Thames Water - what happened?

[username358]

Thames Water has £23bn of assets that are in urgent need of repair and the supply of water to its 16 million customers is “on a knife-edge”, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

Britain’s biggest water company has failed to tackle adequately serious safety concerns, has not upgraded essential IT systems and has tolerated a culture of intimidation among staff, according to insiders and an analysis of documents.

The investigation suggests that the company is in a worse financial state than previously admitted, and neither its managers or regulators appear to have grasped the perilous state of some of its reservoirs and pipes.
www.theguardian.com/business/2024/nov/17/thames-water-supply-knife-edge-23bn-repairs-needed

I'm with Thames Water and as far as I knew, they made huge profits. Now, they're in massive amounts of debt and might have to be bailed out by the tax payer.

Not only are they in massive amounts of debt but they don't seem to have invested any money into maintaining their infrastructure.

AIBU to expect companies to be regulated in the UK? Am I a fantasist to expect water companies to occasionally be assessed? To make sure they're safe, investing in vital infrastructure and providing a decent service to their users?

This situation has obviously built up over a long time, you don't get into billions of debt overnight. Yet here we are and they're dumping raw sewage into our waterways.

There needs to be a public inquiry into how a formerly solvent company with millions and millions in assets and a balanced account book became this complete state.

Ofwat, the government body charged with making sure these thing work, happened. That’s what happened.

These overpaid, lazy, incompetent and useless public sector organizations are given hefty amounts of public funds to enforce rules, regulations and guidelines. And time and time again, they fail to do so. These measures should prevent this kind of situations, yet they don’t. Scrap ofwat.

All the profits were siphoned off to Shareholders. I really think that needs to change for utilities and all repairs/debts seen to before giving to Shareholders and they should be last in the queue, not first.

They did make huge profits and also paid out huge dividends to it's stakeholders and Board. It also underfunded maintenance of its resources/assets.

Chronic mismanagement.

Terrible management and focus on short term profits over investment.

A rare case for nationalisation and no recompense.

This is what happens when you sell off your crucial utilities and infrastructure to the highest (overseas) bidder for short term profit that happens to not GAF about the actual quality of the service.

Nice one Maggie.

@Ytcsghisn You can't blame Ofwat for diabolical financial mismanagement.

www.infrastructureinvestor.com/macquaries-bradley-on-thames-water-theres-nothing-in-our-returns-that-im-embarrassed-about/

See also https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41152516

Water and electricity companies were always the ones that got ignored on the monopoly board…

I have always thought it mad to sell off utilities. Obviously shareholders then come first and sod the service users - tho they're expected to pay more AND pick up the tab when things go wrong.
If you MUST privatise things in the UK, then any ahareholders should be UK Based ONLY so that they have a vested interest in things working properly.
Let's face it, someone in another country's not going to care as it doesn't affect their day-to-day life - they just get paid shareholder dividends and go on their merry way.
I also think it might be harder to nationalise things than it was to privatise them.

Thames Water as purchased by Macquarie a notionally Australian based merchant bank known fas a very aggressive venture capitalist company. It loaded the company with debt and took out large amounts of dividends. The company has struggled ever since.

@Ytcsghisn ok let's say we scrap ofwat. What then? How are we going to regulate the water companies?

National scandal. Shareholders have literally been robbing the British public. It should be ilegal but either should we allow private companies to run public service that rely on one infrastructure because clearly it can never be a 'free market', whatever that actually means.

The owners now are pension funds including the Universities pension funds not Macquarie who was responsible for the asset stripping and OFWAT let them do it.

This is what aggravates me. I spend a lot of money on water and sewage works and my bill is forever increasing because of water wastage.

All the while, a load of people have been grinning and banking my cash.

My money has not gone towards fixing the pipes or better productivity but towards someone's bank balance. Meanwhile the Thames is being pumped full of raw sewage and the wildlife is being destroyed.