to think the water companies need to buck their ideas up

[JenniferBooth]

SE water failures yet again. Even had the temerity to write to customers to tell them to be extra careful with their usage. I come under Anglian Water and we had three burst pipes in this part of Essex last week . I heard that my hairdresser had to empty her emersion tank so she could wash clients hair. She couldnt rebook because she is fully booked. Bad enough there is an aversion to air con in this country but now we are begrudged running water in a heatwave too.

That's so cool!

What’s your opinion on the fact that foreign private equity firms and banks like Macquarie loaded up UK water companies with debt to pay themselves huge dividends and as a result the companies are now paying more to service the debts than they are investing in improvements? Thames Water currently has £23Bn of debt that it is paying interest on. When it was privatised it was debt free.

In clean water leaks they sniff out the chlorine!

Oh and the PR sheet you posted is written by Water UK which is just a lobby group for the privatised water company. It’s not worth the paper it’s (not) printed on. I’ll take the word of investigators such as Radio 4’s ‘The Briefing Room’ over those of water industry shills thanks.

I don’t think anyone is saying you are cunts. It’s a massive failure in strategy going right back to the Thatcher era. The government should never have sold off something as vital as water - I’m absolutely fine with them having sold off British Airways.

It is ridiculous that our water is owned by foreign banks and similar.

The government should be overseeing the water companies closely and they don’t seem to be doing it at all. It has been clear for many years that the population is growing due to immigration and people living longer. Successive governments have failed to ensure that a proper plan is being put in place. Climate change is a similar story.

it is has been entirely predictable for many years that the demand for water would increase but little or nothing has been done to increase the supply or reduce the demand.

Where are the public educational campaigns? Why do so few people have water butts? Why are leaks so frequent and take so long to fix? Where are the tariffs to promote efficient water use? Is anyone auditing big industrial users?

As I said up thread it widely known that Thames water is an awful company and they are bottom of all the leader boards. We are often appalled at what Thames are doing in my company. Thames aren't representative of all water companies though, they are literally the worst example of one. And they folded because of it, and rightly so.

Where are the public educational campaigns? They are constantly put out by the company I work for yet people are still flushing wipes and sanitary products - people literally don't care, it's not their problem once it's flushed. Also when you try to educate people they tend to just start ranting about using as much water as they want because they pay for it and it rains all the time. Like on this thread.

Why do so few people have water butts? Lots of people I know have them for their gardens. My guess to the people who don't would be they don't want one. We literally gave them away for free a few years ago along with shower head aerators to reduce usage. People didn't want them.

Why are leaks so frequent and take so long to fix? Because every time the earth shifts of we get temperature extremes the pipes are pushed and pulled by the earth. Nobody can prevent that or create invincible pipes. They also get damaged by road works, building works etc. They take a long time to fix because you have to excavate the pipe to fix it which involves getting permits for road works and digging up roads. A lot of leaks are on private land which we aren't allowed to dig up and is not our responsibility to fix the leak but people.dont want to pay to repair leaks on their properties. There are creativity new ways of repairing pipes by putting sleeves in them so they don't need to be dug up and is much faster and cheaper but it's not always doable, it depends where the leak is. It is literally impossible to stop pipes everywhere leaking again. All we can do is repair them as they happen. Nothing is invincible, why do you expect pipes to be?

Where are the tariffs to promote efficient water use? What would this look like?

Is anyone auditing big industrial users? Yes.

I really don’t think you are fair to the posters on this thread.

I don’t see entitlement, as in I will use as much as I want because I pay for it, I see posters worried about water supplies and the future, and hoping government and the water companies can address that.

I am very careful about my and my families water use, I try to use as little as possible and that’s why it’d frustrating when there is so much water wasted by leaks and inadequate infrastructure.

It's not you though, it's the companies you work for and the successive governments that allowed private companies to run our infrastructure into the ground. You should be as angry at them as the customers are (unless you are on the board if a water company).

For some context. Estimates are between £70 to £80 billion that has gone to shareholders since privatisation.

That's would have helped significantly with resolving the infrastructure issues we currently have.

This is an essential utility we're taking about here.

I have bowel issues and have to use wet wipes but i dont flush them. They go in a scented nappy bag and into the bin.

This. Water companies are there to make as much £££ as possible for their investors and spend as little as possible on infrastructure. Privatising them was mad but the bs we get fed about competition/lower prices is just that...bs. People want more showers, more people have appliances that use water. And there are more people, all using an antiquated infrastructure.

It's not just the posters on this thread. It's the people we talk to say in day out for YEARS. These are the attitudes were dealing with.

Why haven't the water companies educated people? We have bloody tried! They don't want to be educated!

