Tag Archives: companies

Should water firms charge an extra 40% to tackle the sewage crisis?

You pay for their bad decisions: the privatised, profit-driven water firms have had more than 30 years to fund the restoration of the UK’s crumbling sewage system but instead they have given £72 billion to investors and pumped our effluent into the environment. Now they want to increase our bills by almost half to fix the problem they have created. But where will the money really go?

It looks like the UK’s privatised water firms are trying to sell us down the river again.

They want to add an extra 40 per cent to our bills, saying that’s what it will cost to clean up the sewage crisis they have caused by neglecting the UK’s crumbling system of sewage pipes.

Here’s a report about it, broadcast early in the morning of Wednesday, June 28, 2023:

It’s true that Thames Water boss Sarah Bentley has quit her job, that was worth £1.6 million a year to her, even before she got anywhere near the bonus she received (that she has already given back amid anger over the firm’s poor performance over sewage):

We don’t know how much her bonus totalled but last year she received £496,000.

Unlike many of the water firms, it turns out that this was much more than Thames Water shareholders received – they haven’t had a payout in six years, possibly because the business seems about to go down the pan:

Thames Water is an unusual case, though; since privatisation in the late 1980s, water companies have paid out £72 billion to shareholders.

Should this money have been invested in restoring the crumbling system? Has such investment been watered down to give a fast return to investors?

Panellists on the BBC’s Politics Live thrashed their way through these murky waters in two debates, when it seemed the Tory panellists, Bob Seely and Johnny Mercer, knew why this disaster has happened, but the left-wingers had the solution to it. See for yourself:

The funding system certainly seems to be sending our money down the drain.

But isn’t that because water is not appropriate for privatisation and is, as Mr McKenna suggested, a racket?


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The main points: it’s Vox Political’s morning headlines

DWP accused of ‘denying people their rights’ after rejecting 90% of disability benefit appeals

Food inflation: actual shop prices hit new high

Exposed: payments to LABOUR Health spokesman from private health firms

Under Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting, Labour Party policy has changed from returning the National Health Service to full public control into allowing it to be converted into even more of a front for private firms to profit from your illness.

Is the reason for this the fact that Streeting is being paid a small fortune every year by private health representatives? See for yourself:

Energy firms consulted on plan for extra profit

Energy prices are coming down at last, so what is the regulator Ofgem doing? It’s consulting the companies on a plan to increase their profit so they can be “financially resilient”.

They just made a killing (sadly, in some cases this may be said to be literal) on prices over the last year but this cash went straight to shareholders, it seems. Wouldn’t it have been better to fix dividends at a lower level and put more of that money into “financial resilience” rather than fleecing the public again?


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The water companies show us every day why they should be re-nationalised. Why won’t the politicians do it?

Clean water: enjoy the photograph. Soon the only clean water you’ll see will be in images like this – unless YOU put a stop to the raw sewage scandal.

Ash Sarkar does it again.

Appearing as a panellist on the BBC’s Question Time, she was asked to discuss the way privatised water companies have been allowed to dump raw sewage into the UK’s waterways, poisoning them – and have even gone beyond the permissible limit, incurring large fines.

The fact that the water firms then pay these fines make a very clear point – that it makes more financial sense to pay up and carry on polluting than it does to clean up their act.

Ms Sarkar put forward the obvious solution, and – well, you’ll see what happened, but “Frank Owen’s Legendary Paintbrush” gives the game away a bit:

She phrased that brilliantly, I thought.

And she passed responsibility on to Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire, to explain why her party is not offering re-nationalisation of the water companies as an alternative to the current Tory mismanagement that is stinking up the entire country.

Here’s what she said:

So, filling potholes in our roads is more important than cleaning up our environment and ensuring our natural water is free of diseases like the e.Coli that is infesting the river near Environment Secretary Therese Coffey’s own home?

No wonder Phil Waller tweeted what he did:

And while the politicians dither over technicalities (there’s plenty of money to pay for re-nationalisation; the problem is simply that the Westminster elite don’t want to stop the flow of profit), the rest of us continue to drown in our own waste – and theirs:

The answer is clear: if privatised water firms are refusing to clean up their act (and they are) then the owners need to be deprived of their profit stream by re-nationalisation. And if our current Westminster politicians like Thangam Debbonaire, Labour, and all the Tories won’t do it, then we must get them out of Parliament – for our own survival.

