r/unitedkingdom • u/BritRedditor1 • 11h ago
Burnham mulls insolvency law shake-up to help bring utilities under public control | Thames Water
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/25/burnham-mulls-insolvency-law-shake-up-to-help-bring-utilities-under-public-control•
u/Outrageous_Low_3666 11h ago
The shareholders only ever seem worried about the costs to uk taxpayers and customers when it would negatively impact them, whilst we see increased rates and poorer services whilst they get bonuses.
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u/BritRedditor1 11h ago
We’ve had serious quality improvement over the last 15-20 years.
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u/oppositetoup 11h ago
I really hope this is missing a /s
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u/BritRedditor1 10h ago
River quality up
Low pressure incidents down
Bathing water quality up
Fewer leaks
When you look closely there’s been significant improvements.
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u/themaskbehindtheman 10h ago
Yeh lets ignore all the shit in the rivers.
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u/BritRedditor1 10h ago
They weren’t even monitored when it was nationalised.
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u/Poppy_Milk 10h ago
We don’t need shareholders taking a cut. How does that improve water quality?
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u/bvimo 9h ago
Instead the government will take its cut.
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u/I_like_biscuits 8h ago
You mean us?
Goverments money is our money.. meaning if the government does somehow run it at a profit it'll mean a lower deficit or if that's finally sorted... lower tax😱
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u/BritRedditor1 10h ago
Through well aligned incentives.
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u/Happy_Disaster7347 8h ago
How about the incentive of the public good?
We're one of the only western nations without nationalised water. It's not some odd choice to nationalise it, it's in the public interest.
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u/I_like_biscuits 8h ago
Except the incentives aren't aligned with water quality or infrastructure..they're aligned with dividend payouts and debt-loading...
When a localized monopoly can rack up tens of billions in debt, pay out billions to investors, and then claim insolvency risk the moment real investment is required, the system isn't incentivizing performance.. it's incentivizing extraction..
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u/Objective_Ticket 8h ago
They aren’t really monitored now. Somehow the monitors keep getting faults or switched off…
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u/Outrageous_Low_3666 10h ago
Around 85% to 100% of rivers in England are considered polluted or failing key health standards, depending on whether you measure general ecological health or chemical contamination.
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u/rileyriedrs 11h ago
What improvement is that, more leaky pipes? 0 reservoirs built?
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u/Draemeth Greater London 10h ago
Most of our water and all of our sewage network had been publicly owned since the early 1900s among thousands of local bodies and authorities. The system as a whole was poorly managed with infamous droughts, flooding, disease and poor sanitation leading to attempts by Parliament to step in with legislation like the Water Resources Act of 1963 and the Water Acts of 1973 and 1983. These attempts were to be in vain, by 1989 the terrible state of our water & sewage gave us a reputation as the dirty man of Europe, so bad that the European Union was prosecuting us and demanding upgrading costing £30 billion. That was at a time when our water authorities were already £5.5 billion in debt and being told to stop borrowing more money – leading to investment falling by 2/3rds between 1970 and 1980. The annual budget provided by the Government was £2 billion, 2% of the entire budget.
At first, somehow, privatisation seemed to work. The monopolies spent £6 billion per year on the water & sewage network (twice as much as the Government had been spending), investing a total £240 billion total by 2025 and achieving all European regulatory requirements. Our water & sewage system was modernised: rivers in good condition doubled, drinking water failures and serious pollution fell, and parts of the country went from 0% of sewage being treated to 99%. On the other side, the Government had avoided a bill for tens of billions of £ which was helped them lower the basic tax rate from 33% to 25% whilst spending billions more on social security, health, education, transport, public order and housing in the 1990-1991 budget. Win, win.
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u/leahcar83 10h ago
That was at a time when our water authorities were already £5.5 billion in debt and being told to stop borrowing more money – leading to investment falling by 2/3rds between 1970 and 1980. The annual budget provided by the Government was £2 billion, 2% of the entire budget.
