Its around £9 for fish and chips near me. So you multiply it by say, 5 ,for the number of people and you’re spending 45 quid on just fish and chips (scraps might be included)
Then it shouldn’t survive. It’s not clawing the funds back from Macquarie shareholders, who got paid the funds that should have been used on infrastructure repairs is it?
But the realist in me knows it won’t be allowed to happen.
I know that the government will have to service a £15bn debt through borrowing, which will raise interest rates, mortgages, rents and require cuts to public services to pay for. That is on top of the investment needed over the next few years to stop sewage leaking into rivers and leaks of millions of litres a day.
In addition I know that pension funds and large investors will lose substantial sums of money and will look to divest from similar risks, which could lead to more utility companies becoming insolvent. A snowball effect.
Finally, I know that international investment in the UK will be seen as more risky.
What the government will be doing now is weighing up those risks against the cost of raising bills by the 59% that the water companies and industry bodies are asking for. If the worst should happen, will taxpayers be better off with a couple of hundred extra £ on their water bills to pay, or potentially a lot worse off with a rapid nationalisation of multiple firms.
Service the debt by selling assets of the C suite that got them into this mess. Charge corporations real taxes and levy fines and penalties that are realistic to the damaged caused. Essential services should never be private because this is exactly what happens. And the end user is penalized, and a couple hundred extra € will continue to increase until noone can pay their bills, and then the business will go insolvent anyway, and people will be left without water service anyway.
We need to stop subsidizing corporate failures, so they can privatize the profit.
“No rational investor is going to put their money into water right now.”
Because they shouldn’t be making big profits out of it.
Hand the franchise back and at least if it is being run on a not-for-profit basis then we’ll know that they aren’t taking the piss because public confidence has been eroded by all the piss-taking.
That’s what happens when you fail to maintain things for 30+ years, syphon off all the money for shareholders, and then cry poverty when the government decides that just flushing everyone’s shit into the river isn’t an acceptable way to deal with it.
Tighten the rules further and nationalise any company that can’t keep up. Should never have been privatised in the first place. I, a fairly normal person, cannot pick and choose which company provides my water like I can with electricity, gas and internet. So what’s the point of having a company run it?
bbc.co.uk
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