The Enshittification of British Water

A friend just forwarded a splendid rant about the manifold sins and wickednesses* of the privatised water and sewage companies. (*Book of Common Prayer, for you youngsters.) All so true, and how wicked they have been: loading their companies with debt since 1989, looting them for dividends, failing to upgrade infrastructure. Naughty, naughty people.

And what did we all do about it? While taps kept running (except at, for example, Tunbridge Wells), while toilets flushed, and water bills were trivial, we happily looked the other way – with a few honourable exceptions such as Surfers Against Sewage. We don’t still take our laundry down to the river these days, as so much of the world has to, so nor did we bother much about the untreated sewage being dumped into waterways (under the fig-leaf of emergency “storm overflows”).

The stock answer is to nationalise the water companies, something we’re sure to hear more of at the Labour Party conference. Perhaps our Messiah from Manchester knows where the £100 billion-plus might come from to do that in an orderly way? But putting it all on people’s water bills would be a foolproof way to lose an election.

We are where we are, and not where we’d like to be. A few points are seldom mentioned in the name-calling and whataboutery over water and sewage: management, regulation, workforce. So let me make them.

One of the conjuring tricks of privatisation was the way the same lacklustre drongos who headed water companies in public ownership were kept on by the new owners – at multiples of their previous salaries. Not stupid, because these were the people who knew how the creaking systems worked and where the skeletons were buried: essential they stick around if the taps weren’t to run dry. And if they became uneasy about how things were going, bonuses (aka “retention payments”) took care of any silly qualms.

The way you stop the foxes (private sector) massacring the chickens (captive customer) is to have good fences of course. But fundamentally you need a farmer with a gun. Instead of sheriffs with balls and six-shooters, what the water sector actually got was a procession of feeble regulators and the hapless Ofwat.

I happened to meet one of these regulators socially in the 1990s, and a less impressive apparatchik I have seldom encountered. I doubt she could have confronted a shopkeeper who’d given her short change, let alone water company owners who were making out like bandits and breaking the law. How right that was. But even the most uncompromising regulator would have needed political backup – and where was that?

Then there’s public sector efficiency. The amount TfL pays its drivers to keep the Tube running totals, say, three times what the work involved is worth in the real world. It’s human nature: most people would prefer to be paid lots more for doing a lot less, and wherever essential workers spot a chance to run a closed shop to achieve that, they grab it. As Attlee discovered in the 1940s, the only way to get the NHS off the ground was to stuff the GPs’ mouths with gold.

See also Fleet Street’s old printers, Camden’s direct labour force when I lived there in the 1980s, train drivers and resident hospital doctors today. Liverpool was infamously the city run by and for the benefit of its council’s manual workforce, and collapsing. What reason is there to suppose workers in publicly owned water companies would not find ways to make taxpayers and customers pay them ever more for doing ever less? If the toilets might stop flushing, those pay rises will magically appear: with taxpayer subsidies and/or increased bills rising in lockstep.

As for the idea of confiscating the companies from their present owners and reneging on their debts: could there be a more effective way to crash the UK economy? The bond market would have something to say about that, and no one would lend to or invest in the UK ever again. (A small upside, perhaps: there’d be no money to pay benefits to everyone who doesn’t feel like working, and economic or illegal migration would cease – Iraq or Nigeria would look like better bets.)

We would also have to renege on those gold-plated subsidies to windmill and solar-farm owners to supply intermittent ‘green’ electricity. Boo hoo, and bring on the day. Living with candles and paraffin heaters, as I remember doing in the 1970s during those three-day weeks, might almost be worth the pain – but it still took some years to face down the closed shops.

The notion that the water companies were handed over in good shape in 1989 is just silly. Even then the infrastructure was creaking, and the Government of the day couldn’t tax people enough or borrow enough to put it right. And in the early years, the new private owners did borrow, and good work was done. But before long they realised the regulators and Ofwat were useless, and there was no political will to stop them taking excessive rewards and breaking the laws against pollution. No consequences? Gimme, gimme.

Even Thames Water has a long list of successful projects – well yes, obviously: if they’d screwed up London too badly, even the dimmest politicians would have noticed, as Parliament did in the Great Stink of 1858, and hired Joseph Bazalgette to sort out sewers and the Thames. Luckily for London, he doubled the diameter of pipes compared to what was thought necessary, thus quadrupling the flow – and keeping the city going for 150 years.

Thames Water’s new London fresh-water ring main was finished on time and under budget; its Thames Tideway “Super Sewer” was a bit delayed by Covid, but similarly successful; the Lee Tunnel intercepts five million tons of sewage a year that would otherwise have gone into the River Lee and thence the Thames. And so on.

So if simple expropriation – the communist approach – would be suicidal, how about what the fascists did in the 1930s? Allow the water company owners to keep their businesses, but on condition that the state will tell them what they may or may not do. Their share prices would collapse, but that’s capitalism for you – and perhaps payback. Shame about people’s pension funds that invested in them, though: omelettes, eggs…

And the spectacle of a Labour government arriving at the solution that worked for fascist states 90 years ago – well, that would be something to savour.

Mike Wells won the World Press Photo competition in 1981 and worked in many countries including Nigeria. He has written often for DS and elsewhere about the repatriation of the Benin bronzes.