Then dump untreated sewerage in rivers and demand more money from bill payers, because they “can’t afford” to maintain the infrastructure.
In most industries a company so poorly managed would lose customers, go bankrupt, and be replaced by a better run company. But water companies? They have a monopoly, and everyone needs water to live.
My provider is Thames Water. They are losing money.
According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgleg70r7rno
> When Thames was privatised in 1989, it had no debt. But over the years it borrowed heavily and its total debt - which includes all of its borrowings and liabilities - now stands at £22.8bn, according to latest financial results, external.
> Its debt pile increased sharply when Macquarie, an Australian infrastructure bank, owned Thames Water, with debts reaching more than £10bn by the time the company was sold in 2017.
According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41152516
> Macquarie and its investors paid £5.1bn for Thames Water, of which £2.8bn was money Macquarie had borrowed [...] £2bn had subsequently been repaid. Not by Macquarie and its investors, who had originally borrowed the money, but from new borrowings raised by Thames Water through a Cayman Islands subsidiary.
> Martin Blaiklock said: "That letter was a red flag to me because it showed clearly that the debt which Macquarie funds had used to buy Thames Water had been transferred over to Thames Water." [...]
> the total returns made by the bank and its investors from Thames Water averaged between 15.5% and 19% a year. Mr Blaiklock has 40 years of experience in such matters and said these returns were "twice what one would normally expect"
According to https://news.sky.com/story/approval-for-higher-bills-and-loa...
> The company, which has been crumbling under a £16bn debt pile, was due to run out of money in about a month's time. It has now received court approval for another £3bn loan [...] the company's gearing ratio is 80% and its annual debt interest bill is around £900m (about a third of the revenue it gets from customer bills) [...]
> The water regulator has sanctioned bill increases of 35% by 2030.
> However, Thames wants more. It is seeking a 53% increase, which would take the average bill to £677 a year
This stuff's all pretty widely documented and reported, if your idea of fun is getting angry and depressed while also reading about business accounting.
Ofc, that doesn't claw back the billions that the PE pirates made off with, but at least the UK wouldn't have to pay them even more to get its water supply under control again.
[0] even if the UK had to pay market value for it, the market value for a business so drowning in debt would be close to zero.
Are they losing money because costs exceed revenue, or are they losing money because they are servicing massive loan interest on money they already distributed to shareholders?
https://www.thameswater.co.uk/media-library/l13deqmw/thames-...
> £1,271 million of expected credit loss provision recognised against the intercompany loan receivable from TWUL’s immediate parent company, Thames Water Utilities Holdings Limited. This balance is fully provided for, as it is not deemed recoverable
However, any money paid to shareholders while accumulating debt, including deferred maintenance, etc was financial smoke and mirrors not actual profit.
Poor shareholders, mainly Ontario Municipal retirement fund pensioners, who are the biggest ones (32%) and retired British academics (20%).
They are a scam operation, frankly.
In 2023 their interest payments were 28% of revenue. They also made the news for dumping particularly large volumes of sewage into rivers.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/dec/18/water-firms-us...
Yes and they have been fined for doing so, thus proving my point. These companies have statutory obligations. See the Water Industry Act 1991 and subsequent legislation.
I'm having a hard time reconciling the theoretical claims made in the thread with the blinding light of what actually happened.
British water companies are in lots of debt because they aren't really private. They're forced to spend huge sums to repair Victorian-era infrastructure whilst the government sets the prices they're allowed to charge. Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment, resulting in a huge accumulation of debt.
This is exactly what would have also happened if the water companies were not privatized, so the fake "privatization" is a red herring. It's the expected outcome of price controls, not whether the utilities are owned by the state or not.
> Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment, resulting in a huge accumulation of debt.
Bloody Tories, the whole problem isn't that they were in charge for 32 years from 1979-2024, it's the 13 years of Blair. They have been powerless to stop the spooky Left and fix the pipes before the water was privatised (or anything afterwards, because obviously it's still the Left)!
Oh boy. That's funny.
> much of their base having defected to Reform.
Yes, they found a party they will say the quiet bits out loud, so they don't feel as uncomfortable being bigots and racists.
You honestly believe this? If so: Jesus H. Christ!
