Why is the CEO of a regional water company making £3.2 million a year in compensation??!!
Well, what salary would
you command, in return for you personally taking on responsibility for the absolute **** storm that is a UK water company...?
I think it goes deeper than that, had their been the proper investment to upgrade the water system over the years their wouldn't be the need for such large investment now. The UK sewage system is still largely reliant on the original Victorian base design of combined sewer system.
The cost of that investment would have been insane, even decades ago. So much has been built on the surface in the last 100 years, from buildings to roads to motorways, to railways, that we'd have had to demolish and rebuild the majority of every town and city.
The countries where utilities do not see these sorts of construction complexities are typically those that saw heavy bombing in recent wars. This is one reason why Germany has such great infrastructure by comparison - They got levelled in WW2 and much of their systems are new builds with modern standards.
The article is OK in general terms, but not entirely accurate. The majority of sewers in places like London are not combined and most external agencies like the EA are using data that is decades old and often found in some local council archive from the years when they still ran the water. There is a plethora of surface water networks entirely separate from foul sewers. A great deal of surface water goes back into sustainable urban drainage, feeding gardens, parks and even little flower boxes in town/city centres.
Developers do often combine sewage on their part of the land, which is where the article skews the picture somewhat. Those are private assets which the water companies have no say in and are nothing to do with the public sewer network, except at the point of connection or if they otherwise impact the mains.
As far as there being no maps of the sewer system goes - I myself make use of said maps on an almost daily basis. There are some gaps in data, usually where the water company has had to adopt formerly private pipes and accurate/any records were not kept. There are also plenty of formerly council-owned local networks that are similarly hideous.
Or the water industry could be configured in such a way that didn't allow water companies to make "profit" and pay dividends whilst not investing in infrastructure and process that doesn't involve them putting **** into our rivers and seas.
The profit is return on investment and repayment/interest on loans. Without that return and repayment you get no investment and no repairs or new infrastructure. Kinda how it went back when it was still nationalised.
The discharge process came about because customers (even back then) were putting so much junk down there that blockages became a daily occurrence. Without that, the sewers are typically designed to handle additional rainfall and flooding on a scale expected only once in 30 years. Many are designed to a 1 in 50 year incident.
I think at this point there's no alternative but to renationalise them. Like much of the UK's infrastructure, it should never have been privatised in the first place. It's been a money grab from day 1.
I think it's six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Either way was
I’ve always wondered if a hybrid model would work. So the government owns and maintains the infrastructure and rents it out to companies to run and provide the service.
It should, and the concept has been bandied about before, but no-one's yet had the stones to actually use their power and make it happen.
I've never understood the argument that privately run operations are inherently better run than state run operations, in any industry, not just water.
Very simplistically, what difference does it make if a company's shareholders are pension funds or the state?
Private ownership is supposed to bring vastly higher amounts of money in investments.
The state is reliant on public borrowing for its funding, and arguably the state has a recent history of not even being able to run a fever!
We might have done, but that's my point, what is it about state run services that allowed them to be so badly run?
Everyone, not just a specific industry, is ultimately clamouring for as much of that same pot of public borrowing as they can get.
If a private company can come in and make billions, what mechanism is it that means state run services can't make billions.
The privates make billions from mortgaging and asset-stripping, and then running off with the cash.
Governments can't easily do that and much of their profit will be diverted to other public services.
You can't switch provider.
Non-domestic customers can switch provider. The same capability is intended for domestic customers at some point, but I think they have their focus on other matters right now.
But regardless of who your provider is, they will all still be buying wholesale from the same undertakers who operate and maintain the network... It's like buying your internet from WiFi Wonderful, or GigaSplat, but it still being owned and run by BT.
