COLUMN: Water cash cow is running dry

Elwyn Vaughan, Plaid Cymru County Councillor and our monthly columnist, tells us that the company that wanted our water for free, is running dry

“Thames Water is in deep water!

The company that wanted to take water from Powys on the cheap rather than mend its own leaks is now laden with a mountain of debt after paying millions to shareholders rather than invest in the ageing infrastructure. Such is the risk to the viability of the company that the Government may well have to take control of it.

A classic case of charlatans having stripped £72bn of funds from water companies whilst leaving them with circa £65bn of debt. A failed privatisation of a failed ideology which will cost all of us as residents and taxpayers. 

Water companies are now saying that bills will have to increase 40% to fix crumbling infrastructure. This after three decades since privatisation, that gave their shareholders more than £72 billion in dividends.

And this from Thames Water which wants to extract up to 155m litres of water a day from Efyrnwy to boost supplies to London paying a mere 3p a tonne or 1,000 litres.

Thames Water bosses were awarded bonuses of £2.4m in 2020 and 2021 despite the company losing up to a quarter of all its water from leaks.

Likewise, they failed to build the long-awaited new reservoir at Abingdon, a proposal which has been circulating since 2006 and The Gateway Water Treatment Works in Beckton, east London takes water from the Thames Estuary, treats it and makes drinking water should also be used rather than switched off.

The staggering combined debt pile built up by the UK’s 12 water companies means that huge swathes of cash are being spent on interest payments – money that could be spent cleaning up polluted rivers or fixing leaky pipes.

Thames Water have already had a £500million cash injection in March from its shareholders, who include the state-backed China Investment Corporation and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. 

United Utilities and Severn Trent, which are both listed on the London Stock Exchange, have £8.2billion and £7.16billion debts respectively.

They have also recently handed shareholders a combined £562 million in dividends.

Other companies including Anglian Water, Southern Water and Yorkshire Water all have individual debts of more than £5billion.

Privatisation of the industry paved the way for foreign investors to seize control of companies, extracting billions in dividends and piling up debts yet leave us as taxpayers to foot the bill and the liabilities.  

Water is a fundamental resource and should not be privatised for multinational corporations and banks to plunder whilst leaving us to pay their bills. It’s our resource, our asset and we as the public should benefit from it not spivs and charlatans.”