> Future generations, who will be dealing with long, dry summers, would probably be shocked at the profligate way clean tap water was used to flush toilets, water gardens and run washing machines.
Climate change means societal change. There was a time that Northern Africa was one of the best places in the world to grow crops. They were at the top of civilization for thousands of years. Climate changed, what people could grow and do changed too.
The difference this time is that we did this to ourselves. Even worse that we continue making our future prospects worse on purpose so a few oil countries can squish some extra money from earth. It is baffling the lack of foresight.
> Forecasts indicate that by 2055 England’s public water supply could be short by 5bn litres a day
> Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1tn litres of water through leaky pipes each year.
Seems like there's most of a solution here, just staring us in the face, no? Problem being of course, that the privatised water companies have little incentive or investment in order to tackle the problem.
Are we ready to admit that selling off critical national infrastructure was a stupid idea, yet?
It's the same story with power and gas, wherever they get turned over to the private sector, things get worse. Fundamentally I don't give the first shit about choosing an energy provider. I don't want to find a new deal every few years. I don't give a shit about choice, I just want someone to do it well and charge reasonably. Instead you get stuck in a market offering discounted signup rates and you have to switch every year, while the companies draw their earnings from the minority of people who forget or otherwise can't be bothered to switch.
I don't miss that from the UK. Here in communist Western Australia we maintained ownership of the water, power and gas infrastructure, where other parts of the country set up privatised energy marketplaces. When the UK and the rest of Australia were screaming about rocketing bills, we were protected from some of the fluctuations in international energy prices over the last few years and any profits got ploughed back into infrastructure or the state coffers rather than heading off to private hands. It's just better...
By the time the water issue become very serious in England, there would be other far more serious issues, globally and locally, that will dwarf the water issue. For instance, water issue around the world would drive the people out, water wars breaking out, drought and food crisis, powerful nations simply taking over resource-rich lands globally and so on. A swing back to medieval times.
As the article mentions, privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity and relied on drawing from rivers and other sources.
What the article doesn’t mention is that pre-privatisation a new reservoir was built every year up to about 1960 and then every few years until privatisation in 1992.
So we are about 30 years behind in adding capacity to the system. This combined with the inadequate levels of investment in the system leading to enormous wastage, is the answer.
Water should never have been privatised. At least not without a framework for a national strategy for water. I suspect that wasn’t done because it would have made water companies and unattractive source of profit.
It shouldn’t be considered a source of profit at all, attractive or not. Water is a fundamental resource for human life. We pay bills to ensure the infrastructure is there to provide it.
If the infrastructure isn’t there, we haven’t received what we paid for. Worse, without EU regulation these companies are now blasting sewage into lakes and rivers. Ofwat can’t do anything.
At this point I feel there’s no solution other than nationalising the infrastructure again and ploughing billions of tax payers money into yet another failed Thatcher initiative.
Of course that will never happen, because we’ve not had a government willing to make sweeping changes like that since Thatcher. Except maybe Liz Truss with her exceptional grasp of economics.
People have this propagandized view that the "free market" (which isn't real) is responsible for innovation.
All capitalism does is build enclosures and engage in rent-seeking. With the tendency for profits to decrease, ultimately it comes down to cutting costs and raising prices. So why would a water company invest in a new reservoir? That increases supply. That might lower prices.
The UK is going to neoliberal all the way into being a developing nation.
Someone down thread posted that the private company has proposed several new reservoirs starting in 1992 and they've all been blocked on environmental grounds by the government or by NIMBYs.
For example the Abingdon Reservoir has been in planning for 19 years[1]. It is opposed by GARD[2], the Group Against Reservoir Development. It's hard to see how this is the fault of privatization.
As a counter point, go look at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. It's a publicly owned municipal utility and is notorious for its corruption. The DWP doesn't perform any maintenance, lettings things break completely and then having to fix huge issues. They were the group who failed to fill a reservoir in the Pacific Palisades to save some money where firefighters weren't able to use to fight the fires.
> privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity
Of course not. The water company was in terrible shape (read: lacking funds) before it was dumped on a commercial company that does not have deep pockets like Chevron. Thames Water owes £16.8 billion. That money is already gone.
