Water industry.

As Martin Lewis says, it wasn't so much the privatisation, it was doing it without competition, that was never going to work.

I think the water companies have paid out something like 60bn in dividends since it was privatised in the early 90's under the Tories. Dividends shouldn't have been anywhere near that figure without a hell of a lot more reinvestment. The execs are being paid 1m a year wages too, plus divvies/ bonuses, and standards have got no better, so what is the bonus for?
The problem is, now they have accepted they need the reinvestment there's no way to get that 60bn back, so the public will end up paying.

Part of my job is redesigning sewers, for easier solutions and I can understand that they have a tough task doing it, as a lot of the UK is on combined sewers and the heavier storms (climate change) etc basically cause capacity to be overwhelmed, way above what it was designed for, so some overflows get used more and more, along with additional population adding to this etc.

New houses keep the surface water and foul water separate and go to extreme lengths to do it, they have to do by law/ planning regs. Systems should largely be separate for housing built from the 70's onwards, but it was ages before they actually limited (reduced flow) the problem causing rainwater going into sewers, and I've only noticed a major difference in the last 10 years on new builds. Nearly every new estate in the last 10 years either sends surface water straight to a stream/ river, or stores it on-site in attenuation tanks or SUDS ponds and lets it out into the existing sewer system as a trickle. These systems are designed to take a 100-year storm event, plus 20%. The sewer companies get given all the infrastructure installed by developers for free too!

Upgrading or adding major sewers through towns is a nightmare mind, as they often need to be 3-10m deep as gravity systems, and have had 50-100 years of other services put over the top of them or have those services above where these new pipes need to go. It's certainly not simple or cheap.

They will probably end up relining and converting a lot of the old combined systems to surface water only, and will end up just pumping the foul water in new pipes, as pumped systems are far cheaper and easier to install, and much smaller pipe sizes.
 
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It's no different from the Gas Industry. If there ever is a trnasition to H2 it'll be paid through higher bills, the owners and shareholders will see zero impact on their risk free massive returns.
 
Some things should not be privatised. Water being the most obvious one from the amount of shy te that we now pump into the sea. Its a national embarrassment and disgrace. Here we are trying to preach to other countries on climate change and green energy, meanwhile we pump the sea & rivers full of our turds.
Utilities and transport, none of it should be privatised, but once the genie is out of the bottle it's very difficult to get it back.

Late tage capitalism is out of control, not just in the UK, but internationally.
 
It's no different from the Gas Industry. If there ever is a trnasition to H2 it'll be paid through higher bills, the owners and shareholders will see zero impact on their risk free massive returns.
Electric's the same also, the only one that isn't is telecom but that's only really two main provider options.

They should have been put on 3-5 year competitive tenders, and had to commit to maintenance and a certain percentage of upgrades.

Hydrogen won't happen, the cost of the infrastructure would be ludicrous compared to any other service like water, gas, electric and telecom and it will probably end up even more expensive than new sewerage and with a shorter life.
 
Electric's the same also, the only one that isn't is telecom but that's only really two main provider options.

They should have been put on 3-5 year competitive tenders, and had to commit to maintenance and a certain percentage of upgrades.

Hydrogen won't happen, the cost of the infrastructure would be ludicrous compared to any other service like water, gas, electric and telecom and it will probably end up even more expensive than new sewerage and with a shorter life.
3x the volume of Natural Gas to burn to make the same amount of energy with Hydrogen as Natural Gas.
Just the stupid of concepts.
All of the proposed schemes have done a HS2 and the books have been fiddled to show at least 3x the true cost of the pipelines/plants etc.
One huge CON on which £100s millions of taxpayers money has already been spunked.
 
The trouble with things being nationalised is that they then end up on the government's balance sheet. Which will then run said services into the ground.
Yeah, nationalisation is only good when good (or fairly good) people are running the nation, which 2/3rds of the time certainly aren't.

Assuming the Tories are not going away after they lose the next GE, this is why I'm up for the lesser evil of privatising or contracting out the running of it, but it has to be locked into having competition, contracts with performance-related payouts/ dividends and profits.
 
