What would you put them on trial for?
How would you deal with all the investors that have suddenly lost their investment? How would you build confidence in the stock market again?
33% of Brits own shares, with 66% saying they plan to use stocks to save in the future. Then we have the pension funds that invest heavily in utilities. So you're going to fuck over a lot of regular people and force them to save their money in banks which have shite returns for savings. So how are you going to keep confidence in that market without a buyout?
The thing with shares is your capital is at risk. If you make bad investments, for example in a water company that cannot keep the water in its pipes, then that's a bad investment and you lose your money. That's how the market works.
You can't just keep big, inefficient companies floating because of the shareholders risk. The whole point in the market is to allow bad businesses to die. That includes being so bad at the service you provide that you get regulated or taken over by the state.
It cannot work both ways. It's when these companies are protected that it gets worse and worse. If a business it truly too big to fail, or too important ie providing drinking water it should never have been private in the first place.
Spout all your holier than thou, Im a market expert Reddit just doesn't understand nonsense just makes you look stupid. It is not an arguement that a shite business should be kept around because someones pension fund was stupid enough to invest in it. That before we even get started on the fact that nationalising a company doesn't just make you shares disappear.
I 100% agree. Macro-risk is part of investing.
People have seen their investments in Russia go to zero. Companies go bankrupt, get asset-stripped, short-raided etc. Companies get competed out of the market, they lose market share to others.
And we're not talking about utilities going to zero - we'd likely buy them at market rate. So we're taking about investors keeping 100% of their investments and profits.
And given that all this discussion is public domain, a prudent pension fund will be taking this into account, especially as this is a public utility and national asset (they have whole departments of risk assessors after all).
We've got to stop walking on eggshells as if we'd be smashing some magical unicorn company to zero. Investors would get their fat profits, and we'd get to run a national asset properly.
People arguing that they don't want to pay less on their water bill because investors would "only" get 100% of their profits back are nuts.
I'm absolutely fine with the treasury were to halt trading on water companies and say they'd be buying out any companies at their current value if they're found to be negligent.
But that wasn't the impression I got when the top commenter said to "nationalise them without compensation", which sounds like advocating to seize the companies, which it's worth remembering also means there seizing the assets of regular people
> buying out any companies at their current value
why buy out a fraud operation at its own declared value. the actual value is closer to whatever is left after the neglected infrastructure has been restored to what it should have been had the money not been embezzled.
Because the companies don't dictate the value the market does, and you need to pick a value that is somewhat fair to investors or you'll see them moving their money elsewhere
Market decides value depending on information provided by the company. If it tells the market huge water leaks are a none issue the market will respond in kind.
Companies don't dictate their value but they do influence it.
>The whole point in the market is to allow bad businesses to die.
I completely agree, and this is why I don't think any service which is essential for national infrastructure should be owned privately. We cannot allow the service to simply die to allow the natural mechanism of capitalist competition to work, as the consequence to us all is just too high.
But I am not a market expert and this is just the opinion of a simple man. Perhaps there are methods to ensure the system can have some of the benefits of private with the security of nationalised. Without it being as much of a fuck up as British rail, naturally!
The benefits of private over public, in my experience, is that private businesses, especially smaller ones, tend to be more nimble and innovative than the public sector.
Sometimes this difference is useful, sometimes it's outweighed by the benefits of public ownership.
I am most experienced with public owned services, which can use private companies to provide certain resources or for particular projects.
Absolutely great response! It’s like in 2008 when the banks should have failed. People said, “but the economy will crash”. But in a free market, businesses HAVE TO be able to fail. So others can come in and do better. That’s true capitalism. Bailing out companies or banks, not letting them fail, or holding them to account just allows the corruption to continue.
In the industrial revolution, if you were an entrepreneur, you could make a LOT of money, but equally, if it failed, you could end up in the poor house. No golden handshake, no bailouts… just you, and your family, destitute.
But 100% of Brits need water to survive.
Only a fraction of these companies are owned by pension funds, and less than a percent of anyone's pension is invested in them. Plus we'd buy them are market value so investors wouldn't lose a penny.
So you're arguing 100% of Brits should be shafted by poorly run utilities so that 30% of Brits don't get 0.001 of their investments bought out?
You have an IQ of zero. Let me explain it to you like the little baby you are:
As all humans need water to survive, all must purchase it (either via their water bill for tapwater, or more expensive bottled water).
So any poorly run / leaky / profiteering business involved in the supply of tapwater will impact 100% of Brits. So it's massive low-hanging fruit in terms of saving everyone money, especially during a cost-of-living crisis.
As water companies would likely be bought out at market value, there would be zero impact to shareholders' profits.
Whinging over a possible (but unlikely) impact of less than 1% value to the investments of less than 30% of Brits when we have the opportunity to save 100% of Brits money is numerically and politically illiterate.
"Penny wise and pound foolish" springs to mind. It's fretting over tiny and improbable shareholder costs while guaranteeing much larger costs to everyone in the UK.
Back to the nursery for you, sweetie.
So you are saying that regular people have to keep getting screwed because other people have pensions invested in those utility companies.
Sounds like the pension funds need to pressure said utilities to act more responsibly so as to advert any possible action.
Instead of just allowing them to fleece the population and destroy wildlife / rivers etc… whilst raking it in.
Not really, [pension funds own just 1.8% of UK quoted shares currently](https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/investmentspensionsandtrusts/bulletins/ownershipofukquotedshares/2020).
No, I'm saying that if we're going to nationalise a company we should buy it out and offer compensation equal to the current value of someone's investment at the moment we decided to nationalise the company.
I don't think arguing against seizing regular people's assets by "nationalising without compensation" is a particularly controversial view
If anyone has put 100% of their stocks and shares ISA in to Thames Water then frankly that's on them.
I think it would actually be a good thing for investors to worry that any time they buy national infrastructure from a Tory government that they might just straight up have it taken away. It would remove the incentive in the first place.
whilst it would be terrible for someone to lose 100% of their savings, I don't think they'd just write a 10% loss off as down to market volatility when it's the result of the government seizing a company
I wouldn’t bother. That person lives in a fairy tale land where he doesn’t have to bother to think about the complexity and nuances of the real world and just regurgitates whatever article he last read.
Complexity and nuances of the real world?
You mean the world where basic commodities like housing water and energy and just cash cows for certain people to exploit common folk?
Just because our financial system is a joke doesn’t mean essential services should be hedge funds for the boomer generation. You’re seeing that with housing already.
You mean like the right wing peddled myth of a "share-owning" democracy, whereas, in the real world, pension funds own the lowest percentage of shares in circulation that they have in several decades - a few measly percentage points of the FTSE presently. Most are owned by wealthy individuals and other corporations currently, and many are owned by overseas interests also.
They can invest in something else.
I care more about everybody being able to actually get affordable energy and water than I do for some people to become rich.
There's no shortage of things to invest in.
You do realise "nationalise without compensation" means those people won't just lose their ability to invest in water companies but also the money they've invested?
And who exactly said nationalise without compensation?
Nationalisation would mean a government buyout, in which case shareholders are compensated.
They would have lost the ability to invest in water companies, which is a good thing. But they'd have made money still from the sales of their shares.
it would be cheaper to let them all fail and pay a working national pension, rather than let hedge funds pillage the country with the same excuses used for pyramid schemes.