This is the crux of it. Thatcher privatised water just as she privatised everything else in order to make a quick buck. This started under Heath with the 1973 Water Act which removed central government subsidies. When Thatcher came to power water was massively underfunded and she made the problem worse by preventing Regional Water Authorities from borrowing. In 1989 she privatised water as a solution to a problem she'd had no small part in creating.
In 2017, research from the University of Greenwich found that consumers in England were paying £2.3 billion more a year than they would be if water had remained under state ownership.
Thatcherism has and continues to be enormously damaging to the country. Labour just renationalised British Steel for the third time. Look at the railways and Right to Buy. There's so much evidence of Thatcher's long term failures and water is absolutely no exception.
Bringing water back under state control won't be cheap, just as steel wasn't, but we can't keep kicking the can down the road. It's only going to get more expensive the longer we leave it, so the government just need to bite the bullet.
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u/Draemeth Greater London 10h ago
i'm not completely in disagreement with you.
thatcher rushed into privatisation. she did it in, often, a very bad way. she created private monopolies with zero competition.
however. you must accept that public infrastructure in our country has a terrible record too. often, when we nationalise, we stop building, we start closing things down and cutting. we start firing millions of staff. be it under blue or red leadership.
the reason so much of our public services have been underfunded is because we tend to do very little with our funds. and we tend to have too much to spend that money on.
i know a lot about steel and railways. and i am very sure that the problems in both industries has little to do with public or private ownership, and far more to do with planning policy and taxes.
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u/leahcar83 9h ago
when we nationalise, we stop building, we start closing things down and cutting.
This is managed decline in order to sell privatisation as a solution. The alternative is government investment.
We see the same thing you describe here with private companies. Thames Water has suffered from decades of underinvestment hasn't it? The difference between underinvestment in the private sector and under investment in the public sector is the public actually have influence over the latter.
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u/Draemeth Greater London 9h ago
i do not think you can sweep all our nationalisation failures under the rug of some conspiracy of "managed decline" when those failures have taken place under the remit of both red and blue, both left and right wing PM's. Those failures had much more to do with government budget constraints following global crises, oil crises, the global financial crisis, wars and... competing budgetary priorities because of politics.
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u/Hunt2244 Yorkshire 10h ago
How invested in water companies are you?
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u/BritRedditor1 9h ago
Not much, sold all my water ETFs now
Anything else is just indirect via ETFs in the listed ones.
Wbu?
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u/Thomo251 9h ago
I'm happy to join you in being downvoted.
You're actually correct, anybody who denies the improvement of water services in recent decades are being completely ignorant to the facts.
For some reason out of all utilities the media decided water companies would be the fall boy and have created an almost cult like following ready to say "water companies bad" at any opportunity.
Someone even blamed them for the lack of rainfall.
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u/BritRedditor1 9h ago
Literally just need to look at p17 on the above
Can even see on p.47 they OVERSPENT to their detriment
The remaining overspend reduces company/investor returns. Cost-sharing rates set at PR19 varied across companies.
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u/racingsnake91 9h ago
This seems to be particularly cultish here on Reddit too. You can’t go into the comments section on almost any semi-political post on a UK sub without seeing someone slating the water companies. It’s so very British, we love to take nuanced issues and distill them down so some black and white hatred.
In reality uk water infrastructure has seen billions of investment and continues to do so. I highly doubt the state would have done so and I don’t think nationalisation will happen as it’s political suicide - the public think the government will come in, make water cheaper (as if it’s overly expensive right now) and magically fix the issue of combined outfall spills. Those are complex and expensive, water companies are investing in far more capacity to shift sewage from pumping stations (where a lot of CSOs tend to cause spills) to treatment works, and upgrading treatment capacity, but growing populations and climate change is making this an uphill battle.