No one is going to swoop in to save the day. Taxpayers will eat the bill, and invest even more to reverse decades of neglect. All of those hard decisions labour committed to make are unnecessary when nothing is done and they are made for you. The country has limited funds, and is spending funds it doesn't have on things like billions on hotels for 29,000 unauthorized travelers so far this year.
UK external debt is £2.7 trillion, and whats her name said yesterday it may be necessary to ask the IMF for a loan? Water company indeed.
It turns out that “If you put the markets in charge of the United Kingdom, in thirty years there’d be a shortage of water” is the realistic version of the Sahara sand quote.
The privatization of water supply is featured prominently in Adam Curtis's new series "Shifty," and paints a similar picture. Profit > infrastructure is ruining so much...
Short answer is that the UK gave private companies to extract as much wealth as possible with minimal re-investment in infrastructure. The nation has since seen water rationing and raw sewage being pumped into rivers and beaches, but at least some shareholders have benefited, right?
This last year I've noticed a disproportionate number of burst mains water pipes pissing ridiculous amounts of water everywhere, with whole roads flooded for days, sometimes weeks, before Thames Water's subcontractors managed to get round to dealing with it. This has happened before on occasion, but this year I've seen maybe 10x more leaks than any previous year. Critical infrastructure is bursting in unison because it has been criminally undermaintained for over three decades in favour of dividends on profits from critical national infrastructure.
Articles like this, with subtle mentions of how it was all our fault and all the water companies were doing was prioritising low cost for the consumer, are the equivalent of 'were the nazis really that bad or were they just a bit sad and lonely', but national infrastructure edition. They exist only to soften up and distract public opinion so that we're less likely to want any of the people involved to be held to account.
It's not just water either. Nothing works in the UK anymore. Trains, the NHS, BT, roads, the CCRC, everything seems to be deteriorating more and more. What the hell's going on?
What sort of waste there is in industrial and agricultural use? It seems like the focus is always far too heavy on the individual household while corporate waste and excess tends to get ignored even while they lobby for less regulation and oversight
> People across England are already banned from using hosepipes, with more restrictions probable over coming months.
> So how on earth did famously rainswept England, notorious the world over for being green and wet with our national symbol pretty much a furled umbrella, come to this?
> The UK is one of the rainier places in Europe. Some areas are wetter than others
> Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1tn litres of water through leaky pipes each year. The industry has said that about 20% of all treated water is lost to leaks. The water firms have pledged to halve leakages by 2050.
> Meanwhile, the annual pipe replacement rate is 0.05% a year across all water companies
An honest request for enlightenment:There's the structural problem. There are the structural aspects of a potential solution. There's some mapping around the problem. Given that, why does the England government not provide a definitive solution?
As a former 3rd world resident, one thing that I noticed in Europe is that several basic problems do not have the right incentives or willingness to be solved, even if there are the "raw materials" in place, like capital, human talent, a need, and so on.
I know that some can think like the "Why Didn't I Think of That?" meme template [1], but I have been in worse places where you have several headwinds like corruption, lack of capital, etc.; I see that in England and in continental Europe you can see a lot of those "basic problems" happening and piling up. I wonder if those issues will be solved gradually or if those societies will need to have their “burning platform” moment [2].
Five-year election cycle, and the dominant party is very good at controlling the narrative
Selling public infrastructure lets you give tax cuts now, and you'll be long gone before people recognise that they are paying more and getting less. It's much like MBAs making cuts - you can boost the bottom line in the short term and be gone before the blame starts gathering
We have a fptp electoral process, which means there are a lot of safe seats in parliament. In battleground seats, a vote for the third party is effectively a vote for the first. People who want not-the-incumbent cannot choose which party they actually do want. I personally have been disenfranchised all my adult life, MEP votes excluded. (If I could change only one thing, I would abolish fptp.)
Moreover, like most populous Western countries, most of the electorate is not well educated on politics or economics; they get their political news from limited sources, and they don't seek information that challenges their prior beliefs.
These facts combine to reduce electoral accountability.
