I still have no idea why businesses that don’t benefit from competition and are pretty much monopolies have been privatised in the first place.
It’s also strange that the leader of the left leaning party needs urging to consider that nationalising the sector is a good idea.
> The former shadow chancellor John McDonnell said the leadership should consider a policy to nationalise water. “Water privatisation has been the biggest ripoff privatisation of them all. Fortunes have been made at all our expense as the service has deteriorated, charges have gone through the roof, massive debts have been incurred to pay shareholders, and they’ve polluted our rivers and seas. Thirty years of regulation has significantly failed. Public ownership is the only serious option from here on,” he said.
> Kate Osamor, the MP for Edmonton, an area supplied by Thames Water, also called for the water companies to be nationalised. “For decades, Thames Water have passed on enormous profits to their shareholders while failing to invest. Leaks and sewage dumps in Edmonton are at an all-time high and now my constituents are going to be asked to pay more during a cost of living crisis,” she said.
> “Enough is enough. Thames Water must be brought back into public ownership, without compensation for shareholders. The British public has been taken for a ride for too long. The model of nationalising risk and privatising profits has failed.”
How much would it cost to nationalise the water firms ? I am getting wildly different answers on Google as assuming it’s pretty much unknown.
Now Is Not The Time to be talking about renationalising water. Hard Working Families Are Rightly Concerned about rising costs, rising interest rates, not being able to take their Hard Working children on two foreign holidays, high speed bicycles.. and the way we as a Labour Government address these concerns is by working closely with the private sector and providing opportunities for our friends in the private sector to work closely with us on addressing some of these concerns. Thank you.
We just need to force heavy regulation/fines and limits on dividends Vs debt on the water firms that either bends them into being excellent value for us or they fail and are worth little before we nationalise them.
All this seems to have been prompted by some misleading headlines about sewage leaks. People took that and built up some crazy image of the situation in their heads. It’s very far removed from reality. That’s why everyone thinks nationalising will make a huge difference.
Even if he did, he’d change his “mind” a day later.
Hope they won’t get suspended for making the suggestion.
“Labour MPs attempt to talk to an ideological brick wall for no result” would have been a better headline.
Scottish Water is more or less nationalized (100% owned by the Scottish Government) and it works great- that should be what England tries to replicate.
The corporation is regulated through a number of bodies including the Water Industry Commission for Scotland, which sets the prices for water and sewerage and is charged as part of council tax rather than at a metered rate.
It was set up in 2002 after the Water Industry (Scotland) Act consolidated existing local water authorities into one large national statutory corporation.
There is some limited private involvement in the form of PFI contracts that were inherited before consolidation, these mostly handle treatment of waste water. The contracts last for several decades so it remains to be seen if they’d be renewed upon expiry but given they currently treat approximately 45% of Scotland’s waste water I’d assume so (but it’s more tightly controlled and more competitive and it doesn’t appear to suffer the same issues wholesale privatization suffers from so that may not be a bad thing.)
Businesses are served by Scottish Water too, under their subsidiary Scottish Business Stream, however not 100% anymore. Due to EU competition rules the Scottish Government did have to forfeit a contract in 2015 so there are also a limited number of businesses and public services being served by a private entity known as Anglian Water.
Anything Labour does need to be protected from the next Tory government. Which is the issue with nationalisation. The Tories just run public services into the ground so would it be better?
We need better ideas I think. Wider laws that prevent profiteering in key sectors or something.
They won’t commit to that for one very simple reason.
Thanks to the media in this country, it would be political suicide.
I’m sure a large percentage of the population support the idea, but you can be damn sure that if any party said “If we’re elected, we’ll re-nationalise”, the papers run by Murdoch and the Daily Heil among others would immediately start campaigns to turn all their readers against that party.
And considering it worked for the Brexit vote, I have zero confidence in people actually voting for their own betterment.
>Water companies have been lobbying Labour to warn them off nationalisation. The Evening Standard this week reported that Liv Garfield, the chief executive of Severn Trent, was trying to bring a taskforce of utility bosses together to keep what she referred to as the “status quo”.
>She wrote in a letter to other utility companies: “Whilst it is clear Labour will not include nationalisation in its next manifesto, they are also not keen on entering into the election race championing the status quo. The leadership thinks there is room for improvement and, politically, there is significant pressure to ‘do something’ about utilities.
>“One idea we believe might be attractive to the Labour leadership is repurposing utilities and utility networks into a new breed of declared social purpose companies – companies that remain privately owned, who absolutely can (and should) make a profit, but ones that also have a special duty to take a long-term view.”
Well I, for one, will be amazed when Labour’s policy turns out to be a variation of this corporate rebadging.
