It’s time to renationalise our failing water industry

Editorial: Like a high street bank, a water company cannot be allowed to go bust. If Thames Water, with its eye-watering debts, is no longer commercially viable, it has to be taken over by the state

29 March 2024 (Dave Brown)

Ever since the Conservative manifesto for the 1987 general election disingenuously promised to “return to the public the Water Authorities” – in other words, privatise the ones in England and Wales – there has been an on-off national debate about whether the supply of water, sewerage and associated services should, in fact, be owned and controlled by the state or in the hands of free enterprise. Soon, however, the issue, at least in the case of Thames Water, will be resolved not by a popular vote but through commercial pressures.

Thames Water, to put it bluntly, is going bust and will run out of money by May 2025. Given that its wide range of well-resourced shareholders, including major pension funds, are warning that the business is now uninvestible, it seems inevitable that Thames Water will before much longer pass into a special administrative regime, and, in effect, be nationalised. The alternative, which is that the taps run dry and the loos no longer flush in the capital of the United Kingdom is rightly an unthinkable consequence of subjecting what is, at base, a public service to the worst emanations of capitalism.

Thames Water has many problems, not all of them of its own making. Britain’s Victorian sewers and water pipes are crumbling, inadequate, prone to leaks and sewage dumps, and expensive to replace. The infrastructure was neglected under many decades of municipal ownership long before it was floated on the stock market in the exciting though transient era of mass share ownership promulgated by Margaret Thatcher. The regulators have also failed to be tough enough over water purity and pollution, to an unbelievable extent.