Now, how do you propose to do that?

If you haven’t voted, check this map of sewage discharges in your area first

It’s still the big issue of the local elections, and now you can find out how big it is in your part of England.

(This is only really relevant to England because England is the only part of the UK that has totally privatised water companies.)

I refer of course to sewage pollution, as permitted by the Conservative government – and not (yet) restricted following a motion for such action in Parliament last week.

And it’s the normally Tory-supporting Express that’s sticking in the knife!

 

Here’s that “horror” map, for your information:

If you’re not happy that these profit-makers devoted their cash to paying huge dividends to their shareholders rather than on properly processing your sewage, your vote today is the only say you can express that… displeasure.

Remember: not only are these firms destroying the ecosystem, they are also charging you a fortune for the meagre services they provide because they know they have a monopoly in their part of the country.

If the Tories get a good result, they’ll be encouraged to allow worse from their corporate friends and donors.


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Tories agree to tackle sewage discharges – because they think it allowed them to humiliate Labour

Flushed out: the Tories have not only agreed to carry out impact assessments on the effects of dumping raw sewage into UK waterways, but they must also set targets for such dumping to be reduced, and introduce fines against privatised water companies that fail to do so, or fail to properly monitor such discharges.

Don’t be discouraged by the Tory carping; this is a victory for anyone who is concerned about raw sewage being dumped into UK waterways.

Labour used an Opposition Day debate in the House of Commons to put forward a motion calling on the government to

  • Set a target for the reduction of sewage discharges
  • Provide for financial penalties in relation to sewage discharges and breaches of monitoring requirements, and
  • Carry out an impact assessment of sewage discharges

The motion also included a provision that would have given the Opposition the ability to take control of the Commons order paper in future and introduce legislation of its own.

Now, why would it do that? It doesn’t have any specific relevance to the sewage issue, as far as This Writer can see.

The Conservatives leaped on what they saw as an opportunity to humiliate Labour, with an amendment that removed the fourth part of the motion but supported the first three.

Because the amendment only deleted words from the motion, Parliamentary procedure meant it would be the first aspect on which MPs would vote – and the Tories’ Parliamentary majority meant it was passed by 290 votes to 188 against.

They then forced a vote on the amended motion. Labour MPs were ordered to abstain on it, because the Tories had amended it in their favour.

Had they, though? Had they really? It still demanded all the measures on sewage that Labour wanted.

And I don’t think anybody in the Labour leadership believed the Tories would allow them to introduce their own legislation.

The amended motion passed with 286 Tory votes – so the Tories pushed through the changes that Labour had demanded.

That means that the Tories are now obliged to

  • Set a target for the reduction of sewage discharges
  • Provide for financial penalties in relation to sewage discharges and breaches of monitoring requirements, and
  • Carry out an impact assessment of sewage discharges

that they weren’t willing to do before.

And they’re saying they humiliated Labour?

Well, here’s a thing:

Those of us who are concerned about water pollution don’t care.

The changes have been supported – by the Tories who originally opposed them.

So who has been humiliated, really?


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Here’s why it is Tory waste – NOT nurses’ strikes – that is harming NHS health care

Tory wasters: Rishi Sunak and Steve Barclay have wasted billions of pounds that could have paid for much more than the pay rises demanded by doctors, nurses and ambulance crews. If they withheld it because they’re trying to steer us towards privatisation, they have failed.

The Conservatives have been paying billions of pounds to private health-related companies for services that have not been provided – while accusing striking doctors, nurses and ambulance staff of jeopardising patient care.

Exhibit A:

From the article:

Experts say the figure is just scratching the surface, with NHS bosses in England having been given the green light to spend up to £10bn on private health companies as part of the government’s plan to reduce the record number of patients waiting for care.

The biggest beneficiary of the outsourcing has been the Australian healthcare multinational Ramsay, which received £134m to offer non-emergency care to NHS patients between 2021 and 2022.