12 comments
I still have no idea why businesses that don’t benefit from competition and are pretty much monopolies have been privatised in the first place.
It’s also strange that the leader of the left leaning party needs urging to consider that nationalising the sector is a good idea.
> The former shadow chancellor John McDonnell said the leadership should consider a policy to nationalise water. “Water privatisation has been the biggest ripoff privatisation of them all. Fortunes have been made at all our expense as the service has deteriorated, charges have gone through the roof, massive debts have been incurred to pay shareholders, and they’ve polluted our rivers and seas. Thirty years of regulation has significantly failed. Public ownership is the only serious option from here on,” he said.
> Kate Osamor, the MP for Edmonton, an area supplied by Thames Water, also called for the water companies to be nationalised. “For decades, Thames Water have passed on enormous profits to their shareholders while failing to invest. Leaks and sewage dumps in Edmonton are at an all-time high and now my constituents are going to be asked to pay more during a cost of living crisis,” she said.
> “Enough is enough. Thames Water must be brought back into public ownership, without compensation for shareholders. The British public has been taken for a ride for too long. The model of nationalising risk and privatising profits has failed.”
How much would it cost to nationalise the water firms ? I am getting wildly different answers on Google as assuming it’s pretty much unknown.
Now Is Not The Time to be talking about renationalising water. Hard Working Families Are Rightly Concerned about rising costs, rising interest rates, not being able to take their Hard Working children on two foreign holidays, high speed bicycles.. and the way we as a Labour Government address these concerns is by working closely with the private sector and providing opportunities for our friends in the private sector to work closely with us on addressing some of these concerns. Thank you.
We just need to force heavy regulation/fines and limits on dividends Vs debt on the water firms that either bends them into being excellent value for us or they fail and are worth little before we nationalise them.
All this seems to have been prompted by some misleading headlines about sewage leaks. People took that and built up some crazy image of the situation in their heads. It’s very far removed from reality. That’s why everyone thinks nationalising will make a huge difference.
Even if he did, he’d change his “mind” a day later.
Hope they won’t get suspended for making the suggestion.
“Labour MPs attempt to talk to an ideological brick wall for no result” would have been a better headline.
Scottish Water is more or less nationalized (100% owned by the Scottish Government) and it works great- that should be what England tries to replicate.
The corporation is regulated through a number of bodies including the Water Industry Commission for Scotland, which sets the prices for water and sewerage and is charged as part of council tax rather than at a metered rate.
It was set up in 2002 after the Water Industry (Scotland) Act consolidated existing local water authorities into one large national statutory corporation.
There is some limited private involvement in the form of PFI contracts that were inherited before consolidation, these mostly handle treatment of waste water. The contracts last for several decades so it remains to be seen if they’d be renewed upon expiry but given they currently treat approximately 45% of Scotland’s waste water I’d assume so (but it’s more tightly controlled and more competitive and it doesn’t appear to suffer the same issues wholesale privatization suffers from so that may not be a bad thing.)
Businesses are served by Scottish Water too, under their subsidiary Scottish Business Stream, however not 100% anymore. Due to EU competition rules the Scottish Government did have to forfeit a contract in 2015 so there are also a limited number of businesses and public services being served by a private entity known as Anglian Water.
Anything Labour does need to be protected from the next Tory government. Which is the issue with nationalisation. The Tories just run public services into the ground so would it be better?
We need better ideas I think. Wider laws that prevent profiteering in key sectors or something.
They won’t commit to that for one very simple reason.
Thanks to the media in this country, it would be political suicide.
I’m sure a large percentage of the population support the idea, but you can be damn sure that if any party said “If we’re elected, we’ll re-nationalise”, the papers run by Murdoch and the Daily Heil among others would immediately start campaigns to turn all their readers against that party.
And considering it worked for the Brexit vote, I have zero confidence in people actually voting for their own betterment.
>Water companies have been lobbying Labour to warn them off nationalisation. The Evening Standard this week reported that Liv Garfield, the chief executive of Severn Trent, was trying to bring a taskforce of utility bosses together to keep what she referred to as the “status quo”.
>She wrote in a letter to other utility companies: “Whilst it is clear Labour will not include nationalisation in its next manifesto, they are also not keen on entering into the election race championing the status quo. The leadership thinks there is room for improvement and, politically, there is significant pressure to ‘do something’ about utilities.
>“One idea we believe might be attractive to the Labour leadership is repurposing utilities and utility networks into a new breed of declared social purpose companies – companies that remain privately owned, who absolutely can (and should) make a profit, but ones that also have a special duty to take a long-term view.”
Well I, for one, will be amazed when Labour’s policy turns out to be a variation of this corporate rebadging.