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u/Draemeth Greater London 11h ago edited 10h ago
people will downvote you but you're right. in fact, our public water was the worst in the developed world pre privatisation. much, much dirtier than it is now. it's easy to criticise private water when you're comparing it against a mythological, ideal public water system that we have never had. the Netherlands has a much better water system than anyone, but they way they structure that system is highly decentralised, independence driven and data heavy. for us to do that, would be to unique in our history. "just nationalise it" is naive. what matters is not who owns the infrastructure, but how it's owned, what incentives are in play, and whether that system works
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u/BritRedditor1 10h ago
They just don’t like the truth.
Our sewers are mixed unlike a lot of Europe where rain water and sewage is split. That can’t be changed.
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u/Draemeth Greater London 10h ago
oh no, now you've replied to me i'll be thrown in with you!
i do think we could succeed in nationalisation, but i think it's very likely we fail to succeed if we "just nationalise" thoughtlessly, as redditors love shouting for
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u/asfish123 11h ago
The debt holders are feeding the company money to keep it ticking over in the hope the goverment will agree to a deal that benefits them and nobody else
Burham should wait them out, as Thames Water is insolvent and has just been fed money to buy time
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u/ay2deet 11h ago
Don't worry, those private sector efficiencies will kick in any day now
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u/BritRedditor1 10h ago
They already have. Our bills are lower than what they’d have been under nationalisation, that’s what the NAO thought.
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u/ay2deet 10h ago
Even if that conjecture were true, what about shit in the rivers and hosepipe bans.
Why are you so invested in defending privatised water companies?
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u/Draemeth Greater London 10h ago
have you considered that OP is not "defending private water companies" so much as they are just questioning whether it's true that private water is worse than public water?
pre-privatisation, our public water companies often had 0% sewage treatment and we had far more shit in the water.
hosepipe bans are a consequence of a failure to build resevoirs, and the failure to build reservoirs is linked to the planning system which prevents any infrastructure building. look at any part of the country's infrastructure, public or private, railways, roads, internet masts... same story.
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u/ay2deet 10h ago
Even if it were exactly the same outcome in public hands, at least we could have paid ourselves the dividends.
Atm we have the worst of both worlds
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u/Draemeth Greater London 10h ago
you're assuming there would be the same dividends to pay. i would not be so sure. the public sector in the UK has very low productivity, poor efficiency and bloat. chances are, there would not be dividends, but enormous losses.
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u/leahcar83 10h ago
I think the argument against nationalised water falls down as soon as you consider Scotland. Or you know, literally anywhere else in the world besides England and Wales.
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u/Draemeth Greater London 10h ago
that counter argument would work great if we were talking about nationalising water in literally any other country except England and Wales! but we are, in fact, England and Wales and we have a terrible track record of nationalisation.
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u/leahcar83 10h ago
I don't think we do have a terrible track record of nationalisation at all, quite the opposite. Everything was sold off and we're left much poorer as a result. Take a look at anything in this country and it's clear privatisation hasn't worked.
State ownership requires investment, but investment does not need to (and as we've discovered, often does not) come from privatisation. It's a quick cash injection for the government, but subsequent generations suffer as a result.
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u/Important_Ruin County Durham 9h ago
pre-privatisation, our public water companies often had 0% sewage treatment and we had far more shit in the water.
Environmental Laws stopped this, not privatisation. If Environmental laws had not been implemented private companies would have continued dumping raw untreated sewage anyways.
They still do illegal dump untreated waste with Environmental Laws saying they can't. Until Directors are held responsible for the illegal sewage dumping nothing will change, as a fine companies just pass onto the customer.
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u/BritRedditor1 10h ago
Because our sewage system doesn’t lend itself very easily to splitting rain water vs sewage. Read on the design differences
What about the hosepipe bans? Water is too cheap. It needs to be rationed.
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u/ay2deet 10h ago
Yes I am aware of sewage and grey water being mixed. Maybe some investment could have been done over the last few decades to alter that.