3x the volume of Natural Gas to burn to make the same amount of energy with Hydrogen as Natural Gas.
Just the stupid of concepts.
All of the proposed schemes have done a HS2 and the books have been fiddled to show at least 3x the true cost of the pipelines/plants etc.
One huge CON on which £100s millions of taxpayers money has already been spunked.
Is that factoring in that we need to use electricity to make it too? We won't have enough spare capacity to do that until we've completely done away with gas, so any scheme which makes hydrogen from it's own renewables should instead be just using renewables to replace gas altogether.

It's just the sheer pipe cost, and design cost for new high-pressure pipelines, it's absolutely mental. As far as I understand it, it's not like we can just switch off the gas and replace it with hydrogen either, as industry shares the same supply as homes, it just won't work with more complicated gear. It would need completely new infrastructure, sort of running in parallel for most places.

It would be ok if we were starting a fresh, and already had got rid of gas, as we had enough electric to cover that cheaply and emission free, but if we were at that stage then we wouldn't even have a need to use it anyway.

The best way is clearly make enough electricity in a green way, to cover the grid, and then once that's done completely phase out gas or any other similar appliance so it can run on electric.
 
As Martin Lewis says, it wasn't so much the privatisation, it was doing it without competition, that was never going to work.

I think the water companies have paid out something like 60bn in dividends since it was privatised in the early 90's under the Tories. Dividends shouldn't have been anywhere near that figure without a hell of a lot more reinvestment. The execs are being paid 1m a year wages too, plus divvies/ bonuses, and standards have got no better, so what is the bonus for?
The problem is, now they have accepted they need the reinvestment there's no way to get that 60bn back, so the public will end up paying.

Part of my job is redesigning sewers, for easier solutions and I can understand that they have a tough task doing it, as a lot of the UK is on combined sewers and the heavier storms (climate change) etc basically cause capacity to be overwhelmed, way above what it was designed for, so some overflows get used more and more, along with additional population adding to this etc.

New houses keep the surface water and foul water separate and go to extreme lengths to do it, they have to do by law/ planning regs. Systems should largely be separate for housing built from the 70's onwards, but it was ages before they actually limited (reduced flow) the problem causing rainwater going into sewers, and I've only noticed a major difference in the last 10 years on new builds. Nearly every new estate in the last 10 years either sends surface water straight to a stream/ river, or stores it on-site in attenuation tanks or SUDS ponds and lets it out into the existing sewer system as a trickle. These systems are designed to take a 100-year storm event, plus 20%. The sewer companies get given all the infrastructure installed by developers for free too!

Upgrading or adding major sewers through towns is a nightmare mind, as they often need to be 3-10m deep as gravity systems, and have had 50-100 years of other services put over the top of them or have those services above where these new pipes need to go. It's certainly not simple or cheap.

They will probably end up relining and converting a lot of the old combined systems to surface water only, and will end up just pumping the foul water in new pipes, as pumped systems are far cheaper and easier to install, and much smaller pipe sizes.
Andy - I obviously dont know the tech about the infrastructure, but in an ideal world, what could be put in place asap to stop Windermere dying and Cumbrian Water filling it with schit and pzz. Its a disgraceful state of affairs ?
 
They won't; they'll just get someone in like capita to run it. Who will then run services into the ground.
This is spot on.

When I was in the army they sold out big time to Capita with recruitment and other tools, it isn’t a coincidence that numbers are dwindling with cuts and capita put in place. They are a means to an end where the government is concerned.
 
There should be direct action taken agaisnt the CEOs of these companies
I'm sure the government are all over it and have plans in place. What are you thinking? Peerages in exchange for cushy non-executive director roles with a nice shares / dividends package?

Because I'm pretty sure that'll be nearer the mark than any actual negative consequences.
 