Spire Healthcare, which operates 38 private hospitals formerly owned by Bupa, has been handed a further £108m over the same period. Circle, which is owned by Centene, one of the biggest US healthcare corporations, was paid £50m.

A further 30 private companies, which also include the Nuffield Trust and Specsavers, have been paid £195m in total as part of a contract aimed at boosting the number of patients the NHS treats in England between 2021 and 2022.

The data was obtained by openDemocracy through a Freedom of Information request to all 42 NHS Integrated Care Boards, which are responsible for spending and managing NHS budgets regionally in England. Only 23 responded to openDemocracy’s request, meaning the total cost could be significantly higher.

But the number of patients being treated has not recovered even to pre-Covid-19 levels:

Between January and November 2022, the NHS treated 6.6% fewer patients from elective care waiting lists than it did over the same period in 2019, according to an analysis by the Institute of Fiscal Studies.

The think tank said in February that the NHS was “clearly lagging” behind its target to increase the number of people it is treating to around 30% above pre-pandemic levels by 2024/25.

Exhibit B:

From the article:

The department spent £8.9bn during 2020-21 and another £6bn last year on such supplies, including masks and gowns for NHS staff that have proved unuseable and are now being burned.

The sums were revealed in the Department of Health and Social Care’s (DHSC) annual accounts and report for 2021-22, published on Thursday, and highlighted in a highly critical assessment issued by the National Audit Office (NAO).

The DHSC’s report also disclosed that it expects to spend £319m storing and disposing of PPE which is no longer needed and is of such poor quality that it is no use to frontline staff anyway.

In March last year it was still spending £24m a month storing the infection-preventing equipment, the NAO said.

On the subject of storage, there’s this:

Exhibit C:

From the article:

i analysis of figures provided by NHS bodies showed that strikes by junior doctors, nurses, ambulance and other health workers have already led to 665,000 cancelled appointments or operations.

NHS Providers in March said 140,000 appointments were postponed due to nurses and ambulance workers walking out between December and mid-March.

NHS England said the first junior doctors strike last month caused the cancellation of 175,000 operations and appointments.

Up to 350,000 appointments could have been cancelled during the unprecedented four-day junior doctors walkout last week, the NHS Confederation estimated.

Separately, NHS England analysis said the first nurse walkouts on 15 and 20 December caused the cancellation of almost 30,000 operations and appointments.

This is not justification for government investment in the private sector, though. Quite the opposite.

Let’s go back to that Open Democracy article for a moment:

Junior doctors are asking for a 35% pay rise to reverse 15 years of below-inflation wage increases.

The BMA calculates that the net cost of the pay rise for the government would be £1.03bn – a tenth of the potential spending on private healthcare companies. Even the £500m spent last year could have funded an 8% uplift in junior doctor wages for the year in question.

Add nurses and ambulance staff to the calculation and bringing their pay up to parity with 2008 or 2010 levels would still cost a fraction of what Rishi Sunak and his government have wasted – let’s be clear on that: wasted – on private health firms that simply do not help.

Exhibit D:

The Tories don’t want to go into talks with preconditions, and won’t talk if strike action is likely. In other words, the only talks they want are if they tell the nurses (and other NHS staff) what they have to take. No union representative will accept those – let’s face it – preconditions. In any case, it is hypocritical of the Tory government to demand preconditions while condemning nurses for having any of their own.

Exhibit E:

From the article:

From a peak of 70 per cent in 2010, overall satisfaction with the NHS has fallen to just 29 per cent – the lowest figure recorded since this question was first asked in 1983. Satisfaction with individual NHS services is at record lows across the board, while satisfaction with social care is the lowest of all with only 14 per cent of the public saying they are satisfied with it.

Yet none of this translates into any appetite for user charging or a different funding model, the first options that some commentators flailing around for a magical solution tend to clutch at. The public’s aspirations seem straightforward: they simply want an NHS that does what it says on the tin and that works. They were highly satisfied with a system that provided this as recently as 12 years ago, and they do not accept that this is too much to ask.

This may come as a huge disappointment to leading Tories, who are generally believed to have spent the last 13 years de-funding the NHS in order to stop it working properly, in the belief that public opinion would swing behind changing to a US-style, insurance-based, privately-run health system.