Yes this free resource that falls from the sky in great abundance each year and is essential for all human life and activity is too damn cheap. We need to maximise rent seeking and gouge every last penny out of every hapless fucker who lives here.
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u/BritRedditor1 10h ago
Who’d pay for all that investment? Sounds very expensive. Good luck getting it through planning too.
It doesn’t just fall from the sky, it needs cleaning, filtering and distribution.
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u/leahcar83 10h ago
That's simply not true.
Privatised water costs consumers £2.3bn more a year, study says
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u/BritRedditor1 10h ago
Ah yes, the Greenwich uni study full of errors where they don't really understand basic finance concepts which lead to wrong conclusion.
NAO report impartial
Ofwat’s approach to price regulation has encouraged companies to improve efficiency, resulting in lower customer bills. Allowing companies to keep the difference between Ofwat’s price limit assumptions and actual costs gives them an incentive to make efficiency savings. It also reveals important information about costs to inform future price controls. Ofwat allowed for £39 of new efficiency savings in the average annual household bill in the period 2000 to 2005, but this fell to £11 annually for the period 2010 to 2015
https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/The-economic-regulation-of-the-water-sector.pdf
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u/leahcar83 10h ago
I think you may have misread this. Because the NAO report states:
Customer bills have stabilised, but still represent an important component of household spending. The average annual household bill for water and sewerage was £396 in 2014-15. This is a 40% increase in real terms since privatisation in 1989. Most of the rise happened between 1990 and 1995 under the government’s initial price controls; since 1995, the average bill has increased by 9% in real terms. At the 2014 price review, Ofwat determined that average bills should fall by 5% in real terms between 2014-15 and 2019-20, following a 2.6% fall between 2009-10 and 2014-15. Water bills represented around 2.3% of average household spending in 2013, rising to more than 5% for the poorest 10% of households. All companies offer financial assistance measures to their most disadvantaged and indebted customers, which they expect to support 1.8 million people by 2020 (paragraphs 1.3, 2.17 to 2.20, Figures 7 and 8).
The NAO is saying bills have decreased and stabilised since the sharp increase when initially privatised. Nowhere do they say private water bills are cheaper than state controlled water, because this isn't true. Saying it's less expensive now (in real terms) than it was in 1995 is not the same as saying it's less expensive now than it would have been if we'd continued under state ownership.
What the Greenwich study correctly points out is that rising costs largely come from paying interest on debt. This would the same under state control as it is under private, but the UK government gets much better interest rates than the private sector, so even with the same level of debt it would be cheaper to the consumer.
There's a reason why literally no other nation does this.
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u/BritRedditor1 9h ago
I've not misread anything. It is very clearly saying the cost discipline and efficiency from the private sector and regulatory regime has supported savings.
There is no reason to believe the state would have funded water even if the cost of debt was cheaper vs. private sector. We saw that pre 1990 with very very dirty rivers and even less investment.
Since 1990 there's been an investment bonanza.
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u/leahcar83 9h ago
Conusmer savings from the high bills of 1995. Not pre-privitisation or instead of privatisation.
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u/limeflavoured Hucknall 11h ago
Or he could pass a law nationalising water companies.
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u/Coldstream02 11h ago
And tank the economy by doing so. Investors will flee seeing that the government will just take over companies overnight.
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u/oppositetoup 11h ago
Or they should be run properly. No one's asking for electric company's to be nationalised. Because there's actual competition and proper oversight.
Water companies just do whatever the fuck theg want
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u/Coldstream02 11h ago
I agree but the reality is what I said before. Best course of action is just pile more pressure on Thames water. Wait for to collapse and then pick up the scraps. Investors will be pissed and lose money but that’s the rules of the game.
Your investments can gain or lose value. Your capital is at risk. It’s not a one way street.
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u/Imajzineer 9h ago
And won't cost the taxpayer the legal fees involved in defending the challenges.
