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How can England possibly be running out of water?

theguardian.com

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

#181

Post by michaelt »

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…

The thing is, if a water company is in good financial health, with low debt and lots of money to invest in infrastructure, it’s completely legal for private equity to buy the company, stop investing in infrastructure, take out loans until a third of customer bills go on interest payments, and take the loaned money as ‘management fees’.

Then dump untreated sewerage in rivers and demand more money from bill payers, because they “can’t afford” to maintain the infrastructure.

In most industries a company so poorly managed would lose customers, go bankrupt, and be replaced by a better run company. But water companies? They have a monopoly, and everyone needs water to live.

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

#182

Post by drowsspa »

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?

Tesco's is infrastructure?

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

#183

Post by pjc50 »

braza wrote: post #63

> People across England are already banned from using hosepipes, with more restrictions probable over coming months. > So how on earth did famously rainswept England, notorious the world over for being green and wet with our national symbol pretty much a furled umbrella, come to this? > The UK is one of the rainier places in Europe. Some areas are wetter than others > Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1…

> several basic problems do not have the right incentives or willingness to be solved

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.

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

#184

Post by arethuza »

teamonkey wrote: post #174
graemep wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not free - there are explicit charges for it attached to our council taxes?

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

#185

Post by tremon »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #175

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.

I'm not sure how faucets work in the US, but most valves here in Europe are not binary: you don't have to open them all the way.

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

#186

Post by pjc50 »

RagnarD wrote: post #89

[flagged]

"Socialist"? Hardly.

I do not think people would accept the prices for desalinated water produced at UK energy prices. Nor is it terribly easy to find somewhere to put the plant and its required piping. I wonder if someone could give us a back of the envelope estimate for land area required?

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

#187

Post by atoav »

fragmede wrote: post #93
atoav wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privatization just means that if you were interested in the outcome before (having water), they are now interested in the money that can be extracted from it. 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…

Waste and inefficiency should be stomped out, but it doesn't need to be ground down into a fine dust and then vaporized into nothingness. A little bit of waste is fine. You want slack in your system in case of emergencies.

The problem with that attitude is that waste isn't that easy to define:

- what is waste during good times may be essential during bad ones. If your service utilizes 100% CPU during normal operation (no waste), it has zero slack for changes in the environment.

- what is waste for a manager, may be an essential service to the persons using it. So maybe that cell tower in a remote area may be operating at a loss, because few people live there, but to them it is essential (or to you, if you break your ankle during a hike). Privatized services don't have the goal of covering people, but earning money. Covering people may be a side effect, but it isn't necessarily the goal

- cutting waste can make the service less attractive as a whole and make it enter a downward spiral. E.g. if you cut all non-profitable lines in a public transport system your public transport system becomes less usable as a whole, as people now have a harder time fetting where they want to go. That leads to less people using it. That in turn leads to you having to cut more lines, which in turn... You get the idea. No service means no waste, any service has/to have waste

- some waste appears like waste because managers don't understand why it is there. Essentially a Chesterton's fence-type of situation. Like with the OceanGate submarine implosion, that essentially happened because the late owner of the company decided that all these lengthy certification processes the submersible industry had written in blood were waste and could be skipped. He didn't posses the expertise to know why it was there in the first place, so it was waste.

With some services the goal isn't (or shouldn't be) to do "something" as cheaply as possible while extracting value, with some services the goal ought to be to provide the service in a sustainable fashion to everybody ad infinitum, while trying not to waste more money than is necessary and creating budgetary timebombs for future administrations/generations/managers.

Those are entirely different incentives, leading to entirely different results. And depending on which service we talk about the reasonability of chosing one over the other may differ.

That being said, there can be real waste to cut. But cutting everything based on suspicion is very expensive in the long run.

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

#188

Post by walthamstow »

BouffantJoe wrote: post #166
walthamstow wrote: post #111

> [England] While famously rainswept 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.

25m is too high. London is 9m, South East England is 9.5 million

I included the East of England region which includes home counties like Beds, Herts and Essex. Any measure of "around London" must include Essex, surely.

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

#189

Post by krona »

another-dave wrote: post #165
krona wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I mean, all the more reason it shouldn't be privatised. If it only makes sense to have one of something (road network, water system) it's a natural monopoly, _and_ it's going to require large public investment to be maintained, why wouldn't you in-house the expertise needed to do that and avoid the shareholder dividends overhead?

My point is the differences you're postulating are a rounding error in the scale of the problem in front of you.

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

#190

Post by fredley »

bjoli wrote: post #164
philipallstar wrote: post #151

England's population has been rising far faster than it would naturally rise due to immigration. This means giant sums of money need to be borrowed to fund capital-intensive projects including new energy and water sources. They haven't been done enough on the water side. It's incredibly expensive to have the population increase this fast.

Always the immigrants. Weird that they are to blame, even though water abstraction has been trending downwards for close to 30 year.

> faster than it would naturally

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.

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