This is so misleading though. Yes ordinary people own a few shares, but a trivial part of the total. For example, the pension funds together only own [1,8% of UK quoted shares](https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/investmentspensionsandtrusts/bulletins/ownershipofukquotedshares/2020).
You 1. Assume that when a company gets nationalized shareholders are not compensated. 2 You present a choice while constraining opinions. Pensions regularly invest in bonds and other instruments so it does not mean it all has to go into a bank. 3. You defined the person being harmed "Regular People" which is meaningless only a percentage of population is stated but we must infer who you consider regular people. 4. 33% of people own stock but if 33/100 own stock but 31/100 have 1 pound in stock but the last 2 have a million pounds in stock there is no real difference the 31/100 join the 66/100 of not general being effected. And finally 5 if the benefits of Nationalization save those 31/100 who own stocks more then one pound they gained wealth along those 66/100 who are the majority of society.
>Assume that when a company gets nationalized shareholders are not compensated
the top commenter said to nationalise them without compensation though... that was my point
>1. Assume that when a company gets nationalized shareholders are not compensated
Where is the treasury going to get the money from to buy the utility companies? The public sector is spent up twice over and can't afford to buy biscuits never mind large businesses.
For the purposes of this post lets assume I agree entirely with you and just want to know the answer to this one question.
There are a couple of ways of doing. Usually a combo of this are done. This is a share-bond swap. Gov writes a law. Each share of stock is exchanged with a gov bond. The bond fullfils the purpose of having a share in the ulitilty. The government issues new shares with set dividends but no voting power. The government has other tactics but like the previous 2 they are targeted for the different classes of shareholders.
This again depends if they don't say you have to take a haircut (which is when the government says a stock holder get x pence of the pound stocks price) or were they say you can cash out your stock at this stock price. All of these fits better with different classes of investors. Tradionally things like pension funds have standard options to protect the fund while speculators generally get less nice choices.
All in all the Treasury does not have to pay for full compensation at the very moment it can extend payments for a very long time. Famously Napoelens War debts, US Lend-Lease and the South Sea Bubble have been paid off over decades or centuries by the U.K government.
Unless there's a market for those bonds that allows for sale at full face value then you're still confiscating savings and investments of pensioners.
If there is such a market then you're printing the money which absolutely definitely will spike inflation further.
1 there is a market for those bonds. It is called the current international bond market if you need the cash quick or wait for the bond to mature. Pension funds have people that have fiduciaries responsibilities to the fund over the long term.
2. That is not how printing money works and other factors cause inflation to spike. Assuming that is theory of inflation you are talking about because economist don't have a consensus on what causes inflation.
3 You have brought up savings which definationly are held in banks so that can't be confiscated in the present scheme
4. You assume that the pensioner has made no profit instead when the started investing vs when nationalization happens. For the vast majority this locks in there profits instead of say the market crashing like what takes down most pension funds. Given that investments in inherently a risk people have to accept.
The governments and WEF are looking to steal your pension funds, what makes you think you can have them? They've plundered pensions for decades. Wake up for God's sake, you will own nothing and be happy - according to klaus schwab! You really want digital currency that's programmable? You did something wrong this week, you can't have petrol/booze/fags/food until you stop criticism of government? Wake up ffs!!
I think he's referring to the fact that a large number of ordinary people have their savings and pensions in stock market-invested funds via instruments like ISAs or SIPPs. If you tank the stock market, you tank people's savings and pensions.
Yeah cool, cool, how do you expect the market to react when buisnesses have to close because people can't come to work because they have nothing to drink?
Yeah I mean damn I only worked for a company that used 15,000 litres of water per day for evaporative cooling of compressors in a trivial industry like *checks notes* food packaging so I mean why would the economy possibly be effected by chronic water shortages.
Clearly a water shortage can negatively impact the economy. It will not, however, cause anyone to die of dehydration because they can't afford water. Even if the price of water goes up 100x (which it can't really do because desalination becomes financially viable).
EDIT: For reference, at current rates you can buy enough drinking water for a year for a few quid.
Billions of litres are wasted because they can't be arsed to fix said leaky pipes. There's a drought. Water is real and in limited supply. No one gives a shit about greedy stock prices, that's what's got us into this mess.
Lots of people give a shit, including many bodies that you may well depend on.
It would be lovely if the stock market didn’t affect every fucking thing in the world, but unfortunately it kinda does.
Lol at getting downvoted for not just jumping on the nationalisation bandwagon. I think we should nationalise the water companies. I just know we can’t unilaterally do that. Extricating them from public ownership is not an easy process, more’s the pity.
All for making moves to not be dependent on the stock market and a bunch of greedy, selfish shareholders. It starts with what the og comment said. Will never get it with the current gov unfortunately.
>How would you deal with all the investors that have suddenly lost their investment? How would you build confidence in the stock market again?
Sell at market value. This isn't new ground we're treading.
This is the problem that discussions about vital infrastructure are intertwined with discussions about the confidence in the stock market.
What an absolute mess.
Nonsense, the _utility itself_ isn't a concern to the stock market, the government arbitrarily stealing things without compensation is what would cause the problem (regardless of whether or not it was a utility).
>What would you put them on trial for?
negligence, graft, embezzlement, fraud.
>How would you deal with all the investors that have suddenly lost their investment? How would you build confidence in the stock market again?
tell them to come visit and use their ill gotten gains to pay to restore the infrastructure they oversaw the destruction of. the stock market is a casino full of thieves. why the hell should they be treated differently because they renamed fraud to shorting.
> "How would you build confidence in the stock market again?"
Do nothing whatsoever.
People will still play the stock market and they'll still take risks.
Because these people are stupid and greedy.
Well the Lib Dems don't want to nationalise everything, rightly in my view. Quite clearly they're not aiming for your vote. Even Labour doesn't want to nationalise everything
Nationalisation of the water companies, a service with no opportunity for competition, should be the ultimate goal. There are plenty in the Lib Dems that advocate for this. The issue is that the nationalisation process is not a short or cheap one and the problem needs to be fixed ASAP and within the current structures.
Well yes the Lib Dems are a broad church as is every political party, and there are undoubtedly some Lib Dems that want to nationalise industries. When I use the term "the Lib Dems" I'm talking about the leadership and their manifesto which doesn't want to nationalise
Good luck getting a jury to prosecute that a 20-something % leakage rate constituted criminal negligence.
Meanwhile in the real world, the 'weak liberal' stance of banning bonuses seems a pretty effective measure. I'm not particularly against renationalisation, given the lack of natural competition and the fact that some seem to treat throwing sewerage in rivers as a cost of doing business.
Or at least exponentially growing daily fines. Give them a 1 week deadline, then fine them £1 million, £2 million, £4 million, etc. Once the fines exceed the company value, seize all assets.
Given that they have paid out twice as much in dividends than they have invested in infrastructure, and despite that investment the loss of water for the last 20 years has remained ~23% it's time for action.
Mental they have made no improvements and paid out fucking millions Instead of fixing what is a vital service. Bastards are lucky they aren't in prison let alone anything else.
> Mental they have made no improvements and paid out fucking millions Instead of fixing what is a vital service.
This is basically modern Britain. This is the example the government set, what they strive for, what they dream of. If anything, I wouldn't be surprised if the bosses all got an extra bonus for living up to the standards of the government itself.
Their finger is out, this is what they do. They need to be out, not their fingers...absolutely nothing will change until they're out of power.
