ursaminortaur wrote:Arborbridge wrote:Nationalisation is a huge step and will solve nothing much. We'll be back in the same old problem that governments used to have in raising capital to invest in industries, which is why someone came up with the PFI - that proved controversial too. Quite apart from that, we having trouble enough raising capital to fight Covid, Energy bills, the Russian games - without taking on nationalisation. Think of the endless arguments there would be: I heard this morning that to fix the sewage into the sea outfall problem alone might cost £600 billion - even half that would be a big amount, and that is only one potential demand for capital from nationalisation.
I'm not second guessing politicians - just keep taking the diversity pills.
Arb.
On the otherhand the way that the water companies have avoided fixing the leak problem preferring to sweat their assets so as to get greater profits as well as allowing all these outfalls of sewage into the sea shows
that privatisation solved nothing.
I started working in the water industry shortly after privatisation and saw major improvements in all areas: treatment, leakages, pollution, the list goes on. Since I've left (I'm not saying it was all down to me!) it is clear that this early flow of investment and improvement has slowed considerably, but I have no doubt that things are in a far better state than if the industry had been left limping along as before. However, whether private and regulated or nationalised, I think the main problem for the politicians is the general public's perception of drinking water and sewage disposal as a basic right, without real consideration of what is involved. For an average daily cost of £1.12, a household expects to get enough clean water to drink, cook, wash themselves, clean dishes and clothes, flush the toilet several times, water the garden, and more. They also expect to get all their wastewater taken away and dealt with elsewhere. This entails energy to abstract the raw water, energy and chemicals to treat it, energy and chemicals to monitor its quality, energy to pump it into the distribution system, then energy and chemicals to treat and dewater the sewage and dispose of the sludge. It also obviously requires maintenance of all the infrastructure and, of course, all these processes require human input with varying degrees of training.
So, rather than fret over whether the industry should be renationalised, I think the first step should be to try to nurture an understanding that water is a valuable commodity and, at considerably < 1p/litre, it is really quite seriously underpriced. Yes, we should invest in improving the infrastructure to prevent leaks and untreated sewage discharges, but neither a privatised nor nationalised industry will be able to fully achieve what is being demanded until the people demanding it understand (and accept) the true costs.