This week, Thames Water has said that it needs to increase customer bills by 40 percent to pay for the necessary upgrades to its infrastructure.
Thames Water, like other water companies in Britain, has been under the spotlight recently for dumping sewage into rivers. It now says that if we want to keep our rivers pristine, as well as clean water flowing to people’s homes, we need to allow it to price gouge its customers. Why is that?
The company is in billions of pounds worth of debt and will need further investment if it’s to have the cash to upgrade its infrastructure. The debt has been run up at the same time that the company has paid out billions of pounds worth of dividends to its shareholders. Those shareholders now say that they won’t make the necessary investment unless the regulator allows it to hike the prices that it charges to customers by 40 percent.
While this is disgusting behaviour, none of it should be shocking. This is how it works under capitalism. Businesses try to maximize their profits in any way possible, to please their investors. To the investors, the profit and loss figures are simply numbers in a book, while to the customers who have to deal with the business, the money involved can represent significant hardship. Investors have no obligation to provide the cheapest and best quality service to customers though. Profit is all that counts.
Luckily, in this case, the regulator, Ofwat, has refused to allow the business to raise its prices. Ofwat is reassuring customers that they’ll continue to receive clean water no matter what happens.
This has created an impasse however. If the company’s owners aren’t willing to make the necessary investments in infrastructure, Thames Water could end up being nationalised.
Understanding our political class and its neoliberal ideology, any nationalisation would only be temporary, before the company is sold off again to new investors, ready for the cycle to repeat.
Essential public services have no business being profit making enterprises for private owners. Food, housing, water, education, healthcare, and more should all be free to access. They should all be run for the public good and not for the benefit of a wealthy few. We can create a world like that but we have to make it happen ourselves.
In the short term, contact your MP and let them know that you support public ownership of essential services. Support campaign groups such as We Own It if you can as well.
For the longer term, join a socialist party or organisation and fight for public ownership of the economy. Horrific stories like this greedy management of Thames Water can only take place under a capitalist economic system. It’s time for us to put ownership of the economy in the hands of the people who work in the economy.