Having flogged the public infra, renationalisation is tricky. You either buy it back at market value, which means imposing a tax burden and playing into your opponent's electoral strategy, or you seize it and spook capital markets, which also plays into your opponent's electoral strategy.
>> Given that, why does the England government not provide a definitive solution?
Every government in the last 20 years has been incompetent when it comes to managing the country. All they know is to make statements to the news about hot-button issues, like Brexit, foreigners, flags, Ukraine, Palestine, trans rights, Lucy Letby, etc. Both the Tories and Labour. They've both been more like teams of social media influencers than governments.
Thatcher era privatization has been proven to be epitome of "short term gains for long term pain". Water, Power, Gas and Rail all privatized in a short span of decade and now the future generations will be footing the bill.
Don’t forget about selling off of NHS hospitals. I don’t think many people realize how much of the NHS is privately owned. NHS pays the owners for use of the facilities. It’s insane.
Agreed!Two things here: 1. Totally deficient regulatory framework and 2. The argument for those on the Right or Left is - do those running the company bear the consequences of their actions? Do public servants? Almost never. We need water, power, roads etc., So define the goals for these and get people to run them (public or private) who will bear consequences for a F.U. Politicians almost never face the consequences of their decisions. If there was at least some linkage the future might be different. That is a fundamental problem with bureaucracy as well.
As a far distant example: Tony Blair sails into opulent old age as a 'respected statesman' having lied about weapons of mass destruction incurring the deaths of 150K - 1 million.
As a reminder, the British water treatment system was privatised in the 1960s and has been a huge joke ever since. When they were still in the European Union, common environmental and health regulations prevented the worst from happening.
But as an example, one of the first actions taken after Brexit was to stop monitoring and treating sewage discharges into the English Channel.
Previous government sold off the land on which gas storage once sat to private developers to build houses and business parks.
Roll forward 25–30 years later, UK is something like 65% dependent on gas imports from the EU who kept the majority of their gas storage ... quite an ironic position in the post-Brexit era.
I remember they tried to privatize water in Ireland a good few years ago and there was so much backlash that it had to be binned. Basically everyone was destroying the meters that were being installed.
> I remember they tried to privatize water in Ireland a good few years ago
That is not what happened. The government simply introduced plans to charge for water usage. As you say, there was a backlash, albeit only from certain sectors of society. While it did cause the authorities to shelve the charges, it's not correct to say that "everyone" was destroying the new meters; as I recall, there was very little vandalism.
The result of this mob rule is that, like Britain, we have been left with an underfunded, ageing, leaky water network that is essentially incapable of supporting further expansion.
Here in Nova Scotia(new scotland), with weather much like, and conected by the jet stream to England, it rained after the longest rainless period ever, yesterday.Normal rainfall is several times a week, or weeks of rain every day, 3 months of no rain is a new thing.We are lucky in that there are thousands of lakes and a system of dams and locks to direct water so shortages are not a problem, yet.
Though as we are aprox half the size of England, with 1/56th the population
the the urgency in a drout will be less acute.
4 years ago we had unpresedented rain and floods
with people getting washed away and killed, roads and bridges destroyed and comunities cut off with damage from that still evident, which would be truely devastating if it were to happen now.
Civil engineering calculations were based on max rain bieng 1”/hr, and now there are regular reports of twise and three times that, and I am sure that drout planning was based on now irrelivant tables of average rainfalls and resevoirs sized acordingly.
The issue for England is if the will and capacity to build better infrastructure is there, as hydrology is governed by geography and cant be put just anywhere, ie:we are talking water frontage here, dams to raise lakes, and other popular types of projects.Given that it's England, some of the water rights will be written into ancient law, and will be essentialy impossible to override, and then require buy outs of breathtaking proportions.
Which leaves tunnel boring machines, sand hawgs, epic infrastructure that has to be built to last forever, and not one but of it suitable to pose in front of.
85 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 81.7 ms ] thread:D
Climate change means societal change. There was a time that Northern Africa was one of the best places in the world to grow crops. They were at the top of civilization for thousands of years. Climate changed, what people could grow and do changed too.
