Hi ,
Boo! Happy Halloween from Thames Water!* We hope this email finds you scared. Of us.
Horror! At the idea the government will do nothing about this.
Scream! With frustration that you can't even change your water supplier.
We at Thames are officially the worst supplier of water in England and boy, is that stiff competition. Not one of the English or Welsh water companies hit their targets for reducing sewage dumping incidents last year and eight out of nine were rated as "poor" by the Environment Agency. But Thames Water is different: we're also leaky, dirty, and begging regulators to let us get away with whatever we like until 2040.
And we need to be let off from any regulation for the next 15 years because that's the only way our business model can work. You see, there basically hasn't been any enforcement of laws or regulations around water companies since privatisation. Even before this crisis began, we've been illegally dumping sewage and hiding that from regulators for decades. It doesn't matter! We've been able to happily pay ourselves billions in shareholder dividends anyway.
But now the billions in debt we took on has caught up with us, and we've tried everything to keep the gravy river flowing. We tried blaming customers for shortages because they keep showering and storing photos on the cloud. We've tried putting up your bills by hundreds of pounds. We've tried.... actually, it's just those two things.
If we get nationalised – if the government is forced to accept that our system is so broken that a business model of taking water out of the ground and selling it you for whatever price we like is unsustainable – then who knows what might be next? The whole idea of privatisation would come into question. It would be almost impossible for us to argue against common ownership of water, power, transport, housing, or communications.
Don't let that happen. Support your local privatised water company. Not that you really have a choice about that.
*This is a joke, obviously, I'm not Thames Water. I've dumped next to no sewage in our waterways and have a little less debt. |