Privatisation is only for profits, not for losses silly.
plan for collapse of Thames Water
- Thread starter Mrwong
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Privatisation is only for profits, not for losses silly.
Soldato
I've been screaming this for years; like howling at the wind. The long and short of it boils down to creative, complex, and ill-judged contractual and licensing terms meaning the taxpayer will ultimately always be on the hook for any accrued debt, at times of collapse, for pretty much any type of privatised utility service.
As others have posted glibly; profits for the shareholders / equity / hedge funds versus taxpayer on the hook for the losses / debt. It does boggle my mind how these practices are still allowed to continue on license renewal. You would have thought the licensing would have changed to reflect better value for the taxpayer. Ooops, I'm howling again!
Capitalism for the workers socialism for the corporations.
I think the actual quote is, "Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor."
The amount of times that CEOs/owners/shareholders manage to pull millions out of failing companies before handing over their vast debts and liabilities and asking for govt bailouts...
Tracks are already publicly owned, yet our rail network in this country is a disgrace. It's old and falling to bits and requires massive reinvestment.
In reality infrastructure doesn't work either way.
I can't say I've travelled by train for decades but in what way are the tracks that the train run on not working?
Well the Tories don't want anything in public ownership to be any kind of success story, so they deliberately under-fund it until it's on its knees. That's an ideology thing.
Then when everything is in private hands, customer bills are pushed up and a few people make bank very nicely thank you very much, but your service is still absolute ****. Possibly then also taking the company into bankruptcy and running back to the govt for a bailout. But never failing to pay a select few very well during the collapse.
Good old dysfunctional Britain at its best.
You mean, the bit of the railway network that is very expensive to maintain but doesn't actually generate any revenue or hold much value was left for the taxpayer to worry about. While vulture capitalists picked up the parts that they could turn a quick penny on, while not having to worry about being on the hook for future infrastructure investment ?
Soldato
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If you live in the country, you'll generally have paid the exact same rates as people in the city, regardless of how little service you get. As a result, you'll have subsidised all the infrastructure investments that only benefit the city folk, such as the Lee and Tideway Tunnels.
For once, the city lot are subsidising rural investments.
That all sounds a bit leftist and/or socialist to me, why should others have to pay for something that only a few people use.
Soldato
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Because every customer expects, and is expected, to pay the same rate, so they bump it all up. London is expensive enough, without people having to bear the full amount that it costs to keep their **** (literally) tidied away.That all sounds a bit leftist and/or socialist to me, why should others have to pay for something that only a few people use.
The railways similarly used to keep mainline costs down by running lots of little local lines, but they got sold off and abandoned as local transport companies bought them and forced people to use their busses for the routes instead.
Soldato
True enough.
Privatise the profits, Nationalise the debt. It's been the accepted way in this country for a long time unfortunately.
I think you may have that backwards, it's cheaper to supply infrastructure in cities than the country side. People living in the sticks get infrastructure like water and rail far cheaper than the actual cost of supplying them with it.
Soldato
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If I need to lay a pipe or install a pumping station somewhere rural, it's mostly just digging up mud and grass.
In the city there are road (and often railway) possessions, parking suspensions, streetworks notices, traffic management plans and controls, local council authorisations, and a plethora or other utilities which will likely be impacted. Urban infrastructure is massively more expensive than rural.
If you lay a pipe or install a pumping station somewhere rural you're doing it for fewer people and laying more pipes and pumping stations per person.
It's basic economies of scale and the scale is larger in cities than rural areas, why do you think some rural places still heat their homes with oil.
Soldato
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Actually my team are currently installing several hundred FLIP pumps in London, as part of flooding resilience for properties with basements.
Each FLIP serves just one property, as do the many private pumping stations we service.
For the same cost of this programme, the water company could cover several times the number of rural customers.
Pipes are far cheaper, quicker and easier to lay in places without roads, buildings and other infrastructure, and there are more options for less disruptive construction methods.
I don’t think the point is that it’s cheaper to lay the pipes it’s that in our system those costs are socialised and therefore in a city spread between far more people/households and therefor the cost to per person is far lower than serving a ritual area where you may put in a 3km stretch of pipe to service a single house.
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Are you suggesting that it's cheaper to lay +10-20 miles of pipes than it is to lay 10 meters.
Soldato
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You wouldn't put in long stretches of pipe for single properties, though. You'd use a decentralised and more local solution.
Either way, rural customers still pay the same as urban ones.
Not if you're applying urban drainage to rural locations.
But it takes a lot more than just 10m of pipe to service an entire urban catchment. All those catchments will need a massive network of larger diameter pipes, all feeding into one massive centralised treatment works. It gets worse with any commercial properties, and even more so if you have to include trade and industrial effluent. Finally, you have the near-doubled issues of surface drainage to include as well as the sewage, which is far less of a factor in rural areas.
BBC News - Thames Water criticised for 'inconvenient' Boxing Day outages - BBC News
Brilliant v
Thames Water criticised for 'inconvenient' Boxing Day outages
Supply disruption near Guildford prompts criticism from chancellor and local MP, Jeremy Hunt.
www.bbc.co.uk
Brilliant v