The difference this time is that we did this to ourselves. Even worse that we continue making our future prospects worse on purpose so a few oil countries can squish some extra money from earth. It is baffling the lack of foresight.
> Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1tn litres of water through leaky pipes each year.
Seems like there's most of a solution here, just staring us in the face, no? Problem being of course, that the privatised water companies have little incentive or investment in order to tackle the problem.
Are we ready to admit that selling off critical national infrastructure was a stupid idea, yet?
It's the same story with power and gas, wherever they get turned over to the private sector, things get worse. Fundamentally I don't give the first shit about choosing an energy provider. I don't want to find a new deal every few years. I don't give a shit about choice, I just want someone to do it well and charge reasonably. Instead you get stuck in a market offering discounted signup rates and you have to switch every year, while the companies draw their earnings from the minority of people who forget or otherwise can't be bothered to switch.
I don't miss that from the UK. Here in communist Western Australia we maintained ownership of the water, power and gas infrastructure, where other parts of the country set up privatised energy marketplaces. When the UK and the rest of Australia were screaming about rocketing bills, we were protected from some of the fluctuations in international energy prices over the last few years and any profits got ploughed back into infrastructure or the state coffers rather than heading off to private hands. It's just better...
What the article doesn’t mention is that pre-privatisation a new reservoir was built every year up to about 1960 and then every few years until privatisation in 1992.
So we are about 30 years behind in adding capacity to the system. This combined with the inadequate levels of investment in the system leading to enormous wastage, is the answer.
Water should never have been privatised. At least not without a framework for a national strategy for water. I suspect that wasn’t done because it would have made water companies and unattractive source of profit.
Responsible for putting a pin in development and turning Britain into a museum, with insufficient water or power.
It should urgently be reformed.
If the infrastructure isn’t there, we haven’t received what we paid for. Worse, without EU regulation these companies are now blasting sewage into lakes and rivers. Ofwat can’t do anything.
At this point I feel there’s no solution other than nationalising the infrastructure again and ploughing billions of tax payers money into yet another failed Thatcher initiative.
Of course that will never happen, because we’ve not had a government willing to make sweeping changes like that since Thatcher. Except maybe Liz Truss with her exceptional grasp of economics.
People have this propagandized view that the "free market" (which isn't real) is responsible for innovation.
All capitalism does is build enclosures and engage in rent-seeking. With the tendency for profits to decrease, ultimately it comes down to cutting costs and raising prices. So why would a water company invest in a new reservoir? That increases supply. That might lower prices.
The UK is going to neoliberal all the way into being a developing nation.
For example the Abingdon Reservoir has been in planning for 19 years[1]. It is opposed by GARD[2], the Group Against Reservoir Development. It's hard to see how this is the fault of privatization.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abingdon_Reservoir
[2] https://groupagainstreservoirdevelopment.org/
Of course not. The water company was in terrible shape (read: lacking funds) before it was dumped on a commercial company that does not have deep pockets like Chevron. Thames Water owes £16.8 billion. That money is already gone.
No one is going to swoop in to save the day. Taxpayers will eat the bill, and invest even more to reverse decades of neglect. All of those hard decisions labour committed to make are unnecessary when nothing is done and they are made for you. The country has limited funds, and is spending funds it doesn't have on things like billions on hotels for 29,000 unauthorized travelers so far this year.
UK external debt is £2.7 trillion, and whats her name said yesterday it may be necessary to ask the IMF for a loan? Water company indeed.
„Water should not be human right”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifty_(TV_series)
Articles like this, with subtle mentions of how it was all our fault and all the water companies were doing was prioritising low cost for the consumer, are the equivalent of 'were the nazis really that bad or were they just a bit sad and lonely', but national infrastructure edition. They exist only to soften up and distract public opinion so that we're less likely to want any of the people involved to be held to account.
Another news article recently made a huge story, that we're running out of sand. I wonder what will be next.
An honest request for enlightenment:There's the structural problem. There are the structural aspects of a potential solution. There's some mapping around the problem. Given that, why does the England government not provide a definitive solution?