Andy - I obviously dont know the tech about the infrastructure, but in an ideal world, what could be put in place asap to stop Windermere dying and Cumbrian Water filling it with schit and pzz. Its a disgraceful state of affairs ?
The whole issue would need to be investigated, its not just the treated effluent that is legally discharged in the the environment. The biggest pollution to our rivers and lakes is from nutrients, ie phosphate and nitrates, which is the result of years and years of fertiliser application by the agriculture industry. this is what causes the alge to grow. Remember, there is no new water in the world, its all been used before so we really need to take good care of the water resources. We have seen the panic last year when the weather is hot and water in the Uk is restricted. Recently a couple of planning applications for new reservoirs in the south have been the subject of local opposition and not been improved. Its even more important that we keep our rivers clean.
 
The whole issue would need to be investigated, its not just the treated effluent that is legally discharged in the the environment. The biggest pollution to our rivers and lakes is from nutrients, ie phosphate and nitrates, which is the result of years and years of fertiliser application by the agriculture industry. this is what causes the alge to grow. Remember, there is no new water in the world, its all been used before so we really need to take good care of the water resources. We have seen the panic last year when the weather is hot and water in the Uk is restricted. Recently a couple of planning applications for new reservoirs in the south have been the subject of local opposition and not been improved. Its even more important that we keep our rivers clean.
The short video I posted in this thread earlier highlights the issues identified by a local man who has taken samples and has researched the problem in detail.
 
Andy - I obviously dont know the tech about the infrastructure, but in an ideal world, what could be put in place asap to stop Windermere dying and Cumbrian Water filling it with schit and pzz. Its a disgraceful state of affairs ?
The problem with Cumbria is it rains a lot, so any worse storms caused by climate change etc impact those areas more, so they're going to have more to fix, just for that reason alone. Also the ground conditions are absolutely awful almost everywhere we've worked in Cumbria, and the roads are really narrow, which makes installing new infrastructure very hard, time-consuming and complex. Some places only have like one road, so you can't close it off, as there's no other way in, and people whinge like crazy when things are trying to get sorted out for them.
Then the other problem with over that way is that it's hard to install gravity drainage systems as the ground is up and down all over the place. A simple drain might by 1.2m deep, but even running it at a minor fall it could end up 5m+ deep, 100m down the road, and every metre depth you add on over 3m you basically double the time and cost.
What also doesn't help is that it's basically one big national park, so you also get hammered by red tape too. People at the top don't seem to realise that relaxing the red tape would get things done much quicker, which would result in much less overall harm/ damage. The whole utility sector and UK construction suffer from big "red tape" problems though, things were all pretty safe and well managed a decade ago, maybe even longer, but since then the H&S and Eviro guys ran out of things to do, so just started inventing more rules to justify their jobs. It doesn't really reduce risk, as only half the work gets done. Sure, there's probably 10% less risk per man-hour, but the output is probably down 50%. To get the same scheme complete takes twice as long, and time is a big enemy for overall/ total risk.

I think over that way it's United Utilities too, and these are so far behind when it comes to using modern tech and materials it's beyond a joke. To be fair, over that way the bills for drainage should be much higher to get this sorted out, as it's a nightmare over there, but they should get slightly cheaper water. The problem is UU probably have standardised rates for their whole area which covers the Scottish border to Wales, when it should all be on different tariffs really, it needs that area breaking down into much smaller sections.

They're going to have to upsize most of their dedicated surface water pipework, and spend a lot of money on pumped foul sewers, and close access off to some major roads for years. Probably means closing off Coniston access for a year and Windermere the next year etc, and nobody is going to be up for that, as they need it for tourism.

This topic is funny though, as Wales (run by Welsh Water) has similar problems and this gets highlighted by the Tories as "being no better" than the private areas in England, like that's some sort of justification for private water ownership. Yet Wales has no chance to be better, due to topography (and horrendous weather). The fact that Wales has not really got any worse, from basically bills in line with every other place is a pretty good achievement in all honesty. WW seem to handle things better than UU are mind, and WW are much easier to work with.
 
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Good luck getting CEO’s in the dock.
Foreign investment firms, private equity, pension funds and businesses lodged in tax havens own more than 70% of the water industry in England, according to research by the Guardian.
 
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