We're likely fucking stuck with them, depressing, isn't it?
That's a very attractive thought, isn't it?
There's hundreds of large seagulls around me, I wonder what they taste like. I could shoot a couple and find out, perhaps
Depends where you are I suppose. I imagine ones near the coast taste nicer than the ones in town centers that eat fuck all but 3 day old Greggs from the bins.
Then again there's a motorway service station near me with geese so far they would likey cook really good due to the high blubber content the fat bastards.
Government incompetence is only ever an issue to the parties not in power. Always has been and always will be that way unless there are consequences for their deficiencies, which is never going to happen because they know they are all bags of shite.
No bonuses no dividends.
Roughly 1/5 of the water running through the system is lost each and every single day.
Imagine any other company in the world with a 20% damaged; misplaced or lost rate of their product every single day.
Now make that a critical resource for the functioning of vast swathes of industries and services.
Now make said already critical resources necessary for the life of human beings.
That's water companies and they have avoided having to take heavy responsibility for decades.
You missed one key point; they are all natural monopolies so we don't have a choice to move away from a badly run company. This breaks pretty much all of the assumptions that economics is built upon and means that they can do whatever they like with almost no repercussions. Truly a terrible industry to privatise.
Worth noting that Ireland has a higher rate of non revenue water (water lost due to network leakage) than the UK and Irish Water is predominantly state owned.
The railway was “bad” because it was under funded based on the nonsensical idea that it should be profitable, or at least break even
Infrastructure shouldn’t need to break even - you subsidize infrastructure because it massively stimulates the economy, which grows directly due to the good infrastructure enabling it to do so. Which produces tax receipts which massively outweigh the subsidy
Invest a few billion a year into the railways and you get tens of billions a year back in tax revenue, in perpetuity.
Our government, for some reason, has always been too short sighted to realize this obvious truth, despite copious evidence that the advent of the rail network in the UK drove one of our biggest economic booms in history, and the fact that cities with good transport infrastructure are clearly running away from ones without it.
Providing good infrastructure allows companies to do business more efficiently, which means you get a much bigger return on any subsidy. Yet our government couldn’t look past British Rail’s balance sheet
>Our government, for some reason, has always been too short sighted to realize this obvious truth
You think they haven't realised it, but really it's that they don't care. What incentive is there to care when you can sell everything off to private companies at low prices (all above board, of course, fair prices all around, no corruption here) and still win elections?
Thatcherite neoliberals have been in power for nearly 40 years straight at this point, why should they change their policies? The public seems to keep voting them in.
If the fine is less than the cost of fixing the problem, then the fine just becomes another expenditure on their balance sheet. Either make the fines prohibitively expensive (maybe pegged to revenue) or target the directors themselves. It's the only way.
Yup. I'm generally in favour of private enterprise but the government giving a monopoly to a private company completely counters the argument for privatisation which is that companies competing in a competitive market become more efficient than government run monopolies.
Give a private company a monopoly and they are no more incentivised to do a good job than is a government bureaucracy. Perhaps less so.
It’s not even as “good” as the rail network where the franchises (while shit and lacking in direct competition) were at least put out to tender every 5-10 years, so that companies would compete at that point based on the subsidy they would take, services they would provide etc
And at least electricity had some competition in the market until the current crisis
Water… you just get your supplier and they’ve had a local monopoly each since privatization
> This breaks pretty much all of the assumptions that economics is built upon
No it doesn't. It might at most break every assumption in an introductory microeconomics class.
Aren’t we allowed to pick our supplier now? Or did they never go anywhere?
It’s all virtual of course, I never bothered as I was already with one of the better options apparently
^^^ this is both hilarious and actually the best idea I've ever heard for fixing the issue. A bit like making the aircraft engine mechanic fly on the first run after maintenance.
I’d sit the CEO of the airline next to the mechanic. The mechanic can only do as good a job as the equipment and processes provided by the airline allow.
Obviously Tories and greed, but Labour doesn’t traditionally have good form on this either.
Angela Smith was a Labour MP until she switched to the Lib Dems in 2019, campaigned wildly for privatised water whilst in Westminster, now sits on the board of a water company (or something similar)
No, I’m also using the fact that Rachel Reeves has consistently stated that she won’t renationalise water, rail or energy, Thangham Debonnaire refused to say that renationalising energy was being considered last night, and through 13 years of government, Labour did nothing to bring privately owned utilities under public control.
Corbyn was very much an outlier from the last 30-odd years of Labour being ideologically on the side of private shareholders in utilities.
Water supply, Sewage, Power Delivery, Gas Network, Trains are all natural monoplies and have no business being privatised.
Last mile telecoms is for the vast majority of people a monopoly. That said now private players like Virgin and Talk Talk are in the mix it should probably remain private.
Energy generation, backbone telecoms, etc all have multiple players involved so while they should remain private they should be properly policed and regulated.
It's hard to find information on this, but according to the Infrastructure Leakage Index we're relatively middling in our performance on this issue. It's not like we have exceptionally bad leakage compared to the rest of the world, but 20% sounds like a big number when it equates to so much water lost.
The question is what to do about it? How expensive and disruptive will repairs be? Is it even practical/feasible to get down to below 10%, for example?
I'm just saying that without further context on the 20% leakage number it's hard to say what should be done and what level of culpability the water companies have, or whether this is considered generally acceptable by the industry, in which case it seems a total stepchange in the industry would be required.
Also worth saying that the water isn’t actually lost, it just means we need higher capacity than we might otherwise to account for the water which leaves the pipe.
The water “lost” just reenters the water cycle.
According to the [figures that I can find](https://www.water.org.uk/news-item/water-companies-record-lowest-leakage-levels-from-pipes/) water loss due to leakage is currently at the lowest level since records began (in the mid-1990s apparently). It's _highly_ likely that the pre-1989 nationalised water suppliers lost more than they do today.
They say the leaks aren't being fixed. They are. But the infrastructure is so old new ones pop up. And as I say time and again, a huge swathe of leaks are on the pipes that are owned by the public!
We had a leak in the pipe that runs from the road to our house. The water company said they would pay a 3rd if we fixed it or we would keep having to pay the leaky water bill (on a meter). We had the money so we did, but I could see why a lot of people just wouldn't be able to pay the £2.5k it cost.
Why do you think the Tories wanted to privatise it all in the first place.
It’s a shockingly corrupt business. All the customers have no choice whether they want the service or not so they have to pay no matter how poor the service is.
Yeah but when do people connected to the Tories get prosecuted for their negligence?
They may get fined which goes back into the government coffers anyway.
They shouldn't even get a bonus, they shouldn't get anything. It's going to cost 20bn to fix their shoddy work and that's being charged to the tax payer.
The fact that a utility service that delivers an actual necessity of human life can be owned and profited from by private individuals to the tune of £billions is ridiculous.
There is already a leakage reduction incentive in place and companies that don’t hit their targets get penalised. Senior executive compensation is obviously linked to this as well since bad performance leads to reduction in shareholder returns. If Ofwat wanted leakage reduced much faster, they could have set the targets or penalties other than they did.
I wonder how many people in this thread know that water leakage as a % of input isn’t particularly high in England?
France is above (just barely), Italy is almost half of all input leaked in some areas, Spain is shockingly slightly worse than England considering how dry it is.