As a former 3rd world resident, one thing that I noticed in Europe is that several basic problems do not have the right incentives or willingness to be solved, even if there are the "raw materials" in place, like capital, human talent, a need, and so on.
I know that some can think like the "Why Didn't I Think of That?" meme template [1], but I have been in worse places where you have several headwinds like corruption, lack of capital, etc.; I see that in England and in continental Europe you can see a lot of those "basic problems" happening and piling up. I wonder if those issues will be solved gradually or if those societies will need to have their “burning platform” moment [2].
[1] - https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/139781746/Why-Didnt-I-Thin....
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698044
Selling public infrastructure lets you give tax cuts now, and you'll be long gone before people recognise that they are paying more and getting less. It's much like MBAs making cuts - you can boost the bottom line in the short term and be gone before the blame starts gathering
We have a fptp electoral process, which means there are a lot of safe seats in parliament. In battleground seats, a vote for the third party is effectively a vote for the first. People who want not-the-incumbent cannot choose which party they actually do want. I personally have been disenfranchised all my adult life, MEP votes excluded. (If I could change only one thing, I would abolish fptp.)
Moreover, like most populous Western countries, most of the electorate is not well educated on politics or economics; they get their political news from limited sources, and they don't seek information that challenges their prior beliefs.
These facts combine to reduce electoral accountability.
Having flogged the public infra, renationalisation is tricky. You either buy it back at market value, which means imposing a tax burden and playing into your opponent's electoral strategy, or you seize it and spook capital markets, which also plays into your opponent's electoral strategy.
Every government in the last 20 years has been incompetent when it comes to managing the country. All they know is to make statements to the news about hot-button issues, like Brexit, foreigners, flags, Ukraine, Palestine, trans rights, Lucy Letby, etc. Both the Tories and Labour. They've both been more like teams of social media influencers than governments.
As a far distant example: Tony Blair sails into opulent old age as a 'respected statesman' having lied about weapons of mass destruction incurring the deaths of 150K - 1 million.
But as an example, one of the first actions taken after Brexit was to stop monitoring and treating sewage discharges into the English Channel.
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62670623
- https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62626774
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9kz8ydjpno
Another major success for the privatisation of services such as the postal service, railways and electricity in the UK.
I think the question should really be, how can it not be out of water? There's literally only 48x48 metres per person.
I think you mean stereotypically rainswept. 25m people, >40% of England, live around London where it actually doesn't rain very much at all.
> The UK is one of the rainier places in Europe
Yeah, that includes Wales, Scotland and NI, where it really does rain all the bloody time.
Previous government sold off the land on which gas storage once sat to private developers to build houses and business parks.
Roll forward 25–30 years later, UK is something like 65% dependent on gas imports from the EU who kept the majority of their gas storage ... quite an ironic position in the post-Brexit era.
Water is a human right, not a commodity.
That is not what happened. The government simply introduced plans to charge for water usage. As you say, there was a backlash, albeit only from certain sectors of society. While it did cause the authorities to shelve the charges, it's not correct to say that "everyone" was destroying the new meters; as I recall, there was very little vandalism.
The result of this mob rule is that, like Britain, we have been left with an underfunded, ageing, leaky water network that is essentially incapable of supporting further expansion.
Though as we are aprox half the size of England, with 1/56th the population the the urgency in a drout will be less acute. 4 years ago we had unpresedented rain and floods with people getting washed away and killed, roads and bridges destroyed and comunities cut off with damage from that still evident, which would be truely devastating if it were to happen now.
Civil engineering calculations were based on max rain bieng 1”/hr, and now there are regular reports of twise and three times that, and I am sure that drout planning was based on now irrelivant tables of average rainfalls and resevoirs sized acordingly. The issue for England is if the will and capacity to build better infrastructure is there, as hydrology is governed by geography and cant be put just anywhere, ie:we are talking water frontage here, dams to raise lakes, and other popular types of projects.Given that it's England, some of the water rights will be written into ancient law, and will be essentialy impossible to override, and then require buy outs of breathtaking proportions. Which leaves tunnel boring machines, sand hawgs, epic infrastructure that has to be built to last forever, and not one but of it suitable to pose in front of.