Will we ever learn?

[youngmafbog]

Your Company has a drop in profit, customer satisfaction is down and you are forced to impose a hosepipe ban in a country that is very green. What would you expect, hauling over the coals, an official warning or the sack? Well if you are in charge of Thames water you get a bonus bigger than you Salary.

Just when will this madness end?

As for water companies, when will we have the bottle to Nationalize them anyway?

[emmie]

do you think that by nationalising them it would make them more efficient.

[boxtops]

what difference would that make? It didn't work with nationalising the railways.

[Gromit]

Maybe privatisation of the utility companies has not worked. More competition and lower prices for the consumer, afraid not.

[Huderon]

If it bothers you that much, you could ask Thames Water why he was given the bonus.

As far as the hosepipe ban is concerned, you really do need to understand where most of the water we use comes from, and how it gets there in the first place. Water companies extract most of the water we use from aquifers, and that water is replenished by rain soaking into the ground and working it's way down to the aquifers.

However, to replenish the water we need rain. Rain in the summer months doesn't do it - the ground tends to be drier so a lot of it runs off rather than being absorbed, and because it's warmer then there is a lot of evaporation as well. It is rain in the winter months which is needed to replenish the aquifers.

Now, in the last two years most of the country has had below average rainfall, which in turn means that the aquifers have not been fully replenished. And because water companies need a licence to extract the water, and have limits imposed on how much they can extract, that translates into a shortage of water in the places we get most of ours from - hence the restrictions on water use.

And as for all those green plants - they get just about all of their water from close to the surface, not from the aquifers we use.

[Booldawg]

so the problem is that water companies dont conserve rainfall efficiently enough.

[AB Editor]

Completely agree youngmafbog. It is a profound nonsense.

I have yet to see a privatized company which actually invests in long-term good. Even Governments don't seem to fancy it all that much!

[Dodger666]

If UK water companies plugged the leaks that waste 3.3 Billion litres of water every day there wouldn't be a need for hosepipe bans. But then that would cost them money and their profits wouldn't be so big and the big bonuses wouldn't get paid.

[youngmafbog]

Exactly Dodger
Huderon, dont really get your comment on asking Thames water. The point of this site os to debate, if I just conacted thames water that would rahter defeat the object. Anyway my point was rely that despite the furore over paying for failure it still continues, this was just the latest example. Also I note that you concentrated on the collection of water and totally 'forgot' to mention he huge leaks. Are you related to the CEO of Thames water, or are you him ????

[Zeuhl]

Whether rainfall is above or below average is relatively insignificant compared with the other two factors; management of the water we do capture and the massive increase in useage. Various governments over the years have chosen to downplay the fact that the population of the south east has grown disproportionately and continues to do so.

In fact, one of the policies of the last government was to force local authorities in the SE to allow massive house building projects. Whilst there may be some infrastructure improvements in hand neither politicians nor water companies are inclined to take enough of a long term view and address the fundamentals.

Instead, they find it easier and more lucrative to ration by pricing or limit useage by legal enforcement a natural resource that as a nation we have a plentiful supply of.

If you talk about this with people from 'drier' countries they think we are mad (or incompetent).

[emmie]

zeuhl, both i would have said.

[Zeuhl]

^^

L O L em
and affected by Water on the Brain after last night

[Huderon]

youngmafbog, I am neither the boss of Thames Water nor am I related to him.

The reason I suggested asking them about his bonus is that it was, in all likelihood, given to him for reasons which are unrelated to the hosepipe ban this year and any level of customer dissatisfaction. So, if you are unhappy about the bonus payment, become a shareholder and vote against it at the next AGM. And before you ask, I'm not a shareholder either.

Now I know that Thames and other water companies lose a lot of water through leaks, and that they probably don't manage the resources well and may well not invest as much in infrastructure as they should. I doubt that nationalising them would change that very much because the government of the day would see any revenue from the nationalised company as another income stream and would put limits on investment in infrastructure in order to boost the governmental coffers as much as possible.

Besides, when you have people in power who are only too ready to point the finger at someone else when things go wrong, what government is going to want to take responsibility for even more problems ?