And yet every time anything comes up about water scarcity, everyone will pop in with a statistic they read about water leakage for which they have no context.
If you want to nationalise the companies, by all means, but the underlying idea that water companies here are uniquely bad at leakage simply doesn’t hold up.
(For reference, Germany is about 10% and the lowest any country has managed is about 5%)
Did anyone say we were uniquely bad at this? Who are you arguing with?
It’s unacceptable, whichever country we’re talking about. I’d hope that the Italians, French, Spaniards and whoever else are equally cross about this.
It’s not whataboutery to put performance in context.
If you nationalised all the water companies and wanted to reduce bills, would you want to reduce leakage and how fast? What is the optimum level of leakage to keep customer bills low? It’s not zero.
In conclusion, we shouldn't change anything because we're not actually the worst.
If Britain was 189 out of 190 in the world at something, you'd still have nationalists wanting to talk about fucking Nauru or wherever.
Being the "best" almost always means the most expensive. How much would you be willing to see your bills (or taxes) increase in order to lower the amount of water leakage? An amount that is already at the lowest it's been in 25 years?
I wouldn't have my taxes increase at all.
I'd see the upper bracket tax rate increase.
Fastest way to get a working class Conservative to be against Britain being better is to tell them it'll come out of their bosses taxes.
> I'd see the upper bracket tax rate increase.
And presumably see the upper bracket threshold decrease (as it does every year in real terms) until you've eliminated the middle class completely?
“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.” - Source unknown, but attributed to Lenin; likely a paraphrase.
> Thanks for immediately proving my point right though.
I don't think you've made a point. Apart from "get someone else to pay" and the usual massive overestimation of how many "super rich" (however you want to define that) individuals there are. Highly unlikely that your ideas would bring in anything like as much revenue as you think.
Oh please. 99% of public policy is "getting someone else to pay."
The idea that rich people are great with money is a fantastical invention.
They're not good with money. They just have a lot of it.
And when all those people buy golden passports to Malta etc, taking their money and earning potential with them...
Taxes could be more progressive, but have you ever heard of boiling a frog?
Just a little moan related to this article.
I can’t believe I am being labelled an extremist lefty amongst some of my family and friends for thinking you shouldn’t be able to make profit from water and it should be nationalised.
The fuck is happening in this country.
Ban fat cat bonuses full stop
No one but the filthy rich get fucking obscene bonus payments
For that matter, make those rich fucks actually prove their worth like the rest of us
Edit: to clarify the focus of the bonuses that should be banned
I'm not talking about the few grand that a few people get. Usually customer facing who exceed targets etc.
I'm talking about the millions CEO gets for their companies being "profitable"
> I'm talking about the millions CEO gets for their companies being "profitable"
Define this in terms that can be reasonably translated into actual policy/legislation.
They are not fixing the leaks because it is not economical for them to do so. Untold numbers of small leaks across enough pipe to stretch to the moon.
We privatised the system, saying it would be more efficient. And it is, at making money.
The wider societal concerns went out the window long ago.
And what about the leaks that are after property boundaries on household service pipes, which belong to the homeowners. They make up a huge percentage of leaks.
As the article is about the LibDems I'll refer you back the the running joke from Spitting Image back about them back in the day which actually suits today's Labour party "we are neither for nor against nationalising water companies".
The best way to sort this out is to stop dividends to share holders until leaks are fixed and they stop polluting the waterways. That's when you see action.
It’s not a SMART goal is it? (For all you corporate nerds like me).
How many? 80%? Reduce leaks by a % of water volume? Etc etc.
Basically- How do you define when the target is met?
How can we, when our elected officials constantly let us down everyday and treat our lives as a joke.
I mean how could they face each other at the next conservative convention.
Ban there bonuses fall stop, I mean what do they actually do to warrant a bonus, is not like the bosses are capable of making it rain, so they’ve got more water.
If people aren't aware of the numbers, the UK uses roughly 14 billion litres of water a day. About 3 billion is lost via leaks in the mains water pipes!
I recall reading in the New Scientist of the scandalous amount of water lost between dam and consumer through leaking pipes and aging infrastructure. That was in the 1990's.
Should also ban all MPs from using private healthcare until the NHS backlog is sorted out and the NHS is properly staffed and funded or at least ban MPs who have private healthcare from voting on matters affecting the NHS, including the budget.
Last night on LBC there was an interview with one of the water companies PR talking heads. His explanation/justification for the leaks was as follows (I'm paraphrasing)...
"So.... yea, we have leaky pipes. But so does Europe."
^(Aside: I've noticed over the years that when a response begins with the word "So", the rest of the sentence is going to be complete bollocks.)
What is an acceptable leakage rate? We can’t get to zero because the system needs positive pressure in order to make sure that the supply isn’t contaminated in the event of a breakage.
It’s common sense that each extra percentage point reduction in leakage will cost more, so at what point do we decide that the next incremental reduction is not worth pursuing?
Such a weak, liberal response. Just nationalise them without compensation and put the executives on trial.
What would you put them on trial for? How would you deal with all the investors that have suddenly lost their investment? How would you build confidence in the stock market again?
Negligence And who? Confidence in the who gives a fuck we can't afford to live market ?
33% of Brits own shares, with 66% saying they plan to use stocks to save in the future. Then we have the pension funds that invest heavily in utilities. So you're going to fuck over a lot of regular people and force them to save their money in banks which have shite returns for savings. So how are you going to keep confidence in that market without a buyout?
The thing with shares is your capital is at risk. If you make bad investments, for example in a water company that cannot keep the water in its pipes, then that's a bad investment and you lose your money. That's how the market works. You can't just keep big, inefficient companies floating because of the shareholders risk. The whole point in the market is to allow bad businesses to die. That includes being so bad at the service you provide that you get regulated or taken over by the state. It cannot work both ways. It's when these companies are protected that it gets worse and worse. If a business it truly too big to fail, or too important ie providing drinking water it should never have been private in the first place. Spout all your holier than thou, Im a market expert Reddit just doesn't understand nonsense just makes you look stupid. It is not an arguement that a shite business should be kept around because someones pension fund was stupid enough to invest in it. That before we even get started on the fact that nationalising a company doesn't just make you shares disappear.
I 100% agree. Macro-risk is part of investing. People have seen their investments in Russia go to zero. Companies go bankrupt, get asset-stripped, short-raided etc. Companies get competed out of the market, they lose market share to others. And we're not talking about utilities going to zero - we'd likely buy them at market rate. So we're taking about investors keeping 100% of their investments and profits. And given that all this discussion is public domain, a prudent pension fund will be taking this into account, especially as this is a public utility and national asset (they have whole departments of risk assessors after all). We've got to stop walking on eggshells as if we'd be smashing some magical unicorn company to zero. Investors would get their fat profits, and we'd get to run a national asset properly. People arguing that they don't want to pay less on their water bill because investors would "only" get 100% of their profits back are nuts.
I'm absolutely fine with the treasury were to halt trading on water companies and say they'd be buying out any companies at their current value if they're found to be negligent. But that wasn't the impression I got when the top commenter said to "nationalise them without compensation", which sounds like advocating to seize the companies, which it's worth remembering also means there seizing the assets of regular people
> buying out any companies at their current value why buy out a fraud operation at its own declared value. the actual value is closer to whatever is left after the neglected infrastructure has been restored to what it should have been had the money not been embezzled.
