needs to provide a given service, companies compete for pipe maintenance, IT services, etc. It's hardly difficult to think up a system that is mostly free market and better in every way than what the people from the UK have to suffer through.

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#178

Post by bilekas » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 10:51 AM UTC

dukeyukey wrote: post #141

bilekas wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The responsibility to look after the citizens basic needs such as water is on the government. Not private for-profit companies. If they can't do their job, then we shouldn't pay our taxes ?

You could say the same argument about food, but the system of privately owned farms moving food via privately owned logistics companies to privately owned grocery shops works very well. Yes, it's the responsibility of the state that it's citizens can acquire their needs, but that doesn't mean it has to be government owned.

> Yes, it's the responsibility of the state that it's citizens can acquire their needs, but that doesn't mean it has to be government owned.

Absolutely agree, it may not need to be government owned, however it should absolutely be government funded.

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#179

Post by LightBug1 » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 10:52 AM UTC

Because we were the fools who sold our water off to private companies.

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.

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#180

Post by tremon » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 10:52 AM UTC

tome wrote: post #124

alt227 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Privatisation" does not preclude government investment in infrastructure. But if private companies are taking the equity out of the service via profit, then why should the government spend public money to build new infrastructure to support them?

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking. Firstly, it's a type error to say "taking equity out of the service via profit". Profit, by definition, does not come from equity. Secondly, the government should spend public money to build public infrastructure because that's one of the major purposes of a government. Thirdly, if you're saying "private companies will use that public infrastructure to make profit", then I gue…

They're saying that using public funds to build out private infrastructure is a huge transfer of wealth from the public to the rich, and if the subsequent profits of that investment disappear into the same private pockets (or even abroad), the ROI calculation becomes so unfavourable that there's no sound financial reason to invest. There's a huge difference between investing in government-owned infrastructure vs privately-owned.