Tag Archives: privatised

Sewage dumping continues – does it happen near water SHAREHOLDERS’ homes?

Your nearest beach, yesterday: or at least, it might as well be.

Don’t pay attention to the political message if you don’t want to; the factual message is big enough:

The trouble is, we are getting excrement in our waterways and it is harming our environment and making people ill:

Meanwhile, look at the benefits reaped by shareholders who aren’t paying for the materials to clean our water and are instead just flushing it into our rivers:

It seems to This Writer that one way of ensuring the water firms didn’t abuse their government-backed ability to pump crap at us whenever they felt like it would have been simple: make it a legal requirement for them to pump sewage into shareholders’ and executives’ neighbourhoods before anywhere else.

It’s very easy to green-light flooding a place with disease-ridden goop when it isn’t the place where you live. I wonder whether water bosses would be quite so enthusiastic if they had to face irate neighbours to justify incidents like this…

… or this:

It’s a measure that never seems to occur to our Tory legislators, who are quite happy for the outflows to release their loads into other people’s back yards.

And what can you do about it?

Well, maybe you don’t like the Green Party, whose campaign image appears above – but you don’t have to put up with the crap dished out at you by the other two parties mentioned in that image. Find somebody who won’t fill your life with unnecessary excrement and support them instead.


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Triathlon championship contestants fall ill after swimming in polluted water. Who pays?

A prediction that has come true: water discharged into rivers and seas isn’t expected to be drunk. But it has been – and it was full of raw, untreated sewage because the government has allowed privatised water firms to avoid the expense of purifying this water. Will that decision come back to haunt the politicians and the water tycoons now people have become ill?

This should be self-explanatory:

The allegation is clear: people participating in the World Triathlon Championship Series in Sunderland have fallen ill after swimming in waters that have been found unexpectedly to have been polluted.

Swimmers complained that they were swimming “in shit”.

The local privatised water firm has denied any responsibility – but who else would have been capable of doing it?

This could be a crucial test case, regarding the continued – government-supported – pollution of the UK’s waterways with raw sewage.

It seems the UK’s Tory government, by allowing the privatised water firms to avoid their responsibility to purify water before releasing it back into the environment, has actively supported the infection of the nation’s citizens with disease.

It occurs to This Writer that, if evidence can be found linking the swimmers’ illnesses with the release of contaminated water by the company, then the organisers of the event – and the individual swimmers – would have a strong case for compensation against both the firm and the UK’s government.

Taking it further – if such a case is won, the Tory MPs who supported dumping raw sewage into the UK’s waterways won’t be too badly inconvenienced; it will be the public – those their decision has harmed – who will pay the legal bill and any fines.

But we should all remember it at election time. Right?

Oh look – here’s visual evidence of what’s happening all around our coasts right now:


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Rishi Sunak is STILL lying to you about inflation. Your wages aren’t responsible for it

Rishi Sunak: corporate whore?

After British Gas posted huge profits, made possible by price-gouging – charging you far too much for the service it provides – Rishi Sunak has appeared on TV to tell you that he’s tackling all the inflation that has been caused by your pay rises.

… Except, of course, that tackling that kind of inflation doesn’t involve any work at all because your pay rises haven’t caused any of the inflation that has been inflicted on us by boneheadedly stupid, economically-illiterate, back-of-a-cigarette-packet policies dreamed up by Sunak and his equally stupid forerunners.

Sunak’s broadcast was an attempt to distract your attention away from the real cause of inflation – the high prices charged by corporate bandits for no reason at all – and to dupe you into thinking that your pay demands are responsible.

You are not responsible for any inflation at all. Sunak and the corporations to whom he whores himself are.

Here’s Peter Stefanovic to explain further:


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The privatised utility rip-off: Vox Political’s 10-year-old words should haunt government

This is actually a little terrifying.

Words I wrote 10 years ago this month are as appropriate now as they were then. See for yourself.

I was responding to Archbishop of York John Sentamu’s comments on chairing a year-long commission to investigate the need for a living wage (something that is still desperately-needed, even though the Tories have hijacked the term and applied it to something that doesn’t pay nearly enough):

In The Observer, he wrote: “The holes in millions of paycheques are being plugged by in-work support to the tune of £4 billion a year. But why aren’t those who are profiting from their workers paying up? Why is government having to subsidise businesses who don’t pay their employees enough to live on? It is a question we need to answer and act on – fast. The cost of living is rising but wages are not. In the rush for profit, and for high pay at the top, too many companies have forgotten the basic moral imperative that employees be paid enough to live on.”

the simple fact is that the cost of living is too high and – if they had to rely on wages alone – millions of working people, up and down the country, would be unable to pay their bills…

… leading us to a recent blog article by our old friend Michael Meacher MP. He points out that our privatised utility companies are forcing every one of us to pay – through the nose – for substandard services.