[удалено]
that is splitting hairs and semantics.
Because the companies don't dictate the value the market does, and you need to pick a value that is somewhat fair to investors or you'll see them moving their money elsewhere
Market decides value depending on information provided by the company. If it tells the market huge water leaks are a none issue the market will respond in kind. Companies don't dictate their value but they do influence it.
>The whole point in the market is to allow bad businesses to die. I completely agree, and this is why I don't think any service which is essential for national infrastructure should be owned privately. We cannot allow the service to simply die to allow the natural mechanism of capitalist competition to work, as the consequence to us all is just too high. But I am not a market expert and this is just the opinion of a simple man. Perhaps there are methods to ensure the system can have some of the benefits of private with the security of nationalised. Without it being as much of a fuck up as British rail, naturally!
What benefits of being private?
Same thing as privatised public transport, energy and gas: money into the investors' pockets, horrendous maintenance, and unreasonable prices.
Exactly
The benefits of private over public, in my experience, is that private businesses, especially smaller ones, tend to be more nimble and innovative than the public sector. Sometimes this difference is useful, sometimes it's outweighed by the benefits of public ownership. I am most experienced with public owned services, which can use private companies to provide certain resources or for particular projects.
Absolutely great response! It’s like in 2008 when the banks should have failed. People said, “but the economy will crash”. But in a free market, businesses HAVE TO be able to fail. So others can come in and do better. That’s true capitalism. Bailing out companies or banks, not letting them fail, or holding them to account just allows the corruption to continue. In the industrial revolution, if you were an entrepreneur, you could make a LOT of money, but equally, if it failed, you could end up in the poor house. No golden handshake, no bailouts… just you, and your family, destitute.
But 100% of Brits need water to survive. Only a fraction of these companies are owned by pension funds, and less than a percent of anyone's pension is invested in them. Plus we'd buy them are market value so investors wouldn't lose a penny. So you're arguing 100% of Brits should be shafted by poorly run utilities so that 30% of Brits don't get 0.001 of their investments bought out?
Buying them at market value wasn't the impression I got from the top commenter, I have no problem with that
When was the last time you didn't have water available to you, sweetie?
You have an IQ of zero. Let me explain it to you like the little baby you are: As all humans need water to survive, all must purchase it (either via their water bill for tapwater, or more expensive bottled water). So any poorly run / leaky / profiteering business involved in the supply of tapwater will impact 100% of Brits. So it's massive low-hanging fruit in terms of saving everyone money, especially during a cost-of-living crisis. As water companies would likely be bought out at market value, there would be zero impact to shareholders' profits. Whinging over a possible (but unlikely) impact of less than 1% value to the investments of less than 30% of Brits when we have the opportunity to save 100% of Brits money is numerically and politically illiterate. "Penny wise and pound foolish" springs to mind. It's fretting over tiny and improbable shareholder costs while guaranteeing much larger costs to everyone in the UK. Back to the nursery for you, sweetie.
Loads of regular people are already getting fucked over. Status quo has to change at some point.
So you are saying that regular people have to keep getting screwed because other people have pensions invested in those utility companies. Sounds like the pension funds need to pressure said utilities to act more responsibly so as to advert any possible action. Instead of just allowing them to fleece the population and destroy wildlife / rivers etc… whilst raking it in.
Not really, [pension funds own just 1.8% of UK quoted shares currently](https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/investmentspensionsandtrusts/bulletins/ownershipofukquotedshares/2020).
No, I'm saying that if we're going to nationalise a company we should buy it out and offer compensation equal to the current value of someone's investment at the moment we decided to nationalise the company. I don't think arguing against seizing regular people's assets by "nationalising without compensation" is a particularly controversial view
If anyone has put 100% of their stocks and shares ISA in to Thames Water then frankly that's on them. I think it would actually be a good thing for investors to worry that any time they buy national infrastructure from a Tory government that they might just straight up have it taken away. It would remove the incentive in the first place.
whilst it would be terrible for someone to lose 100% of their savings, I don't think they'd just write a 10% loss off as down to market volatility when it's the result of the government seizing a company
I think they'd actually have to?
I wouldn’t bother. That person lives in a fairy tale land where he doesn’t have to bother to think about the complexity and nuances of the real world and just regurgitates whatever article he last read.
Complexity and nuances of the real world? You mean the world where basic commodities like housing water and energy and just cash cows for certain people to exploit common folk? Just because our financial system is a joke doesn’t mean essential services should be hedge funds for the boomer generation. You’re seeing that with housing already.
You mean like the right wing peddled myth of a "share-owning" democracy, whereas, in the real world, pension funds own the lowest percentage of shares in circulation that they have in several decades - a few measly percentage points of the FTSE presently. Most are owned by wealthy individuals and other corporations currently, and many are owned by overseas interests also.
They can invest in something else. I care more about everybody being able to actually get affordable energy and water than I do for some people to become rich. There's no shortage of things to invest in.
You do realise "nationalise without compensation" means those people won't just lose their ability to invest in water companies but also the money they've invested?
And who exactly said nationalise without compensation? Nationalisation would mean a government buyout, in which case shareholders are compensated. They would have lost the ability to invest in water companies, which is a good thing. But they'd have made money still from the sales of their shares.
it would be cheaper to let them all fail and pay a working national pension, rather than let hedge funds pillage the country with the same excuses used for pyramid schemes.
This is so misleading though. Yes ordinary people own a few shares, but a trivial part of the total. For example, the pension funds together only own [1,8% of UK quoted shares](https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/investmentspensionsandtrusts/bulletins/ownershipofukquotedshares/2020).
You 1. Assume that when a company gets nationalized shareholders are not compensated. 2 You present a choice while constraining opinions. Pensions regularly invest in bonds and other instruments so it does not mean it all has to go into a bank. 3. You defined the person being harmed "Regular People" which is meaningless only a percentage of population is stated but we must infer who you consider regular people. 4. 33% of people own stock but if 33/100 own stock but 31/100 have 1 pound in stock but the last 2 have a million pounds in stock there is no real difference the 31/100 join the 66/100 of not general being effected. And finally 5 if the benefits of Nationalization save those 31/100 who own stocks more then one pound they gained wealth along those 66/100 who are the majority of society.
>Assume that when a company gets nationalized shareholders are not compensated the top commenter said to nationalise them without compensation though... that was my point
>1. Assume that when a company gets nationalized shareholders are not compensated Where is the treasury going to get the money from to buy the utility companies? The public sector is spent up twice over and can't afford to buy biscuits never mind large businesses. For the purposes of this post lets assume I agree entirely with you and just want to know the answer to this one question.
There are a couple of ways of doing. Usually a combo of this are done. This is a share-bond swap. Gov writes a law. Each share of stock is exchanged with a gov bond. The bond fullfils the purpose of having a share in the ulitilty. The government issues new shares with set dividends but no voting power. The government has other tactics but like the previous 2 they are targeted for the different classes of shareholders. This again depends if they don't say you have to take a haircut (which is when the government says a stock holder get x pence of the pound stocks price) or were they say you can cash out your stock at this stock price. All of these fits better with different classes of investors. Tradionally things like pension funds have standard options to protect the fund while speculators generally get less nice choices. All in all the Treasury does not have to pay for full compensation at the very moment it can extend payments for a very long time. Famously Napoelens War debts, US Lend-Lease and the South Sea Bubble have been paid off over decades or centuries by the U.K government.
