The broadcast of Channel 4’s Dirty Business has sparked a strong response from Independent readers, who shared anger, frustration and disbelief at the state of Britain’s rivers and the conduct of privatised water companies.
Many readers highlighted the long-standing problem of untreated sewage being pumped into rivers and coastal waters, describing the environmental and public health risks – including incidents of e-coli infection – and drawing attention to the failures of the Environment Agency and other regulators.
Several commenters connected the crisis to broader political and economic factors, citing privatisation, deregulation, neoliberal policies and years of austerity as enabling executives to extract huge profits while ecosystems suffered.
Offshore investors, corporate greed and government complicity were all called out, with some arguing that the situation represents systemic failure rather than isolated wrongdoing.
Some proposed urgent remedies, including renationalisation, stronger enforcement, and even withholding payments from water companies until standards improve.
Here’s what you had to say:
The programme hit the mark
The water companies, the regulators and the government will all blame each other for the disgrace that is the state of British rivers and, of course, they wouldn't be wrong. There’s also plenty due to recent political leaders whose continuous programme of austerity has undoubtedly made a very bad situation much worse.
The programme hit the mark in many ways, especially with the analogy of crime bosses – which is how operators illegally dumping sewage and then covering it up need to be understood and punished. What it has so far failed entirely to represent to viewers, however – and I doubt that will be remedied in the concluding episode – is that the state of the Windrush, or any other single badly contaminated river, is not an aberration to be blamed entirely on greedy, criminal utility providers, but the inevitable result of neoliberal economics and water management – just one more ‘normal accident’, stemming from systematic irresponsibility in environmental governance.
Privatisation, deregulation and fiscal austerity have left the nation with criminally minded executives extracting vast profits from the water industry whilst destroying ecosystems up and down the country. What we saw on the drama is simply the logical outcome of giving a profit-making enterprise control over resources – the access to which represents a fundamental human right – and cutting so-called ‘red tape’ whilst simultaneously gutting funding to institutions tasked with monitoring compliance. Until that is recognised and presented to the general public, there'll just be so much hand-wringing, a token resignation or two, and a return to business as normal as soon as the fuss dies down.
I got E. coli after missing a sewage alert
Some of us swim all the year round in Cornwall and I never go in if there is a sewage alert, although out of season some areas are not monitored, e.g. Penzance and Wherrytown, so we don't know whether there has been a discharge. At Long Rock, just along the coast, there is nearly always an alert when it has rained or is raining, so it hasn't been possible to swim much since before Christmas as we have had 55 days of rain since the beginning of the year. I missed an alert one day last year and went in and got E. coli – it was not a good experience.
What a mess
Offshore private venture capital companies have no place in this industry. And the failure of the regulator is ‘criminal’. The privatised water companies may have taken £85 billion out, but the industry is reckoned to need £200 billion investing.
What a mess – privatisation along with a failure to enforce regulations by governments, Ofwat and the Environment Agency, who, like much of the public sector, were inefficient, ineffective and conflicted (by pension fund investments and senior staff transferring to the private water companies). Our rivers and streams face four big risks:
- Direct and ground/aquifer water over-abstraction (which makes pollution much worse as there is physically less clean river flow to dilute it).
- The licensed and unlicensed/unlawful release of partially treated and raw sewage into our rivers and streams by the water companies.
- The run-off of topsoil and agrichemicals due to modern farming practices.
- The continued and increased development of greenfield sites, with surface water run-off from roads, roofs, driveways, car parks and the industrial built environment creating increased flash flood events. This is increasingly causing flooding to existing homes with no previous history of flooding (climate change and milder, wetter winters exacerbate this).
We are a small island with limited natural resources and a very fragile ecosystem.
A warning for the NHS
This damning example of what can go wrong with selling off vital services to greedy financial companies should serve as a warning for the NHS.
It's already underway with the veterinary service, though the result is a huge cost increase rather than failure to look after animals.
Essential viewing
The programme is essential viewing.
Let's hope it has the same impact as Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
The UK’s extreme privatisation model
The UK’s extreme privatisation model of the water industry, with funds leaving the UK, is almost unique globally. This model has also been the case in other sectors – housing, transport, energy, etc. Public services for citizens became commodity units for investment, nothing more. While we were told we would get our sovereignty back with Brexit, the UK was already being sold and critical infrastructure services were haemorrhaging cash to overseas investment houses. Both the Tories and Labour have overseen this scandal.
Stop payments to all water companies now
What is needed is immediate action – by which I mean now and not in 1, 5, 10 or 20 years’ time.
Politicians and regulators have consistently failed to deliver and have shown themselves as not fit for purpose, so it is over to us, the consumer and general public. I suggest we ALL stop payments to ALL water companies NOW until we are happy with the way things are run and the overall service provided.
Large private monopolies need to be disbanded ASAP.
In any other walk of life, one would refuse to pay or demand money back for such an abject failure.
A national disgrace
The water industry is quite simply a national disgrace. Don't ever let those advocates of deregulation and the free market opine about privatisation again.
This brilliant series demonstrates literally how privatisation can kill both adults and children. The companies are traded from equity firm to equity firm, each time creaming off as much profit as they can get away with. The Environment Agency is complicit and politicians do nothing.
The Tories who created this monstrosity should hang their heads in collective shame. Labour too. The first act of Starmer should have been to pass an emergency enabling Bill to renationalise each company without compensation.
We have been gifted a Third World water and sewerage industry by the spivs and racketeers who would love to do the same to the NHS.
The true reason for Brexit
This film shows the true reason for Brexit. Sewage-polluted rivers and coastlines do not conform with EU water directives; the Government knows this. Apart from fines, it would cost the Government hundreds of billions to get sewage pollution under control to match the EU water directive – money the Government does not have and the water companies won't spend. So the only solution is to leave the EU so that the EU water directive no longer applies: government happy as it doesn't have to fork out money it doesn't have, water companies happy as it is business as usual. The only loser is the consumer, the little man or woman – but hey, what's new?
Some of the comments have been edited for this article for brevity and clarity.
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