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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?

#381

Post by vondur »

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…

As a counter point, go look at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. It's a publicly owned municipal utility and is notorious for its corruption. The DWP doesn't perform any maintenance, lettings things break completely and then having to fix huge issues. They were the group who failed to fill a reservoir in the Pacific Palisades to save some money where firefighters weren't able to use to fight the fires.

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

#382

Post by cma »

ahartmetz wrote: post #320
qcnguy wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Tories are a centre-left party. That's why they lost the support of conservative voters at the last election and are now in the doldrums, with much of their base having defected to Reform.

Maybe they are now (I doubt it), but they surely weren't under Thatcher.

Water was privatized in the 90s after Thatcher.

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

#383

Post by dontlaugh »

alt227 wrote: post #225
walthamstow wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IMO 'around London' is Greater London. If you mean the whole South East of England, then say that.

"Greater London" is London to anyone in the UK, for the most part.

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

#384

Post by midnightclubbed »

qcnguy wrote: post #309
scythe wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is exactly what would have also happened if the water companies were not privatized The post office in the United States is not privatized and yet has been able to set prices in a way that sustains the business for centuries. You can't simply assume that all public entities will ignore fiscal reality. In fact you may run into the opposite problem: when a utility is public, their debts appear on the government b…

Yes, in theory nationalized companies can set prices rationally and turn a profit. In practice they rarely manage this for long because sooner or later a populist comes along and forces them to lower prices in order to win votes. It's not just water where the UK has a problem with this. Transport for London has also been forced to underprice its services for years by London's socialist mayor, it's a big part of how h…

> The US is a very right wing country. It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls. Maybe with Mamdani that's now changing.

Rather than placing price controls on private companies the US slashes taxes to the point where public services then cannot invest in infrastructure and maintenance - and then use that as an argument why public services should be privatized.

If tax cuts aren't populist policies I don't know what are. The magic trick of the right wing parties has been to sell tax cuts as a great thing to the very people who don't benefit from the cuts and are hurt by the fiscal fall-out. That and attaching themselves to Christianity while not following any of Jesus's teachings.

When a service is a monopoly there is no good reason for turning it into a for profit company outside of feathering the pockets of the rich. If the electricity supply to my house (and by extension my street and my city) is controlled by one company and they own the cabling and infrastructure then what is the motivation for them to not jack up my prices to generate profits to their shareholders, as they should as a shareholder owned company? What is their motivation for encouraging renewables or improving infrastructure when those would reduce profits and reduce shareholder value?

Mamdani hasn't even been voted in yet. Keep sowing that fear so that the people his policies might benefit don't actually vote for him - because he's a scary socialist (in the loosest, most American, definition).

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

#385

Post by qcnguy »

runako wrote: post #294
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…

> The infrastructure they inherited was never designed for the things it's being asked to do today I am not British, but this is confusing. Was private capital forced to take on the burden of privatizing the water system? Or did private investors err in their economic analysis? (Or did those investors just assume the problems would happen long after they personally had gotten paid?)

They placed a bet on the government allowing water prices to rise to match the level of investment needed, and lost that bet.

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

#386

Post by mock-possum »

vondur wrote: post #381
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…

As a counter point, go look at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. It's a publicly owned municipal utility and is notorious for its corruption. The DWP doesn't perform any maintenance, lettings things break completely and then having to fix huge issues. They were the group who failed to fill a reservoir in the Pacific Palisades to save some money where firefighters weren't able to use to fight the fires.

Ideally, the dwp is accountable to the city, and therefore to voters and the state, in a way that a private company profoundly is not.

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

#387

Post by yesfitz »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #318
tankenmate wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

although a good point, there is obvious surface level nuance though; oil companies hid the research of climate change for a decade or two, they also lobbied (and still do) against subsidies for renewable energy and for oil and gas subsidies (in development in most countries, and even end customer price subsidies in others). and of course there's further nuance below the surface as well.

Once the hidden research was revealed to the public, we all started curbing our carbon emissions, right?

Have you not?

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

#388

Post by Der_Einzige »

qcnguy wrote: post #307
happymellon wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really twist yourself around here. But this? > Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment, resulting in a huge accumulation of debt. Bloody Tories, the whole problem isn't that they were in charge for 32 years from 1979-2024, it's the 13 years of Blair. They have been powerless to stop the spooky Left and fix the pipes before the water was…

The Tories are a centre-left party. That's why they lost the support of conservative voters at the last election and are now in the doldrums, with much of their base having defected to Reform.

You must think that the lib dems are now more conservative than them.

Bullocks. All of your argument is bullocks

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

#389

Post by KoolKat23 »

qcnguy wrote: post #373
KoolKat23 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike the others this is a natural monopoly. Your first message contradicts your second, which one is it are they paying government risk level interest rates or business risk level interest rates. Edit: I just went and looked up their rating with one of the big agencies. CCC rated (junk basically) with a negative outlook, they did get an upgrade on a refinance last year, but from CC (so now lesser junk). UK's last r…

There's no contradiction. Thames and gilts both pay ~5.8% on average. This is about the same as "Baa" (moderate risk) corporate debt. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAA Thames' debt costs are normal for a company of its type, but for a government this bond yield is danger-level high. That's why there's so much talk in financial circles now about the UK needing another IMF bailout, although I have grave doubts abo…

Very interesting thanks.

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

#390

Post by patanegra »

autoexec wrote: post #64
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…

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…

My provider of water is Thames Water. In the past 10 years, they did cumulative turnover £18,107 turnover, and profit -£1,180. So they in fact operate with a negative margin -6.52%.

In the UK, owning a utility company is nothing easy. Shareholders are definitely not stuffing their pockets. The biggest owner is Ontario pension fund (32%). I guess, poor retired Canadians are not very happy about this investment.

So I would say, your framing sounds interesting, until one digs deeper into facts.

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