Hundreds of residents in nine blocks of flats in Tower Hamlets have been left without a reliable supply of running water for more than seven months. Taps have repeatedly run dry. Families have struggled to cook, clean, wash and flush their toilets. Some residents have waited more than eight months for their first delivery of bottled water.
This isn’t a minor service failure. Water is necessary for life, and keeping a household supplied with it is part of the daily labour that keeps society running. When the taps stop, that burden falls inside the home. Parents, elderly people and disabled residents have had to carry it while their landlord, the housing association Poplar Harca, delayed permanent repairs.
The shortages began for some residents last summer and had spread to at least nine blocks by December. During periods of extreme heat, residents say they spent more than an hour trying to reach Poplar Harca by phone, sometimes without getting through at all. Deliveries were limited to 15 litres per household, regardless of how many people lived there. Families and vulnerable residents were told to use public showers at Poplar Baths or pay for day passes at Mile End leisure centre and claim the money back.
In other words, people paying for homes with kitchens and bathrooms were told to carry bottled water and wash elsewhere.
Poplar Harca says: “Residents continue to receive water, although pressure levels can fluctuate and, at times, may be insufficient for some households’ needs.” It also says Thames Water‘s pressure at the affected buildings remains above the minimum required under Ofwat’s guaranteed standards. This is bureaucratic wordplay. A supply that can’t reliably fill a pan, run a shower or flush a toilet isn’t an adequate water supply. The landlord’s choice of language doesn’t change the material conditions inside the flats.
At first, Poplar Harca blamed Thames Water, saying the supplier was providing “lower flow pressures than in previous years”. At the same time, it told other residents that extensive work was needed to build a new pump room and raise pressure inside their block. It said the work couldn’t begin until a section 20 consultation had determined how much leaseholders would have to pay.
Here the class character of the delay is plain. A legal process organised around property ownership and the division of costs took priority over the immediate needs of hundreds of people. The question wasn’t simply how to restore water. It was who could be billed, how much they could be billed and whether the paperwork had been completed.
Clair Phillips, a senior associate at the law firm Moore Barlow, said: “In circumstances where works are urgent, such as a prolonged loss of water supply, one would ordinarily expect the landlord to undertake the necessary works without delay and then apply to the first-tier tribunal for [urgent] dispensation from the section 20 consultation requirements.”
Poplar Harca chose another course. It maintained that there was no need to use an emergency route because some water remained available, even though it also admitted that the pressure could be insufficient for residents’ needs.
The section 20 issue is tied to the legacy of right to buy. Some former social homes in these blocks are now owned by leaseholders, who can be charged a share of major works. The promise of mass home ownership broke up public estates into a maze of tenures, individual bills and competing legal interests. Capitalism turns the home from a social necessity into an asset. When a whole block needs essential work, residents meet the consequences in consultation notices, service charges and delay.
The immediate cause of the low pressure remains disputed. Residents noticed that shortages began around the completion of Stroudley Walk, a commercial housing development built by Poplar Harca, and some suspect water was diverted to new properties. Thames Water says the low pressure is due to extensive development in the area as well as problems with internal plumbing. While Thames Water has systematically underinvested in infrastructure while paying out fortunes to shareholders, engineers who examined the situation didn’t agree on where responsibility lay.
Paul Kent of Kent Group Services said: “As a boom in construction has emerged over the past few decades, [Thames Water’s] infrastructure is still decades and centuries old, with lots of leaks on the systems due to the number of new housing developments in east London. Thames Water has had to lower water pressure to be able to supply everyone.”
Dale Joseph of Under Pressure Plumbing London said that, if Thames Water was meeting its duty to provide adequate pressure to the buildings, the landlord was responsible for ensuring enough water reached each flat.
East London needs new homes. It also needs water infrastructure planned around human need. Capitalist development separates the two. Housing is built as commercial property while pipes, pumps and maintenance are treated as costs to be postponed, disputed or passed on. The exchange value of the development is realised; the use value of a working tap is somebody else’s problem.
“I’m appalled at the situation my constituents find themselves in,” said Uma Kumaran, the area’s Labour MP. “Access to water is a basic right, yet residents of Devons Road estate have been denied that right for far too long. It’s a gross failure of one of the most fundamental duties a landlord owes to their tenants – especially during record-breaking heatwaves.
“I have repeatedly pushed Poplar Harca to take urgent action, full accountability, and set out a clear and swift timetable for repairs, for all buildings. Residents deserve nothing less than an urgent and permanent fix.”
Kumaran is right that access to water is a basic right. But capitalism recognises rights on paper while property relations decide whether people can exercise them. A right without the material means to enforce it can be reduced to a promise, a complaints line and another bottle of water delivered months late.
This is life for workers in the heart of an imperialist country. London serves global finance and property markets, yet working-class residents in its eastern boroughs can’t rely on their taps. Imperialism doesn’t guarantee comfort for the workers of the dominant countries. It concentrates wealth and power in monopoly capital, and capital sends resources where they can produce returns. New commercial development can move ahead while the infrastructure needed for ordinary life is left behind.
Under the timetable eventually given to residents, repairs in six affected blocks were expected between 5 August and 8 September. Work at three more blocks wasn’t due to begin until 27 August. Some households therefore faced as long as a year without adequate water.
Residents haven’t faced the landlord only as isolated complainants. With help from the community organisation Acorn, some came together to make a collective complaint. Sadaf Moosvi, an Acorn organiser, said: “There are genuinely no words to describe the scale of this scandal. I’ve been organising communities for several years and have seen a great deal, but never anything like this.”
The residents’ collective complaint has cut through months of excuses and exposed the class relation underneath them. Poplar Harca and Thames Water can pass responsibility back and forth, but residents are the ones carrying bottles upstairs and searching for somewhere to wash. The estate’s land has commercial value; the people living on it are treated as a cost. That’s capitalist Britain in miniature.