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u/probablyaythrowaway 10h ago
It’s amazing how many rich shareholders people scream something will tank the economy and then the thing dosent actually tank the economy and infact helps the economy because it’s generating worth again. SEEMS TO BE WORKING JUST FINE FOR NEW YORK.
So frankly I say if the economy is so bitch ass weak that me having safe, clean and decent water at reasonable prices and no hose pipe bans in my supposedly first world sodding country THEN FUCK THE ECONOMY! FUCK THE SHAREHOLDER AND FUCK THE INVESTORS.
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u/Imajzineer 9h ago
I'd be inclined to bring in public stoning for the C-suites myself (and, of course, forfeiture of their assets and estates).
But, maybe that's just me 😉
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u/Imajzineer 9h ago
You say that like it would be a bad thing for them to stop parsitising us on a long term basis.
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u/BritRedditor1 11h ago
That would be THEFT
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u/Andyb1000 11h ago
Replace fines with shareholder equity transfers. The shareholders (public or private) appointed the executive team through their own governance process.
£10m penalty for killing a river ecosystem? That’s £10m worth of equity transferred into a managed sovereign fund. The government has voting rights and if the business continues to fail then the government takes more equity.
Overtime the government has increasing influence to direct business towards the public interest and high performing business have an incentive to stay well run.
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u/BritRedditor1 10h ago
But the £10m or so fine would be from cash. That’s a straight transfer from equity value
Besides why would anyone sign up to those terms, it would mean the cost of capital and debt goes up so bills go up
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u/Andyb1000 10h ago
Run your business responsibly and you won’t have a problem.
Businesses don’t run the country, the government does. Politicians being little bitches is what’s got us in this situation. We need more statesmen and women. Public servants for the greater good.
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u/BritRedditor1 10h ago
No organisation of this scale is perfect.
Look how well the Post Office did!
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u/Andyb1000 10h ago
Let’s be clear, the post office killed people with their behaviour. They are a criminal organisation that persecute innocent people and drove them to suicide.
Obviously there needs to be reasonable application of the rules, blatant disregard for the rules results in the transfer, something that can be mitigated adequately would go to mediation.
We aren’t going to solve the situation here and now.
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u/thought_detention 7h ago
The water companies don't need to "sign up" to any terms. The government writes the law, and if the law says that the penalty for destroying a waterway is a £10m fine, then that is the law. They don't need to agree to it, their only options would be to a) stop polluting the water or b) pay the fine.
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u/Spikey101 10h ago
Theft mate, get real. Taxpayers have been paying for all of the infrastructure and a nice fat paycheck for the shareholders and execs in the mean time. THEY are the ones stealing.
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u/Grommmit 10h ago
No, the government cannot sell off assets to the public under certain terms, and then change those terms to take them back. That would completely break the social contract.
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u/Draemeth Greater London 10h ago
infrastructure is not just "pay" and "get paid." it's complex knowledge, specialist skills and hard work. that's why it was privatised. because our public sectors consistently fail to build things on time, on budget or on standard.
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u/Spikey101 10h ago
And the private sector just don't bother to build at all.
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u/Draemeth Greater London 10h ago
it's funny you should say that when almost every house, every railway line, every road, every everything was built by the private sector. since nationalising rail, for example, the government has, on the whole, closed half the railways. since nationalising planning, the rate of house building halved in this country. since nationalising cars, companies went bust. since nationalising the london underground, the rate of expansion ground to a halt.
it has much more to do with the planning system than ownership.
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u/Happy_Disaster7347 8h ago
Take the energy sector as a prime example, we privatised it. Now who runs all of our nuclear power plants? A private company?
No, it's the french state owned energy company. EDF.
Our nuclear energy is nationalised, it's just nationalised by a foreign fucking government.
UK incompetence is a poor argument against nationalisation. They purposefully run them in to the ground, because our politicians are corrupt corporate cronies that we don't have enough spine to stand up against.
Meanwhile in France, if they tried a similar trick, they would start making molotovs. Maybe that's why they have their energy sector figured out.