Turns out I was wrong, all it takes is to no-true-scotsman everything into the "bad wrong left wing" bucket on the quest to move the overton window ever rightwards. Hilarious. The mental gymnastics knows no bounds.
Bullocks. All of your argument is bullocks
The post office in the United States is not privatized and yet has been able to set prices in a way that sustains the business for centuries. You can't simply assume that all public entities will ignore fiscal reality.
In fact you may run into the opposite problem: when a utility is public, their debts appear on the government balance sheet and legislators are responsible for them. When it's spun off as a quasi-private monopoly, the government can impose debt on the utility without appearing to increase the public debt.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/6407
The US is a very right wing country. It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls. Maybe with Mamdani that's now changing.
The reasons why Western systems often don't recoup even operating expenses, let alone capital costs, from fares are because transit is a public service with public externalities. Drivers on the road contribute to pollution and congestion, especially relevant in dense areas like London. Some level of subsidy is appropriate to account for the positive externalities of discouraging these negative outcomes while still encouraging regional mobility.
This is not to say TfL is as efficient as it could be; there is a well-documented capital costs crisis in the Anglosphere, particularly when it comes to transit. The issues here are more complex, though, than vote buying from an allegedly "socialist" mayor.
Rather than placing price controls on private companies the US slashes taxes to the point where public services then cannot invest in infrastructure and maintenance - and then use that as an argument why public services should be privatized.
If tax cuts aren't populist policies I don't know what are. The magic trick of the right wing parties has been to sell tax cuts as a great thing to the very people who don't benefit from the cuts and are hurt by the fiscal fall-out. That and attaching themselves to Christianity while not following any of Jesus's teachings.
When a service is a monopoly there is no good reason for turning it into a for profit company outside of feathering the pockets of the rich. If the electricity supply to my house (and by extension my street and my city) is controlled by one company and they own the cabling and infrastructure then what is the motivation for them to not jack up my prices to generate profits to their shareholders, as they should as a shareholder owned company? What is their motivation for encouraging renewables or improving infrastructure when those would reduce profits and reduce shareholder value?
Mamdani hasn't even been voted in yet. Keep sowing that fear so that the people his policies might benefit don't actually vote for him - because he's a scary socialist (in the loosest, most American, definition).
In the US we have a problem with fantastically underpricing public roads. We don't expect their books to break even, much less generate a profit. Meanwhile everyone asks why train systems are not profitable.
> The US is a very right wing country.
Yeah, at least compared with most of Europe.
> It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls.
You didn't notice when the current president (somewhat successfully) bullied retailers into swallowing tariff-caused price increases, so they wouldn't damage his popularity? That almost seems right-wing socialist.
This clearly isn't always true and when it does happen the public has the ability to require the transparency from their government to catch it happening quickly and the ability to hold the elected officials responsible for it accountable by voting them out and replacing them. Private corporations don't allow the level of transparency the public needs and aren't accountable to the public either.
Maybe the government could work out some deal that gives the public the right to put webcams in every meeting/board room of the private company, force their bookkeeping to be published to the internet, allow the public to request internal email and other communications, require independent audits/reports, and grant the public the ability to fire and replace any and all employees or executives at the private company who fail to do their jobs, but even then you'd still have the problem that private companies demand extra money on top of what is required to do the job just to line their own pockets. Why should we accept that?
The overwhelming majority of people would disagree that the Conservative Party can be described as "left". Since 1979, the Conservatives have been in power for all but 14 years.
So far as I can make out, here in the UK the near-universal view is that the Conservatives are a centre-right party, Labour are somewhere between a centre-left and a just-plain-centre party (unsurprisingly, people who are further to the left see it as further to the right and vice versa), and Reform are a not-so-centre right party. (People who aren't Reform supporters would mostly describe them as far-right. Not many people like to use that sort of terminology to describe themselves, so people who are Reform supporters would say other things.)
Pretty much no one other than extreme rightists would describe the Conservatives as a centre-left party. Likewise, some people further to the left would describe Labour as a centre-right party. I think more people would do that than would describe the Conservatives as centre-left, but that may just reflect the people whose opinions I happen to be most exposed to.
(I mean, specifically, in the UK. Other countries have different overall political leanings. Someone in the US, comparing with the parties there, might accurately describe the Conservative Party as centre-left. But in terms of the UK political landscape: no, of course they are not a centre-left party.)