So what can be done?

Exhibit F:

The article suggests that £30 billion would be needed to support the kind of pay deals NHS workers need. From the Open Democracy article, this seems a lot more than necessary – but let’s consider the options it presents anyway:

Earlier this year I noted the suggestion that £30 billion was required to fund appropriate NHS pay deals and wrote a proposal to address the need to finance this, including the possibility that it simply be added to the deficit, which is wholly plausible. As I suggestsed then… this funding could be addressed as follows:

1) £10 billion could come from the additional taxes paid by those lured back to the NHS by better working conditions and higher pay, and by those lured back having given up on work altogether. The impact of the extra NHS spending on growth elsewhere in the economy is also taken into account in this estimate.

2) At least £5 billion might be raised from taxes paid by those able to return to the workforce either because their own conditions will be sufficiently well managed to allow this or because those that they care for will enjoy better health, letting them return to work.

So, at least half of the funding required will be directly generated from the benefits created by that additional spending. Options for the remaining £15 billion include:

3) A government could simply decide to run a bigger deficit to fund the £15 billion requirement. The impact on the national debt is insignificant.

4) The Bank of England currently has a programme of selling the government debt it owns bought under the quantitative easing programmes that paid for the banking crises of 2008/9, the Brexit crisis of 2016 and the Covid crisis of 2020/21. If £15bn of this programme was cancelled each year and bonds to fund the NHS were sold instead the funding to deliver the healthcare we need could be found. In this case, there would be no net impact on the national debt owned by third parties.

5) National Savings and Investments could issue NHS Bonds in ISA accounts to provide the funding. £70 billion is saved in ISAs each year. Properly marketed, it would be easy to find £15 billion a year this way.

6) Halving the tax reliefs on savings available to the wealthiest 10% of people in the UK each year. At present it is likely that this group enjoy at least £30 billion of pension and ISA tax reliefs each year.

7) Since the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons has found that for every £1 spent on tax investigations £18 of additional tax is raised, investing £1 billion in additional funding with HM Revenue & Customs might be enough to recover the funds required for the NHS each year.

8) The rate of capital gains tax in the UK is currently set at half the rate of income tax in most cases. If it was set at the same rate as the income tax rate then the revenue from this tax might double, raising £15 billion a year.

Judging by all this evidence, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that the Tory government has wasted huge amounts of money that could have been used to support real investment in the National Health Service, and is claiming there is no money available now.

But in fact there are many options available to it; ministers are simply refusing to consider them.

So the NHS crisis that has led to the strikes by doctors, nurses and ambulance teams was caused by the Tory government, and the Tories are deliberately withholding the cash necessary to restore the system.

It is Tory waste that has caused the problem; the strikers are simply doing the only thing they can do to raise awareness of it.

 

Is this the reason our rivers and beaches are overflowing with sewage? [VIDEO]

Tory Britain: “one of the most effluent nations in the world” as Dr Louise Raw put it when she tweeted this image.

An informative video clip from the Express? Will wonders never cease?

The big question is why nothing is being done about this.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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Why are the #Tories handing £270 million pounds to #privatehealth if #Covid19 is declining?

Backhander: private health companies are being given a fortune in public money by the Tory government – and the cash will go to firms that are part-owned by Tories and Tory donors.

Can anybody make sense of this?

But all the indications are that the Omicron wave has peaked and Covid-19 is declining.

There is no reason at all to give any public money to private health companies for Covid-related services.

But the money has gone and is not coming back. It seems clear there is only one reason for it:

The only reason This Writer can find for such funding is the one that has been causing the Tories all their problems at the moment: deception.

Only recently, we were told NHS England did not have enough Covid-19 tests – LFT or PCR – to cover demand; indeed, it had to take four million kits from NHS Wales in an effort to cover the shortfall.

So when we see that the number of infections is down to around 70,000, can we really believe it? Or is the investment in private healthcare justified?

It doesn’t matter – because the Tory government is deceiving us in any event.

If the number of infections isn’t really down, then the government is lying about that; if it is, then the government is lying about the need to pay private health.