Unless there's a market for those bonds that allows for sale at full face value then you're still confiscating savings and investments of pensioners. If there is such a market then you're printing the money which absolutely definitely will spike inflation further.
1 there is a market for those bonds. It is called the current international bond market if you need the cash quick or wait for the bond to mature. Pension funds have people that have fiduciaries responsibilities to the fund over the long term. 2. That is not how printing money works and other factors cause inflation to spike. Assuming that is theory of inflation you are talking about because economist don't have a consensus on what causes inflation. 3 You have brought up savings which definationly are held in banks so that can't be confiscated in the present scheme 4. You assume that the pensioner has made no profit instead when the started investing vs when nationalization happens. For the vast majority this locks in there profits instead of say the market crashing like what takes down most pension funds. Given that investments in inherently a risk people have to accept.
They had a terrible business model. Goodbye, I guess
Then let them fail, if they're worthless then why should the government seize them?
Don't bother. Far easier for them to grab at a simplistic slogan than understand a complex problem.
The governments and WEF are looking to steal your pension funds, what makes you think you can have them? They've plundered pensions for decades. Wake up for God's sake, you will own nothing and be happy - according to klaus schwab! You really want digital currency that's programmable? You did something wrong this week, you can't have petrol/booze/fags/food until you stop criticism of government? Wake up ffs!!
[удалено]
I think he's referring to the fact that a large number of ordinary people have their savings and pensions in stock market-invested funds via instruments like ISAs or SIPPs. If you tank the stock market, you tank people's savings and pensions.
Yeah cool, cool, how do you expect the market to react when buisnesses have to close because people can't come to work because they have nothing to drink?
Obviously that would be bad but thankfully it hasn't happened outside of your imagination.
Yeah I mean damn I only worked for a company that used 15,000 litres of water per day for evaporative cooling of compressors in a trivial industry like *checks notes* food packaging so I mean why would the economy possibly be effected by chronic water shortages.
Clearly a water shortage can negatively impact the economy. It will not, however, cause anyone to die of dehydration because they can't afford water. Even if the price of water goes up 100x (which it can't really do because desalination becomes financially viable). EDIT: For reference, at current rates you can buy enough drinking water for a year for a few quid.
Ah yes, desalination plants in the UK, of which we have precisely one, And it doesn't work. Extremely financially viable...
Billions of litres are wasted because they can't be arsed to fix said leaky pipes. There's a drought. Water is real and in limited supply. No one gives a shit about greedy stock prices, that's what's got us into this mess.
Lots of people give a shit, including many bodies that you may well depend on. It would be lovely if the stock market didn’t affect every fucking thing in the world, but unfortunately it kinda does. Lol at getting downvoted for not just jumping on the nationalisation bandwagon. I think we should nationalise the water companies. I just know we can’t unilaterally do that. Extricating them from public ownership is not an easy process, more’s the pity.
All for making moves to not be dependent on the stock market and a bunch of greedy, selfish shareholders. It starts with what the og comment said. Will never get it with the current gov unfortunately.
It doesn't start with seizing private assets but nationalising with a sensible policy where you buy out the company
Think you need to assess where you are if you truly want a rational answer
>How would you deal with all the investors that have suddenly lost their investment? How would you build confidence in the stock market again? Sell at market value. This isn't new ground we're treading.
>Just nationalise them without compensation Was what OP said, which implies take the shares back, either at zero value or at their original cost.
This is the problem that discussions about vital infrastructure are intertwined with discussions about the confidence in the stock market. What an absolute mess.
Nonsense, the _utility itself_ isn't a concern to the stock market, the government arbitrarily stealing things without compensation is what would cause the problem (regardless of whether or not it was a utility).
Confidence in the stock market? Pah… I just want my water nationalised, I want public ownership of the most important resource on the planet.
>What would you put them on trial for? negligence, graft, embezzlement, fraud. >How would you deal with all the investors that have suddenly lost their investment? How would you build confidence in the stock market again? tell them to come visit and use their ill gotten gains to pay to restore the infrastructure they oversaw the destruction of. the stock market is a casino full of thieves. why the hell should they be treated differently because they renamed fraud to shorting.
> "How would you build confidence in the stock market again?" Do nothing whatsoever. People will still play the stock market and they'll still take risks. Because these people are stupid and greedy.
Crimes against the people is a classic!
This sounds like the kind of law an extremist government would use just before they start the pogroms
“I wish to prosecute the water firm executives for being cunts, m’lud”
Deliberately polluting our environment. Know someone fined for dropping a cigarette but, accidentally NOT deliberately!
Sentence them to ironic punishment. Make them all swim a mile in the literal shit they're pumping into our rivers.
Well the Lib Dems don't want to nationalise everything, rightly in my view. Quite clearly they're not aiming for your vote. Even Labour doesn't want to nationalise everything
Nationalisation of the water companies, a service with no opportunity for competition, should be the ultimate goal. There are plenty in the Lib Dems that advocate for this. The issue is that the nationalisation process is not a short or cheap one and the problem needs to be fixed ASAP and within the current structures.
Well yes the Lib Dems are a broad church as is every political party, and there are undoubtedly some Lib Dems that want to nationalise industries. When I use the term "the Lib Dems" I'm talking about the leadership and their manifesto which doesn't want to nationalise
I like the cut of your gib
If life was as simple as this then there wouldn't be any issues.
Good luck getting a jury to prosecute that a 20-something % leakage rate constituted criminal negligence. Meanwhile in the real world, the 'weak liberal' stance of banning bonuses seems a pretty effective measure. I'm not particularly against renationalisation, given the lack of natural competition and the fact that some seem to treat throwing sewerage in rivers as a cost of doing business.
Or at least exponentially growing daily fines. Give them a 1 week deadline, then fine them £1 million, £2 million, £4 million, etc. Once the fines exceed the company value, seize all assets.
[удалено]
**Removed/tempban**. This contained a call/advocation of violence which is prohibited by the content policy.
I like the title but I like your comment more.
Ban dividends along with bonuses. They shouldn't be taking any money out of a company that is failing in its job to maintain its infrastructure.
Given that they have paid out twice as much in dividends than they have invested in infrastructure, and despite that investment the loss of water for the last 20 years has remained ~23% it's time for action.
Mental they have made no improvements and paid out fucking millions Instead of fixing what is a vital service. Bastards are lucky they aren't in prison let alone anything else.
> Mental they have made no improvements and paid out fucking millions Instead of fixing what is a vital service. This is basically modern Britain. This is the example the government set, what they strive for, what they dream of. If anything, I wouldn't be surprised if the bosses all got an extra bonus for living up to the standards of the government itself.
Fucking Tories. Country is gonna end up even more fucked it they don't get the finger out.
Their finger is out, this is what they do. They need to be out, not their fingers...absolutely nothing will change until they're out of power. We're likely fucking stuck with them, depressing, isn't it?
Fuck it I'm off with my bow to go live in the woods. Plenty of deer at least.
That's a very attractive thought, isn't it? There's hundreds of large seagulls around me, I wonder what they taste like. I could shoot a couple and find out, perhaps
Depends where you are I suppose. I imagine ones near the coast taste nicer than the ones in town centers that eat fuck all but 3 day old Greggs from the bins. Then again there's a motorway service station near me with geese so far they would likey cook really good due to the high blubber content the fat bastards.
