Your article (Water firm to pay shareholders £300m despite anger over leaks and pollution, 25 May) was very well timed as the water company was having a two-day event in Windermere to “explain” what it was doing. I duly trundled along and asked about the enormous dividend paid by the most polluting water company in England last year. Lo and behold, the main problems lie with Ofwat, which insists that it keeps prices low, and with shareholders, who demand an enormous payout.
Then came what was, apparently, the clincher – “We have spent £XYZ million...” – a tactic much loved by Conservative frontbenchers, ie provide a meaningless sum instead of telling us what proportion of the amount that should have been spent was achieved. I suppose I was meant to be grateful that United Utilities is going to open an information centre in Windermere to tell us what it is doing. That money would be better spent reducing pensioners’ bills.
The sad thing is that the public appears to bathe in apathy. Perhaps we should resurrect the spirit of the poll tax demonstrators and cancel our direct debits to the water companies.
Gwyn Jones
Windermere, Cumbria
• Your editorial (21 May) drew attention to the failings of privatised water companies and called for change, either by reforming the regulatory framework, or through renationalisation. The 1989 privatisation of the water industry in England and Wales was a response to the failure to invest in maintaining the nationalised industry’s assets. The regulatory regime introduced at that time addressed these problems by creating an independent regulator, Ofwat.
For perhaps the first 15 years, it could reasonably be claimed that privatisation had been successful. But more recently, yardstick competition between water companies, enabling Ofwat to set demanding targets based on best practice, has been weakened as ownership has passed increasingly to financial institutions more focused on returns than improving efficiency or service.
Incentives for water firms to act responsibly have been weakened as responsibility for monitoring sewage discharges has passed from the Environment Agency (EA) to the firms themselves, while the EA’s environmental protection budget fell by about two-thirds between 2010 and 2019.
Reform should involve restoring the EA’s responsibility and resources. Alternative ownership models should also be considered. Welsh Water is a debt-financed, not-for-profit business, whose average household bills fell in real terms between 2000 and 2020.
Ian Jones
Fownhope, Herefordshire
• Re your article (30 water treatment works released 11bn litres of raw sewage in a year, study suggests, 27 May), sewage needs different treatment. Digesters produce methane, which can be used as a “green” fuel, as the methane and CO2 are produced anyway as sewage decomposes. The resulting volume of sewage is vastly reduced and is full of nutrients, which can be used as fertiliser. Care is needed as chemicals and heavy metals may have got into the sewage at source, but there are plants that sequester heavy metals.
Obviously this needs major infrastructure, or green investment. The solutions will take a while to put in place, but what else are we going to do – keep swimming in shit?
Dr Miles Clapham
London
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