He wrote: “More than £100 a year of an average household [water] bill, that is about 30 per cent, goes on profit, compared with 9 per cent in the energy sector which is itself known for egregious profiteering.

The profit on water bills is now 35 per cent, we’re told. Energy profits are also huge, although the exact percentage is not easily available.

“In the last 10 years, water bills have risen by a massive 64 per cent, compared with an increase of just 28 per cent in average earnings. In the last three years alone, average earnings have fallen by 7 per cent while water bills have continued to rise remorselessly. There is no competition in the water industry and the only potential constraint is the industry regulator, but he has chosen to succumb to corporate lobbying in allowing water bills to continue to shoot upwards to feed fancy executive bonuses and big dividend handouts.”

And in all the 10 years since, it seems the regulator has yet to grow a backbone.

What were my conclusions? Get a load of this:

1. The privatisation of the national utilities – water, electricity, gas (and, some would say, telecommunications) – has failed in its stated aims, which were to democratise capitalism by making it possible for everybody to be a shareholder, to keep bills low, and to end government subsidies for these organisations. Instead, shares have been drawn into the hands of a very few rich investors, bills have risen far beyond wages, and government subsidies have either increased massively (rail) or companies have used the tax system to avoid paying the amount due on their profits (Thames Water and its ‘super sewer’).

2. Company bosses, keen to drive up their share prices in order to create larger dividends for their shareholders and higher salaries for themselves, have successfully held wages down in order to achieve this. As ‘neilcon’ pointed out, lower wages mean less spending on National Insurance, meaning that keeping the employee payout down by pennies per person leads to many pounds in increased revenue.

3. The government is unwilling to do anything about this because it wants to keep wages depressed as much as possible. This is the reason it has cracked down so hard on benefit payments – not because of fraud (which is minimal) but in order to create an urgent need among the unemployed to find work, and terror in those who have jobs that they could be replaced if they complain about the increasingly meagre pittance on which they are being told to survive.

What’s the answer? (I asked rhetorically.) Here are my thoughts:

The best place to start might be with the private utility companies. An ultimatum to put their houses in order and charge a reasonable amount, rather than extorting money out of a captive clientele, might produce results – especially if the alternative is re-nationalisation.

This might take the pressure off the smaller private companies by actually reducing the amount calculated as the living wage; with lower utility bills, the amount of money needed for a working person’s survival will also drop.

If the government and the utility companies got their sums right, this could mean the need to subsidise working people’s pay would be wiped out, meaning a large saving on the tax bill. Feed this through to working people in the form of a tax cut and, again, smaller private companies would benefit (along with everybody else, of course). An alternative of using the money to help pay off the deficit would be unhelpful – we need more, and healthier, businesses in this country, employing more people. Get that sorted and the deficit will come down in any case.

On a completely different tack, what about Landlord Subsidy (otherwise known as Housing Benefit)? Why not put a cap on rents, thereby ensuring that the government is not subsidising the rapidly-increasing pace of (some) landlords’ greed?

Unfortunately, this is not likely to happen under the current government – and it seems the Parliamentary Labour Party is to keen to become the Plastic Tory Party to take a stand; it will be up to its backbenchers and the party’s grassroots members to force a policy change.

… and isn’t the situation the same today? Sadly, Keir Starmer’s Labour purge means the Substitute Tory Party is unlikely to offer any help at all.

But a plan that acknowledges the mistakes of the past and aims to redress the shocking way that the supply of money has overbalanced to favour a tiny minority – to the detriment of the vast majority – would constitute the first steps on the way to a nation that can not only provide [a] living wage, but also help our struggling small businesses.

Was I right?

I reckon so.

And am I right now?

I reckon so.


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We’ve been told lies about Thames Water’s profits – and the cost of cleaning the sewage

This is now proved true: in a bid to save privatised water firms’ profits, the Tory government is asking them to spend less money on cleaning our water than is needed to do the job. You will drink dirty water; it will make you sick.