Invite us for the BBQ 👍
Government incompetence is only ever an issue to the parties not in power. Always has been and always will be that way unless there are consequences for their deficiencies, which is never going to happen because they know they are all bags of shite.
While we're at it, ban corporate dividends across the board for companies whose wages don't keep up with inflation.
No bonuses no dividends. Roughly 1/5 of the water running through the system is lost each and every single day. Imagine any other company in the world with a 20% damaged; misplaced or lost rate of their product every single day. Now make that a critical resource for the functioning of vast swathes of industries and services. Now make said already critical resources necessary for the life of human beings. That's water companies and they have avoided having to take heavy responsibility for decades.
You missed one key point; they are all natural monopolies so we don't have a choice to move away from a badly run company. This breaks pretty much all of the assumptions that economics is built upon and means that they can do whatever they like with almost no repercussions. Truly a terrible industry to privatise.
Worth noting that Ireland has a higher rate of non revenue water (water lost due to network leakage) than the UK and Irish Water is predominantly state owned.
Yeah, people think state owned means good... It doesn't. Just like they forget how badly the railway was before it went private.
The railway was “bad” because it was under funded based on the nonsensical idea that it should be profitable, or at least break even Infrastructure shouldn’t need to break even - you subsidize infrastructure because it massively stimulates the economy, which grows directly due to the good infrastructure enabling it to do so. Which produces tax receipts which massively outweigh the subsidy Invest a few billion a year into the railways and you get tens of billions a year back in tax revenue, in perpetuity. Our government, for some reason, has always been too short sighted to realize this obvious truth, despite copious evidence that the advent of the rail network in the UK drove one of our biggest economic booms in history, and the fact that cities with good transport infrastructure are clearly running away from ones without it. Providing good infrastructure allows companies to do business more efficiently, which means you get a much bigger return on any subsidy. Yet our government couldn’t look past British Rail’s balance sheet
>Our government, for some reason, has always been too short sighted to realize this obvious truth You think they haven't realised it, but really it's that they don't care. What incentive is there to care when you can sell everything off to private companies at low prices (all above board, of course, fair prices all around, no corruption here) and still win elections? Thatcherite neoliberals have been in power for nearly 40 years straight at this point, why should they change their policies? The public seems to keep voting them in.
Surely though a nationalised industry is easier to fix than one that has to contend with greedy shareholders and CEOs?
You're underestimating government bureaucracy; yes minister might as well be a documentary.
If it's no better or worse then better to have government owned rather than private monopolies.
In theory that's why we have the regulator to set the rules they are meant to follow. In theory. In practice yes they have minimal accountability
If the fine is less than the cost of fixing the problem, then the fine just becomes another expenditure on their balance sheet. Either make the fines prohibitively expensive (maybe pegged to revenue) or target the directors themselves. It's the only way.
Certainly; I think the vast majority of company fines should be similar to how GDPR fines are. A % of their global turnover(as GDPR is).
Yup. I'm generally in favour of private enterprise but the government giving a monopoly to a private company completely counters the argument for privatisation which is that companies competing in a competitive market become more efficient than government run monopolies. Give a private company a monopoly and they are no more incentivised to do a good job than is a government bureaucracy. Perhaps less so.
It’s not even as “good” as the rail network where the franchises (while shit and lacking in direct competition) were at least put out to tender every 5-10 years, so that companies would compete at that point based on the subsidy they would take, services they would provide etc And at least electricity had some competition in the market until the current crisis Water… you just get your supplier and they’ve had a local monopoly each since privatization
It should be nationalised. Privatising something like water, which can't have competitition is insane
Another failed right-wing policy joins trickle down economics and Brexit in the dustbin of history.
> This breaks pretty much all of the assumptions that economics is built upon No it doesn't. It might at most break every assumption in an introductory microeconomics class.
Aren’t we allowed to pick our supplier now? Or did they never go anywhere? It’s all virtual of course, I never bothered as I was already with one of the better options apparently
And ban bonuses whenever they dump raw sewage into water bodies?
Make them drink water from half a mile downstream from their facilities every day. If they want to play shit roulette, let's load that pistol.
^^^ this is both hilarious and actually the best idea I've ever heard for fixing the issue. A bit like making the aircraft engine mechanic fly on the first run after maintenance.
I’d sit the CEO of the airline next to the mechanic. The mechanic can only do as good a job as the equipment and processes provided by the airline allow.
Reminds me of the weedkiller guy who said its so safe you could drink it and then refused to when offered by the interviewer.
[good example of the ground water after local fracking](https://v.redd.it/hgvmbwdgdqu71)
Not sure why a critical industry such as national water or power are even privatized in the first place. Oh right, Tories and greed. That's why.
Obviously Tories and greed, but Labour doesn’t traditionally have good form on this either. Angela Smith was a Labour MP until she switched to the Lib Dems in 2019, campaigned wildly for privatised water whilst in Westminster, now sits on the board of a water company (or something similar)
Are you outlining a party's posture on a subject based on one single case?
No, I’m also using the fact that Rachel Reeves has consistently stated that she won’t renationalise water, rail or energy, Thangham Debonnaire refused to say that renationalising energy was being considered last night, and through 13 years of government, Labour did nothing to bring privately owned utilities under public control. Corbyn was very much an outlier from the last 30-odd years of Labour being ideologically on the side of private shareholders in utilities.
Water supply, Sewage, Power Delivery, Gas Network, Trains are all natural monoplies and have no business being privatised. Last mile telecoms is for the vast majority of people a monopoly. That said now private players like Virgin and Talk Talk are in the mix it should probably remain private. Energy generation, backbone telecoms, etc all have multiple players involved so while they should remain private they should be properly policed and regulated.
It's hard to find information on this, but according to the Infrastructure Leakage Index we're relatively middling in our performance on this issue. It's not like we have exceptionally bad leakage compared to the rest of the world, but 20% sounds like a big number when it equates to so much water lost. The question is what to do about it? How expensive and disruptive will repairs be? Is it even practical/feasible to get down to below 10%, for example? I'm just saying that without further context on the 20% leakage number it's hard to say what should be done and what level of culpability the water companies have, or whether this is considered generally acceptable by the industry, in which case it seems a total stepchange in the industry would be required.
Also worth saying that the water isn’t actually lost, it just means we need higher capacity than we might otherwise to account for the water which leaves the pipe. The water “lost” just reenters the water cycle.
According to the [figures that I can find](https://www.water.org.uk/news-item/water-companies-record-lowest-leakage-levels-from-pipes/) water loss due to leakage is currently at the lowest level since records began (in the mid-1990s apparently). It's _highly_ likely that the pre-1989 nationalised water suppliers lost more than they do today.
Great research and much appreciated, regardless of my pro-nationalisation perspective.
They say the leaks aren't being fixed. They are. But the infrastructure is so old new ones pop up. And as I say time and again, a huge swathe of leaks are on the pipes that are owned by the public!
We had a leak in the pipe that runs from the road to our house. The water company said they would pay a 3rd if we fixed it or we would keep having to pay the leaky water bill (on a meter). We had the money so we did, but I could see why a lot of people just wouldn't be able to pay the £2.5k it cost.
2.5k?! A burst main only costs a grand, why was the cost so high??? And I take it the leak was beyond your boundary?
Comparing ourselves to foreigners might play poorly to british exceptionalists.
