Imagine you are running a private business and you are not subject to any control, you are allowed to monitor yourself. And instead of faking the results of your self-monitoring, you decide not to do the monitoring at all. Sounds like an unbelievable story? Well, that’s the reality of England’s privatised water companies, as reported by The Guardian based on information from The Observer in an article entitled “Revealed: water firms in England ‘passed’ pollution tests that were never carried out”:
Water firms “passed” thousands of pollution tests under a self-monitoring regime … yet the tests were never even conducted, the Observer can reveal. The water firms’ own operational data for sewage plants across the country reveals how outflows of effluent had stopped – in some cases for just a few hours – on days that samples were supposed to be taken.
As water activist Feargal Sharkey commented:
“Yet more corruption and extortion from the water industry. When fat cat CEO’s salaries and bonuses are dependent upon lying whadda ya get? Yep, lies.”
