Well, I don’t imagine I made a lot of friends at Thames Water when I spent twenty minutes on my feet lambasting them in Westminster Hall at the start of April.
But I promised my constituents that I would fight for them every day in parliament on the issues that matter to them most. For many, that means holding failing companies to account who are making our lives, and our environment, much poorer. By that measure, Thames Water is certainly among the worst of a bad bunch.
Years of historic underinvestment in favour of profit has run the business into the ground. It now finds itself on the brink of collapse despite a financial lifeline that it ought not to have been awarded, when a court last month allowed the company to take on another three billion pounds of debt.
So you can imagine my frustration when recently, US private equity group KKR was selected as the preferred bidder to bail out Thames Water — a company whose involvement with Northumbrian Water has covered their reputation more in sludge than in glory.
Enough is enough. A company of this importance should not be allowed to carry on such a self-destructive and brazenly careless path. The government, in not stepping in, is allowing a failing company to lurch from crisis to crisis whilst slowly drowning in ever greater debt. The only flow being successfully managed is the flow of cash into the pockets of bankers, advisors, lawyers and private equity. Meanwhile bills are up and sewage continues to breach into our waterways at dangerous levels.
If I seemed harsh in my assessment of the company in Westminster Hall, it’s because I genuinely cannot fathom why we are allowing the situation to go on as it is. The government must step up, take the lead, and put the company into special administration.
It’s clear that without doing that — we’re sleepwalking into a major failure of the company. The government has been quick to reassure us that essential services would not be disrupted in the event of a collapse – but that’s cold comfort when we should all be expecting a lot more from utility companies than just keeping the tap water running. That is quite literally the bare minimum the British people expect.
What we all want to see is the adults in the room stepping in to stop infrastructure creaking, sewage spilling and bills rising.
Ofwat certainly isn’t able to compel these changes. The regulator is increasingly toothless and unable to enforce any meaningful changes or penalties. It is standing idly by whilst shareholders and executives profit from a declining system. It should be scrapped and replaced with a regulator that is unafraid, and well equipped, to do enforcement seriously.
But there isn’t enough time to simply wait for a new regulator to take its place. So the only solution is the one the government seems most reluctant to admit — that it should take temporary control of Thames Water to reset its activities, restructure its management and refocus its mission.
Because let’s be clear — that is what has fundamentally gone wrong at the heart of Thames Water. It is not just that they are a failing commercial enterprise, they are quite evidently an organisation that has lost the public service part of their mission — becoming instead a paragon of failure, debt and daylight robbery, all in the name of profit — and we are all suffering as a result.
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Source: Politics