Earlier today, This Site reported that Thames Water – the privatised water firm that is in danger of collapse – has not paid any dividends to shareholders in six years.

That was the best information available to This Writer at the time.

However, new information has come to light:

Economist Richard Murphy has examined the finances of all the privatised water companies, and has come back with several conclusions:

  • Their operating profit margin is a staggeringly-high 35 per cent. From this, we may conclude that there is no reason for Thames Water to be in danger of insolvency.
  • Every single penny they have made in profit has been paid out to shareholders in dividends. None was reinvested in infrastructure or equipment (borrowing paid for equipment and the infrastructure was ignored). So Tories like those on the BBC’s Politics Live on June 28 were wrong when they said money has been invested in improving infrastructure. We can’t say they were lying because they may have been misinformed, but someone definitely lied to them.

Mr Murphy’s conclusion on this is stark: “The public is being fleeced by these companies who are simply treating the fact that the English consumer has had no choice as to who to buy water from as a means to extract profit from them.

But that’s not all!

  • The industry has made investments – £77bn on equipment, the rest on other financial investments. This has been funded mostly by borrowing, with £13bn coming from shareholders. This means the claim (when water was privatised) that private capital would fund water after privatisation was nonsense gibberish; it is being funded by borrowing.
  • Mr Murphy’s figures show £13bn invested by shareholders, who have received £25bn in dividends, meaning that for every pound they have put into the industry, they have received nearly two pounds in return.

Finally:

  • It is clear that the water companies are environmentally insolvent. This means their business structures are not sustainable in terms of reducing pollution and if they are made to put in the necessary money to do so, they will go bankrupt.

What this means, of course is that the water firms have been polluting the UK’s waterways to a staggering extent. I’ll republish the part of Mr Murphy’s thread that covers this, so you have it straight from the horse’s mouth:

In simple language: because they decided to take their massively-overinflated profits for themselves rather than invest them in improving the sewage system, the water companies and their shareholders have created a problem that will cost £260 billion to solve – and if they are made to shell out that money now, they will all go out of business.

The government is therefore asking them to pay slightly more than one-fifth of that amount – but as a result, your water supply will be polluted by the sewage and other rubbish that the water companies have pumped into the ecosystem.

This means the Conservative government – and you need to bear it in mind if you have a Tory MP – has said that it is happy for you to be made ill by polluted or infected water, in order to allow privatised water firms to continue making a profit.

The answer to all this, of course, is re-nationalisation.

Ah, but the government says this is too expensive, because of the cost of buying out the shareholders!

Is it, though?

Mr Murphy says no compensation should be offered to shareholders at all, because they have behaved in an irresponsible way that means it will cost more money to fix the problems they have created than they originally paid to own their parts of these firms.

He adds that providers of loans to the water firms may have to take a hit as well, because they made bad decisions in lending to these companies.

The Tories in government are unlikely to accept this because, even though it is in line with a basic principle of business that if you invest in something unprofitable, you lose money, it diverges from their strategy in privatising water in the first place: that the profits would go to private shareholders and it is the losses that will be paid for by the public and customers.

Mr Murphy makes another excellent suggestion – which is that, because the water industry will need to be supported with borrowed funds, it should issue water bonds to the public via ISAs. You could save in a way that ensures we get clean water in the future.

I appreciate that this is a lot of information but it is very important information that could affect your health, and that of your family and children in the future.

So please share this article to ensure the information in it is seen by as many people as possible.


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Getting thirsty in the hot spell? Your private water firms won’t help you

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 privatised water scandal.

It’s getting hotter in the UK; the reservoirs are starting to dry out – and our water supplies are starting to evaporate with them.

The water firms are struggling to provide water to all the homes that need it already, and are still pumping raw sewage into our waterways, creating a vastly increased risk of disease that should never have happened, but that is supported by the votes of the Conservative government.

Meanwhile, people within the industry are trying to blame those of us who actually try to get out and enjoy our natural environment for highlighting their sewage-dumping crimes, as though it would all be fine otherwise:

Water UK is the trade association representing private water companies in the United Kingdom – with 25 firms on the mainland and four associates. May we assume that Mr Henderson was speaking for all of them when he came out with this nonsense?

Meanwhile, here’s a round-up of what those water companies have been doing. I’ll show you these without comment because anything from This Writer will be superfluous:

Finally, here’s a piece that sums up the situation:

Nothing will change unless we – that includes you, dear reader – make it.