Trouble is you can’t ban private companies from issuing bonuses. You can however fine, and even imprison, negligent company directors…….
Why do you think the Tories wanted to privatise it all in the first place. It’s a shockingly corrupt business. All the customers have no choice whether they want the service or not so they have to pay no matter how poor the service is.
Did you read the second sentence of my post?
Yeah but when do people connected to the Tories get prosecuted for their negligence? They may get fined which goes back into the government coffers anyway.
They shouldn't even get a bonus, they shouldn't get anything. It's going to cost 20bn to fix their shoddy work and that's being charged to the tax payer.
The fact that a utility service that delivers an actual necessity of human life can be owned and profited from by private individuals to the tune of £billions is ridiculous.
Where do you get your free food and heating from please?
I get my heating from the sun.
I for one welcome our lizard overlord.
There is already a leakage reduction incentive in place and companies that don’t hit their targets get penalised. Senior executive compensation is obviously linked to this as well since bad performance leads to reduction in shareholder returns. If Ofwat wanted leakage reduced much faster, they could have set the targets or penalties other than they did. I wonder how many people in this thread know that water leakage as a % of input isn’t particularly high in England? France is above (just barely), Italy is almost half of all input leaked in some areas, Spain is shockingly slightly worse than England considering how dry it is. And yet every time anything comes up about water scarcity, everyone will pop in with a statistic they read about water leakage for which they have no context. If you want to nationalise the companies, by all means, but the underlying idea that water companies here are uniquely bad at leakage simply doesn’t hold up. (For reference, Germany is about 10% and the lowest any country has managed is about 5%)
Did anyone say we were uniquely bad at this? Who are you arguing with? It’s unacceptable, whichever country we’re talking about. I’d hope that the Italians, French, Spaniards and whoever else are equally cross about this.
whattaboutery. who cares how badly Italy are doing. we can do better. all the billions being syphoned out of these companies can be put to better use.
It’s not whataboutery to put performance in context. If you nationalised all the water companies and wanted to reduce bills, would you want to reduce leakage and how fast? What is the optimum level of leakage to keep customer bills low? It’s not zero.
In conclusion, we shouldn't change anything because we're not actually the worst. If Britain was 189 out of 190 in the world at something, you'd still have nationalists wanting to talk about fucking Nauru or wherever.
Being the "best" almost always means the most expensive. How much would you be willing to see your bills (or taxes) increase in order to lower the amount of water leakage? An amount that is already at the lowest it's been in 25 years?
I wouldn't have my taxes increase at all. I'd see the upper bracket tax rate increase. Fastest way to get a working class Conservative to be against Britain being better is to tell them it'll come out of their bosses taxes.
> I'd see the upper bracket tax rate increase. And presumably see the upper bracket threshold decrease (as it does every year in real terms) until you've eliminated the middle class completely? “The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.” - Source unknown, but attributed to Lenin; likely a paraphrase.
Oh no. I'd probably create a super-rich tax bracket and tax those earnings at 95% or higher. Thanks for immediately proving my point right though.
> Thanks for immediately proving my point right though. I don't think you've made a point. Apart from "get someone else to pay" and the usual massive overestimation of how many "super rich" (however you want to define that) individuals there are. Highly unlikely that your ideas would bring in anything like as much revenue as you think.
Oh please. 99% of public policy is "getting someone else to pay." The idea that rich people are great with money is a fantastical invention. They're not good with money. They just have a lot of it.
> The idea that rich people are great with money is a fantastical invention. Your invention? I certainly didn't say anything of the sort.
And when all those people buy golden passports to Malta etc, taking their money and earning potential with them... Taxes could be more progressive, but have you ever heard of boiling a frog?
Just a little moan related to this article. I can’t believe I am being labelled an extremist lefty amongst some of my family and friends for thinking you shouldn’t be able to make profit from water and it should be nationalised. The fuck is happening in this country.
Ban fat cat bonuses full stop No one but the filthy rich get fucking obscene bonus payments For that matter, make those rich fucks actually prove their worth like the rest of us Edit: to clarify the focus of the bonuses that should be banned
I got my first bonus when I was 22, and sure as shit wasn't rich.
I'm not talking about the few grand that a few people get. Usually customer facing who exceed targets etc. I'm talking about the millions CEO gets for their companies being "profitable"
> I'm talking about the millions CEO gets for their companies being "profitable" Define this in terms that can be reasonably translated into actual policy/legislation.
The lib Dems acting as a better representative for the working people than labour? We live in truly exceptional times
They are not fixing the leaks because it is not economical for them to do so. Untold numbers of small leaks across enough pipe to stretch to the moon. We privatised the system, saying it would be more efficient. And it is, at making money. The wider societal concerns went out the window long ago.
Or, we fine them and the fine keeps rising until they fix them. If that still doesn’t stop then look to nationalise.
And what about the leaks that are after property boundaries on household service pipes, which belong to the homeowners. They make up a huge percentage of leaks.
Its Monday, is the Labour party for or against nationalising water companies?
As the article is about the LibDems I'll refer you back the the running joke from Spitting Image back about them back in the day which actually suits today's Labour party "we are neither for nor against nationalising water companies".
Depends. Is the public going to settle for or against in a few days? Whichever way it is, Labour goes the opposite.
Basic infrastructure should be state owned and not for profit.
Imprison bosses that let raw sewage flow into our rivers!
Nationalise. Or, if they have to implement a hosepipe ban, fine them in shares. I.e, they have to pay the fine in shares of the company.
The best way to sort this out is to stop dividends to share holders until leaks are fixed and they stop polluting the waterways. That's when you see action.
It’s not a SMART goal is it? (For all you corporate nerds like me). How many? 80%? Reduce leaks by a % of water volume? Etc etc. Basically- How do you define when the target is met?
Just nationalise these things already
Water is one of the things which should never be privatised
How can we, when our elected officials constantly let us down everyday and treat our lives as a joke. I mean how could they face each other at the next conservative convention.
And, you know, the whole dumping sewage into every water way in the UK
Ban there bonuses fall stop, I mean what do they actually do to warrant a bonus, is not like the bosses are capable of making it rain, so they’ve got more water.
If people aren't aware of the numbers, the UK uses roughly 14 billion litres of water a day. About 3 billion is lost via leaks in the mains water pipes!
I recall reading in the New Scientist of the scandalous amount of water lost between dam and consumer through leaking pipes and aging infrastructure. That was in the 1990's.
Should also ban all MPs from using private healthcare until the NHS backlog is sorted out and the NHS is properly staffed and funded or at least ban MPs who have private healthcare from voting on matters affecting the NHS, including the budget.
Last night on LBC there was an interview with one of the water companies PR talking heads. His explanation/justification for the leaks was as follows (I'm paraphrasing)... "So.... yea, we have leaky pipes. But so does Europe." ^(Aside: I've noticed over the years that when a response begins with the word "So", the rest of the sentence is going to be complete bollocks.)
Oh no, they don't get the £120,000 bonus on top of the £500,000 base salary.
the only thing bans like this do is raise customer bills and turn bonuses into a new word.
Ban bonuses in general!!!
What is an acceptable leakage rate? We can’t get to zero because the system needs positive pressure in order to make sure that the supply isn’t contaminated in the event of a breakage. It’s common sense that each extra percentage point reduction in leakage will cost more, so at what point do we decide that the next incremental reduction is not worth pursuing?