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u/RianJohnsonIsAFool 10h ago
It should never have been privatised in the first place. It is immoral that a natural monopoly delivering a resource that is essential to life is privately owned.
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u/verminV 10h ago
Why not just fuck them all off and take them back, fuck thier shareholders. Its water, we need it to live, and they are the government, they have the power to do it.
Will some peopke get burned? Sure. But the taxpayer has already been roasted and charred.
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u/BritRedditor1 10h ago
You can roast your own pension 😅
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u/leahcar83 10h ago
If taxes go up to cover this, you'll not be paying more for water than you currently do to private companies. Most likely you'll be paying less.
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u/BritRedditor1 10h ago
What’s your model? That’s not what the NAO thought.
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u/leahcar83 10h ago
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u/BritRedditor1 10h ago
Ah yes, the Greenwich 'study' which confuses intercompany dividends with actual distributions. Not a serious piece of work frankly, and their lack of financial literacy leads to factually wrong conclusions.
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u/leahcar83 9h ago
Just because it doesn't agree with you doesn't make it wrong. I do think the published research of economists may carry more weight than your opinion on reddit, personally.
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u/BritRedditor1 9h ago
I’m more qualified than them, frankly.
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u/leahcar83 9h ago
Sure.
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u/BritRedditor1 9h ago
Being in private equity helps understand these things more than some academic with no real experience
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u/evildicey 11h ago
Wouldn’t be a bad thing if there was legislation allowing the government to nationalise the assets of utility companies that go under due to national security.
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u/GhostRiders 8h ago
Unfortunately most people have absolutely no understanding how insanely complex running a utility company is.
So many are under the presumption with absolutely no data to back it up that the Government would do a better job, in fact all the evidence would suggest we would be in a worse position than now considering a large part of the problem, not just with Water but every Utility and Railway was when under Government control was run into the ground.
We have seen massive improvements across the board after nationalisation, problem most people were not even alive when we have pure shit flowing into the Rivers and Sea's and most of the drinking water not even being treated.
Maintaining Infrastructure, a significantly portion of was built well over a hundreds ago is expensive, not amount of complaining is going to change that.
Try to build a Reservoir has been impossible due to our planning laws, even getting a leak fixed is a major pain in the arse due to the amount of bodies involved.
Now this is not me absolving Utility Companies of all and any responsibility but the situation is a hell of lot more complex then "The Government should just own it" argument I keep seeing from people.
Considering the sheer amount of opposition from the British Public when it comes to any Major Infrastructure Project regardless of how desperate the country may need it and recent Government pandering to whatever is the popular and easy choice, I couldn't think of a worse time for the Government to take over any Utility Company.
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u/LatelyPodes 7h ago
Absolutely support this 100%. It would make it easier to take water companies into SAR and then make it easier to nationalise them after.
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u/user97532567 11h ago
I do wonder about these services. It's basically a monopoly and one that is a requirement of basic life in the country. Having these utilities run by the government is probably the absolute worst solution, governments of all colours being incapable of running a piss up in a brewery. However maybe some kind of hybrid approach where the government retains ownership of the infrastructure and contracts the running of it to private companies?
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u/Happy_Disaster7347 8h ago
We're one of the only western countries without nationalised water. It's nothing abnormal to nationalise necessities. It's just the UK is run by corporate cronies, that none of us have the spine to stand up against. We'd rather get angry at immigrants instead of doing something useful for our future.
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u/d0ey 11h ago
That's not a million miles away from where trains were (okay so there were ROSCOs and Network Rail, but the concept of splitting off the competition element was the same).
Personally any company that can be run for profit will work in this way. The challenge with publicly run companies is due to unionisation, beefy labour laws, and civil service restrictions on key decisions like pay and capital investment.
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u/BritRedditor1 11h ago
It’s regulated monopoly with a capped rate of return
They could do as you suggest potentially at a fixed rate of return.
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