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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?

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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What’s the big local election issue? It’s all a load of sewage

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

I just found this on Twitter:

The BBC seems to agree:

Two weeks before voters in parts of England and in Northern Ireland go to the polls to choose new councillors, those in office are swimming against a tide of public anger at water companies dumping untreated, raw sewage.

Most waste water travels to sewage works to be treated but under “exceptional circumstances”, companies are allowed to pump the excess into the sea and rivers to prevent homes and roads being flooded with it.

However, EA figures show this is not occasional. Last year, sewage was pumped into England’s waterways for a total of 1.75 million hours – 825 times a day on average.

Conservative MPs and Tory-run councils in rural and coastal communities have felt the ire of people who have encountered evidence of sewage while out with their children, walking their dogs, or swimming.

Beaches by holiday resorts have repeatedly been contaminated and last September, people were advised not to swim at six beaches in Sussex when sewage was released into the sea.

Anger has also been stoked on social media since left-wing site EvolvePolitics listed 265 Conservative MPs who voted “to allow” water companies to carry on dumping sewage – blocking a Labour amendment to the Environment Bill which would have placed a legal duty on firms to phase out the practice.

These days, storm overflow and sewage figures are perhaps as closely watched as GDP and NHS waiting lists at the headquarters of the UK’s political parties – and the issue looks set to roll on into the next general election campaign.

Very well, then. I shall continue publishing articles about it that highlight what’s going on.

Here’s something you should know, for example:

There’s more:

There will be more – much more – sewage to follow.


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Union condemns Department for Transport over privatised rail firm dividends

Scam: rail firms (for clarity, the train in the picture is not run by one of the companies in the story) are being protected from the consequences of strike action with public money that is being used to pay shareholders. Meanwhile, workers’ pay demands are ignored and services cancelled.

Tory priorities.

It seems the Conservative government has happily green-lit the payment of £82 million in dividend payments to shareholders in two privatised rail companies, while refusing to accept the pay demands of thousands of people who actually work on the railways:

From the article:

Transport Secretary Mark Harper has allowed two private rail companies to be paid £82 million in dividends in 2022.

This is the despite the fact both companies are part of a major industrial dispute where hundreds of millions of pounds has been used to indemnify them against lost revenue from strike action.

FirstRail Holdings Ltd, the holding company for five FirstGroup franchises, and Govia Thameslink Railways, which runs the biggest franchise in Britain, have recently reported dividend payments of £65 million and £16.9 million respectively in their annual accounts for 2022.

Two of First Rail Holdings Ltd’s franchises, Avanti West Coast and Transpennine Express, have been the subject of public and political controversy after cancelling hundreds of services. In spite of this, the government has renewed or extended contracts for Avanti West Coast and may shortly do the same for Transpennine Express.

Govia won a contract to carry on running the Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern franchise from the government in October 2022 despite its sister company LSER being stripped of the Southeastern franchise for concealing public money.

The DfT allowed Go-Ahead Group to conduct its own internal inquiry into the failings at LSER and renewed Govia’s contract for the Thameslink franchise in spite of the fact that the two companies shared many of the same management personnel.

All these franchises have benefited from indemnification worth hundreds of millions of pounds in taxpayers’ money by the DfT to cover the costs of lost passenger revenue during the ongoing dispute.

RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch said: “The DfT is now little more than a representative of big business, geared to turning tax revenue into shareholder dividends.

“If you’re a private train operator, it doesn’t matter whether your problem is unpredictable passenger revenue, costly train leases or industrial action, the Secretary of State is there to help, opening the public purse and emptying it into shareholders’ pockets.

“This system is not operating in the interests of passengers, railway workers or the taxpayer.

“It is clear that only full public ownership of train operation in this country can save our railways from being looted by this gang of unaccountable spivs.”

Here’s an English-language explanation of what can only be described as a Tory-run scam:

It would be cheaper to bring rail back under public ownership all around – and that includes paying rail workers what they demand.

The RMT has no strike days currently planned after the government put a new pay offer on the table – but that doesn’t mean its workers will accept any such offer as fair.

Meanwhile, the government has been ring-fencing the failing rail operators against strike action – using public money. That’s your money.

It would be better to let the privateers fail, take the railways back into public ownership at low cost and pay the workers. The Tories aren’t doing it because they want to keep workers poor and pay the idle rich who do nothing for their wealth.


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