From Cat Hobbs, director of the British Blue Community ‘We Own It’:
Inside another week of peril for Thames Water while England drowns in raw sewage.
If you’re banning bonuses for failing water bosses You should be banning all shareholder payouts from failing water companies If you follow this to its logical conclusion, you should be banning private companies from our water system entirely.
They say a week is a long time in politics. Well, this week has been a long time in the politics of water.
We ended last week with drought warnings and the government announcing plans to build nine new reservoirs by 2050. Great that they are trying to secure the supply of our most precious resource, but this plan is slightly undermined by the three billion litres of water lost every day through our crumbling pipes.
After decades of neglect by private water companies, 20% of all the water in the network never even reaches our taps. So, by my maths, if we don’t fix the pipes, that’s nearly two of those nine new reservoirs effectively collecting and processing water only to throw it away again. Good news fades fast with this government.
