When infrastructure becomes a profit center, long-term resilience tends to lose out to short-term returns
How can England possibly be running out of water?
431–440 of 524 posts
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#432I'm really skeptical of the idea that the blame for the lack of water infrastructure ought to be put at the feet of the water companies. The UK's planning system has strangled just about every infrastructure project in every domain. There is a general trend of local residents preventing infrastructure being built in the area, whether it be for water, energy, rail, or roads.
Vetocracy and nimby are ensuring the country barely shambles on until the boomers croak off. No point in putting up with construction and paying for the investments, if the current infra is juust barely good enough to last until the average voter shuffles off this mortal coil. When the older generations vote reliably and young people are apathetic, you get the current situation
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#433As 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…
Here in Ireland, our water is a public service and we have similar supply issues to the UK (and a similar rainy climate). I'm not discounting your analysis and I'm sure there are lots of other variables but it's always good to compare other outcomes when discussing counterfactuals.
Irish Water/Uisce Éireann have delivered on two new reservoirs in the last few years: Saggart and Stillorgan (technically a rebuild of an 1860s open reservoir). A third, Peamount, is in the planning stage. All of these are around Dublin, the driest and most populated area. Perhaps there are more, their website doesn't make it easy to find them. We still get hosepipe bans, occasional pressure reductions, and frequent "boil notices".
At the other end of the pipe they have opened/upgraded many waste water treatment plants recently too, large EU fines being a motivator, including one in Arklow which took nearly 4 decades to get over the line (its planning predating the existence of IW).
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#434As 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 can't run a critical resource like water purely on market incentives when the payoff for long-term infrastructure investment takes decades
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cynically, if you’re someone trying to make a lot of money, why wouldn’t you take a well run system, convince people they can save a bunch of money by ‘cutting waste’, then pocket as much money as you can by cutting long term maintenance and pocketing the difference - and when it blows up, sell them the solution at inflated prices too? It seems like the voters actively encouraged this kind of behavior. Eventually peo…
I can't understand the perspective of those who defend privatizing natural monopolies. I'm not against privatization in any way, but good governance is impossible without consequences for failure. Focusing on Thames Water's particular example, if we assume malice as the cause, what would be the potential consequences? While the government could impose fines, the possibility of non-payment exists and what would happen…
Notably, public utilities are often seen as ‘above consequences’ too when part of the gov’t, since usually governments make it impossible to sue them or give them real consequences either.
In theory, with privatization the gov’t can arrest people or the like. The gov’t very rarely does that to itself.
Politicians can be swapped out of course, but most smart ones setup scape goats and a lot of levels of abstraction so they can claim successes and point the finger elsewhere if it goes wrong.
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like more quangos? I'm not an expert on them but the way people complain about them, they have a penchant for wasting fantasic amounts of money, and have no accountability even by the standards of the civil service. Politicians are simultaneously engaged in a desperate struggle to close down the defunct ones while opening up more, because they are a great way to avoid responsibility, which of course is on…
Not like Quangos - Statutory Boards at least in Singapore are a part of a ministry, but they are given full autonomy [0] to recruit, administer, and manage within their remit as legislated. Quangos are a half assed attempted at doing something similar while trying to include some "inclusion", but with none of the checks and balances. The reality is, not every Tom, Dick, and Harry should have a say on water management…
Was not aware of these - thank you for sharing. But I’d be concerned that such organisations will not stand the test of time, from say a sustained period of governmental (on in this case institutional) incompetence. I’d like to see some mechanism (competition perhaps) that would allow the system to self correct - when the group responsible fail for a sustained period of time. Not saying I have any answers.
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#437As 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…
What's worse is how hard it is to create political urgency around invisible decay
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#438As 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…
Here in Ireland, our water is a public service and we have similar supply issues to the UK (and a similar rainy climate). I'm not discounting your analysis and I'm sure there are lots of other variables but it's always good to compare other outcomes when discussing counterfactuals.
It really highlights that governance, long-term strategy, and actual follow-through matter just as much as the ownership model
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#439> Future generations, who will be dealing with long, dry summers, would probably be shocked at the profligate way clean tap water was used to flush toilets, water gardens and run washing machines. Climate change means societal change. There was a time that Northern Africa was one of the best places in the world to grow crops. They were at the top of civilization for thousands of years. Climate changed, what people co…
Future generations are going to look back and wonder how we let it get this bad while patting ourselves on the back for recycling plastic bottles
Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?
#440Earlier 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…
>Cumulative capital investment
Now divide that by C-suite wages + monies paid as profits.
Well the estimated industry profits of ~£20B pa over the last 30+ years would have got us some way to replacing the worst of the sewage system. Instead that money went to yachts and pushing up rental costs, or whatever.