My personal opinion? The number of deaths appears to have reduced as well as infections (although we’ll have to see what Monday’s data brings), so I’m willing to hazard a guess that the Omicron wave has broken.

That means there’s absolutely no reason to give any money to the profit-grubbers and Sajid Javid is simply lining shareholders’ pockets for no reason other than squandering your cash.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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Tory U-turn over ‘Rivers of Sh*t’ ‘doesn’t come close’ to what is needed

Minehead beach: you might be more sensible than to allow your child to play in the human waste that you see here – but other people clearly aren’t.

We all breathed a sigh of relief and rejoiced that we could once again smell the roses after the government announced its new plan to progressively force water companies to reduce the amount of sewage in our rivers and in the sea. Didn’t we?

No. Here’s our water quality correspondent, Feargal Sharkey:

He also had an answer to Tories like This Writer’s MP, Fay Jones, who claimed that the public would be forced to pay for improvements to the UK’s sewers:

Hear, hear!

On a side note, you have to agree with Omid on this, don’t you?

But what did the water bosses have to say about this?

They weren’t available to be interviewed, of course, because none of them live in the UK!

Our water companies are run by the governments of eight other nations: Singapore, Australia, Kuwait, Canada, Norway, UAE, Qatar and Malaysia.

That’s pretty close to it! Of course, the government has said that it will require the water companies to clean up their act (and our waterways) progressively but it is extremely unlikely that this will happen unless the Treasury provides some stimulus.

In the meantime, we have this:

And this:

Dead seagulls have already been spotted at Southend, I believe. This is one of the top beach resorts serving Londoners, remember.

Also this:

The worst part is that a family was letting their child paddle in the Minehead sewage. People really don’t know any better than not to play with the brown stuff. How many people will catch cholera before the government gets the message?

Well, the Tories wanted a workforce that was less educated than they were, and judging from Boris Johnson, that was setting the bar very low indeed.

At least the satirists have been sharpening their tools. Here’s a selection of their offerings – these are the tools we should use to remind the Tories of their big mistake:

This is particularly good from national treasure Pam Ayres:

And what has actually been done to stop the dissemination of sewage into our waterways, land, crops, food animals and dinner plates in the meantime?

Absolutely nothing.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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Johnson’s government has spent £100 million on consultants because he can’t think for himself

Spaffer: Boris Johnson has thrown so much money at private consultants and contractors that the UK’s financial stability is in peril.

The cost of privatisation: faced with the Covid-19 pandemic, Boris Johnson has paid consultants more than £100 million to do his thinking for him – and the cash has been wasted.

Clearly it’s money for old rope, considering the failure of every policy announced by Johnson and his cronies including Matt Hancock, Gavin Williamson and Dominic Raab.

And the waste is very clearly a result of privatisation; before Tory neoliberalism demanded that even ideas should be outsourced, governments used to rely on people called civil servants who spent their entire careers in public service and could therefore be relied on to know how things worked.

Those people have been largely ostracised, retired or otherwise cast out by know-nothings like David Cameron, Theresa May and now Johnson, in favour of their know-nothing friends in the private sector. Here’s the gist from the Financial Times:

The UK’s largest consulting firms have been paid more than £100m to advise the government on its response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a string of delayed disclosures from Whitehall in recent weeks. A total of 106 contracts worth £109m have been agreed between various government departments and consulting firms such as PwC, Deloitte and McKinsey since March, as civil servants scrambled for support to source personal protective equipment, set up test and trace programmes and acquire thousands of new ventilators as the pandemic gathered pace.

The UK’s public finances are now in a terrible state after Johnson and his people awarded huge contracts to firms that were incapable of honouring them – some of which even turned out to be dormant companies – on the advice of firms like PwC, Deloitte and McKinsey. Weren’t these people supposed to be cheaper than doing the work in-house?

The government has been mired in scandal because it adopted a biased algorithm to award ‘A’ level results, on the advice of an outsourced consultancy firm.

It’s a well known adage that the definition of madness is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results.

And yet we see Johnson going back to these private consultants for more advice.

Why aren’t we all drawing the obvious conclusion?

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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