The UK drought is serious!

For the past 30 years the privatised water companies have been paying their bosses and shareholders big bonuses. Now they whine about old pipes while they piss 30 percent of the water down the drains before it ever gets to the customers. They say desalination is too expensive and it costs too much to pipe water a few hundred miles from the north of the country. They've been doing nothing of any significance to solve these issues for the last few decades.

At the same time the Americans and Saudis have enough water to fill swimming pools in the middle of deserts.

If UK water companies can't supply water properly, they should be renationalised and all that fat cat profit should be put into supplying the service, instead of lining pockets.
 
london-boy said:
Today is the first non-rainy day in almost 2 weeks! (notice how i said non-rainy and not "sunny"...)

Doesn't help. Apparently summer rain is "the wrong type of rain". It doesn't soak far into the ground, mostly evaporating back off or running off the ground. It's the several last few years of dry winters that have failed to replenish the underground aquifers, while water consumption has gone up.

Of course for the last few years, everyone could see rises in global warming, increasing water use and deacreasing winter rainfall, but the water companies have done bugger all, while still wasting huge amounts of water.

We've already got a countrywide network of canals, it wouldn't be asking the moon to ship water down to the south from the north where they have no problems. God knows the south-east shares enough of it's wealth to help the rest of the country, it would only be fair for them to send us some of their spare water. The water companies won't do it because they'd rather put in less effort and charge customers more whilst supplying less.
 
I used to work for NWW, specifically leakage control, back in the "good old days". It was no different then as it is now; leakage was given far too small a budget as it would eat into the profit margins quite considerably. Money aside though, it all reeked of incompetence. I would regularly report faulty pressure sensors, flow meters, dodgy valves, etc but they would never get fixed - just pushed from department to department. In the end all my job came down to was pointing out the obvious: old stuff leaks.
 
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:
We've already got a countrywide network of canals, it wouldn't be asking the moon to ship water down to the south from the north where they have no problems. God knows the south-east shares enough of it's wealth to help the rest of the country, it would only be fair for them to send us some of their spare water. The water companies won't do it because they'd rather put in less effort and charge customers more whilst supplying less.

If you've got all that spare money, why not just spend it then? There's plenty of water up here, we're sloshing around in it.

A national water grid isn't going to happen if it's left to the private sector -- they're just way too myopic. If you want one you've got to persuade your politicians that you want it and you're willing to pay for it!

Or we could be really radical and sort out the root cause of the problem -- too many people living in the south-east!
 
I should start a business selling pure Canadian water to those poor people in the UK.
 
Blitzkrieg said:
Couldnt they just pass a law stating a minimum amount of leaking say 5-10%?

They already have targets, which the main problem water company in the South East has failed to hit several years in a row, and has been fined accordingly. The problem in particular with water pipes in London is that they are old and coming to the end of their useful life. The water companies did nothing about this because it's a big and expensive job, and now it's come to a head because the recent dry winters have made this mismanagement an issue. At the same time, these companies have been making major profits and paying their bosses big bonuses.
 
I think we should just outsource our water needs. When we need a shower we go to India. When we need to wash our clothes we go to Canada.
 
This is crazy. One of my company's former sister companies was Palmer Environmental - foremost leader in leak detection and prevention. They're - drum roll - a UK company. Unfortunately for the Brits their business is strongest in - drum roll - the US and Mideast.

Crazy.
http://www.palmer.co.uk/about.htm
 
Neeyik said:
I used to work for NWW, specifically leakage control, back in the "good old days". It was no different then as it is now; leakage was given far too small a budget as it would eat into the profit margins quite considerably. Money aside though, it all reeked of incompetence. I would regularly report faulty pressure sensors, flow meters, dodgy valves, etc but they would never get fixed - just pushed from department to department. In the end all my job came down to was pointing out the obvious: old stuff leaks.

how ironic! all this waste, unwritten policy of "let's say it's working and don't do anything".. You sound like you worked in USSR :).
 
Maybe this will be the example to finally point out to the government and the water companies that YES there really is something wrong. YES they need to do something about it.

This is far from the first time I've heard people saying that the privatised industries aren't investing enough in their network/infrastructure due to it hurting the profit margin.

Then again, it could just be wishful thinking and the government might stamp its feet a little but ultimately do nothing to get in the way of the fat-cats getting their money.... same old, same old...

Jack
 
Hmm so fines arent working? Maybe they need to increase the fines, or direct the fines against the directors themselves for mismanagement. Make them nasty too.
 
JHoxley said:
This is far from the first time I've heard people saying that the privatised industries aren't investing enough in their network/infrastructure due to it hurting the profit margin.
The problem is that the water companies are private monopolies in their individual areas. If they provide a crap service, who else are you going to buy your water from? There's no incentive for them to do better, beyond the fines, and the fines clearly aren't heavy enough.

It's not clear how this can change. It's not like we're going to end up with half-a-dozen water mains coming to each house. How can one contrive to construct a market which gives the owners of the infrastructure the incentive to invest in sorting it out?

I guess the closest analogue is the gas or electricity markets, where one company is responsible for the distribution infrastructure, and other companies compete nationwide for the actual retail custom. But the difference with gas is that gas leaks are bloody dangerous and hence get fixed as a matter of priority! Ditto electricity, which doesn't leak it just works, or it doesn't, and customers notice when it doesn't!
 
In short, that's why privatising those things never works. Not even if you have separate companies managing the infrastructure.

Because, don't you think that's weighting even more on their bottom line? What more products or services do they have to offer?

Be smart, and let your government handle those things.
 
DiGuru said:
Be smart, and let your government handle those things.
Yeah, unfortunately that doesn't work very well either. The private sector only care about the bottom line, the public sector doesn't care about the bottom line at all, and things end up costing five times what they need to.

Anyway, this is getting dangerously close to politics for a thread in The Fluffeh forum.
 
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