Thank you. Sadly not everyone is as responsible, our works and sewers are literally clogged with millions of wipes. It costs millions a year to deal with them and the damage they cause. We've been asking for years for people to stop. No one listens. They just want to pay their bill, flush and forget about it, then complain about service issues and sewer blockages. It so frustrating!!

Smart meters will show a Water leak you can check for yourself or if it is over a certain limit the water company should inform you

https://www.itv.com/news/meridian/2026-05-31/care-home-cleans-residents-with-wet-wipes-after-five-days-without-water?fbclid=IwY2xjawSJb7tleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETA4Zm1qNGIzeXIxR3JUc0Fjc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHvvjV7nRGPJ5NzEODVztAfLM1XEImg9F3IDe79vrbwlxxRcdPPR9mz1AJXCO_aem_YTnBI8VOfQs1IVsWkKagdg

Water companies take the piss. No new reservoirs. Leaving leaks to keep on leaking for days and weeks on end.

And let’s not start on discharging the waste.

We had a leak only it wasn’t our leak although it was our side of the meter it wasn’t on our land. Still took them 2 months to fix it after sending ever threatening letters that if we don’t fix OUR leak they will and bill us. Their leak that they caused when they installed the smart meter 🤣🤣 we knew we didn’t have a leak as we had our property checked.

There is no incentive to invest in infrastructure because its not an investment with an actual ROI. They don't get to charge more for better water and we won't use more if it comes out faster or more reliably. So they won't make that money back and it's a business "expense" in over simplified terms.

No different to outsourcing customer service to ai chat bots. There's no profit in customer service, its a cost to keep the minimum viable product going. Cut or avoid that cost, make more profit. They'll only "invest" if they can make a return.

Being even more cynical, if the potential ofwat fine for loss of service is less than the infrastructure would cost, its more cost effective to let the failures happen.

And, as a resident of the recent affected area, they were turning the water back on for a few minutes every few hours to avoid the compensation they had to pay for 12+ of no water so...

They all need to be brought under state control. Their fucking ridiculous monopoly is criminal.

@FateAmenableToChange pin points the cause of these problems.

Water should never have been privatised because, if nothing else, it created a monopoly which even back then were considered undesirable if not illegal. Sure, there are several water companies which the disingenuous might argue means there isn't a monopoly. But as there is only one company in each region it is effectively a monopoly as consumers have no choice of supplier. Without the market forces of competition and consumer choice companies have no need to reinvest to maintain the service they control. They certainly don't need to improve it.

Water companies may well have agreed to maintenance and improvement, may even have legal commitments to do so, but what can any government do to enforce that? Fines won't work because they will either be too small to make a dent in profits, too large and that will be a reason for worse service.

It would be nice to think de-privatising water would be a solution. But then the tax payer would be taking on the cost of these decades of neglect. Maybe long term that would be the right thing to do if it wasn't for the fact that the government, whichever flavour it is, has been ballsing up all public services for decades too.

The taxpayer will end up paying for decades of neglect whatever happens!

At least, if water is nationalised, taxpayers won’t be paying dividends to shareholders as well. Even if national water is charged at a profit by the government, the profit goes into the government’s coffers to cover its expenditure and thereby reducing levels of tax.

She did and it was dreadful. However, do also remember the large numbers of the general public who could not wait to get their hands on some small shares in the hope of getting a bit of money for themselves when they sold them on a bit later. Ditto BT, etc. Anything that was flogged off. The general population at large joined right in at the time. Or a large number of them did.

South East Water has failed to prepare for weather events that have been forcast, even though other companies have done so. Then, on at least one occasion, blamed the weather as an 'act of god' to avoid paying compensation to account holders. When publicity was negative then then said they would make a voluntary donation to a charity instead. The amount donated was, of course, significantly lower that what they would have paid out under GSS.

And Thames are no better. A planned upgrade to a sewage pumping station in 2024 was shelved, with no date when it might take place. This is in a place where the village hall advertises that residents can use their toilets when the residents cannot use their own as to do so would probably result in internal sewage flooding. The eternal excuse is 'hydraulic overload'. Lots of handwringing by how terrible it is by the water company for at least the last 20 years but no action taken to address the problem.

Yes, but unfortunately at some point the Tories/Reform (two cheeks of the same arse) will get in and sell them off to their mates again.

https://www.kentlive.news/news/2220-south-east-water-customers-10994295?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawSLsQhleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETA4Zm1qNGIzeXIxR3JUc0Fjc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHi04JD6q0S9cvjxXDkf2GpK-I_cVtx8GpHxqOzCRA5v-5NwrEdk8F8g6eAOO_aem_es7mLQQNZOJZzCur8xZp4A#Echobox=1780396543Its