Hosepipe hypocrites
Water firm lets billions of litres leak away as it plans a ban
THE water company that has threatened millions with a hosepipe ban faced an angry backlash yesterday over its failure to fix leaking pipes.
United Utilities was accused of ‘cheek’ to impose the ban on its seven million customers while it wastes vast amounts of water from leaks.
Some 25 per cent of all its water is wasted via cracked and broken pipes – a staggering 439.2million litres every day. Meanwhile its chief executive Steve Mogford has seen his salary rise 49 per cent since 2013 to £2.3million last year.
Irate residents spoke out at the ‘cheek’ of facing restrictions from August 5.
One resident complained a leaky water main has not been fixed for nine weeks, while another complained of ‘thousands of gallons’ pouring out of a burst pipe for two days.
Cat Hobbs, director of We Own It, an organisation which campaigns for public ownership of utilities, said: ‘United Utilities is allowing an irresponsible level of leakage – 20 to 25 per cent.
‘A hosepipe ban might be avoided if that water wasn’t being wasted. We need to bring water into public ownership now so investment can go straight into infrastructure instead of lining shareholder pockets.
‘In Paris, water is now in public ownership and leakage levels have been cut to 10 per cent.’
Professor David Hall, a global expert on the water industry at the University of Greenwich, said privatised water firms have an incentive not to fix too many leaks as it begins to bite into profits and become uneconomic for them.
He said: ‘They are making big profits, virtually all of it taken out of the industry in dividends, not reinvesting anything and racking up debt. They can’t recoup the cost of making reductions in leakage levels except by reducing profits, that’s not what they want to do.’
Stuart Fegan, GMB national officer, said: ‘It’s a disgrace that customers face a £1,000 fine as private water fat cats trouser millions, all the while failing to invest to tackle leakages.’ One United Utilities customer complained it has taken the firm nine weeks to fix a leak in Denton, Manchester.
Julie Wilson, 56, who runs the Village Chippy restaurant, has complained three times to United Utilities about the leak on Haughton Green Road.
She said: ‘It’s madness –they could have filled four swimming pools with the amount of water that’s poured out. We’ve had two letters saying they were going to turn the water off and nothing’s happened. I got into work and started filling buckets at 6am and then another time a man came with digging equipment.’
‘He took one look and drove off and they have the cheek to announce a hosepipe ban.’
Sophie Gorner, of Poulton, Lancashire, said thousands of gallons of water had been wasted after United Utilities waited 14 weeks to fix the leak on her road.
Miss Gorner, a photography student, 25, who lives with her parents, said: ‘It’s ridiculous. My mum first reported it in May and other locals have as well.
‘ It’s definitely got worse, it started off as a trickle but now it’s a never-ending flow of water.
‘They have wasted gallons of water and now there’s a hosepipe ban.’ The leak had still not been fixed yesterday.
Earlier this year United Utilities was one of several water companies that said it used divining rods to detect leaks – but yesterday it stressed it was using high tech methods.
A spokesman said: ‘We now use satellites to help to detect leaks, and we have just recruited a team of sniffer dogs trained to pinpoint leaks in rural areas.’ In response to specific leaks identified by the Daily Mail, United Utilities insisted all four had either been earmarked for repairs or been fixed, with works ‘well within target’.
The firm said: ‘Leaks are a regular occurrence in a water system that has 42,000km of pipes which would go around the equator.’
Martin Padley, United Utilities water services director, said of the hosepipe ban: ‘ It is not a decision we have taken lightly and we are enormously grateful to customers for having helped reduce the demand on our network over the last couple of weeks, but unless we get a period of sustained rainfall before August 5 these restrictions will help us safeguard essential water supplies for longer.’
WITH aching predictability, officialdom has seized on the heatwave to punish the British public.
The sunshine might have brought a warm glow to the nation, but it also serves as an excuse for corporate bosses to indulge in their favourite activities of guilt- tripping, rationing, finger-wagging and money-grabbing.
Yesterday, the water company United Utilities, which supplies seven million customers in the North- West of England, announced the introduction of a hosepipe ban across the region because of supposed shortages.
Anyone breaching this edict will face a criminal prosecution and a fine of up to £1,000. Welcome to sunny Britain, where filling the family paddling pool has been turned into a crime against the state.
The move by United follows the recent introduction of a hosepipe ban in Northern Ireland, and further restrictions are likely elsewhere, given the instinct of monopolistic organisations for bullying control dressed up as social concern.
Indeed, that impulse to hector people about their domestic habits was on full display last week when Rachel Fletcher, head of the water industry regulator Ofwat, told MPs that households should no longer use tap water for gardening and car washing.
Impose
‘The idea of using treated drinking-quality water to water our gardens and wash our cars in the 21st century just doesn’t seem appropriate,’ she declared piously.
Issuing dire warnings about climate change and population growth, Ms Fletcher — who has had a long career in regulatory bureaucracy — also complained that only a minority of homes have water butts, while gardeners make far too little use of recycled bath or shower water.
But why should we swallow these lectures, given the miserable failures of the water firms to provide an efficient service and Ofwat to impose improvements in supplies?
The fact is that the industry is using both the good weather and the fashionable green agenda as a cloak to hide its own gross mismanagement.
This recent crisis is selfinflicted, for the water companies — supposedly regulated by Ofwat — have set new levels in the service sector for incompetence, greed and contempt for customers.
It is ridiculous that gardeners, bathers and carwashers now face severe restrictions because of such self-serving boardroom excess and refusal to invest in a decent infrastructure.
We should not be facing any restrictions, given our traditionally damp weather. Only a few months ago, we endured a hard winter and long, dull spring. Other, more southerly European countries, with far drier climates, manage better than we do in Britain.
Daily Mail reader, Ann Brook, wrote yesterday from Cadiz in south-west Spain that ‘four months without a drop of rain is not uncommon, but there has never been a water shortage and there is lush greenery and trees everywhere’.
In line with current environmental posturing, the water companies talk of water as ‘a precious resource’. Not only is such politically correct language absurd in our rainy island, but the firms’ earnest rhetoric is also contradicted by their own reckless behaviour.
Every single day, 3 billion litres of drinking water — one fifth of the entire total pumped into the system — is allowed to drain away through leaks.
The companies now complain about the heat, yet earlier this year Thames Water, one of the biggest corporations, used the cold snap as an excuse to explain shortages in London, when around 20,000 households were left without water supplies owing to burst pipes.
One expert, Roland Gilmore of the Thames Blue- Green Economy, was deeply sceptical and said at the time: ‘For water mains to be affected, the frost needs to penetrate 2ft underground. We haven’t had that degree of penetration, so I don’t believe them.’ He’s almost certainly right, given that in June 2017, Thames Water was fined £8.5 million for leaks totalling 47 million litres a day, while it was also reported the same year that for every 625 miles of mains in the region, there were 265 burst pipes.
Also, in March of that year, the company was fined £20 million, after allowing the upper reaches of the Thames to be contaminated with untreated sewage. The judge in the case condemned the firm for ‘inadequate investment’ and ‘diabolical maintenance’.
What is so insulting about the present mess of the water industry is that while the public endures an expensive, over-priced service, a small group of fat cats is lapping up extra thick financial cream.
Largesse
As this paper revealed last month, the chief executives of nine water companies have personally raked in £58 million in the past five years.
One of the worst offenders is Steve Mogford, head of United Utilities which has imposed the present hosepipe ban in the North-West. Having profited from a £12 million package since 2013, he was handed £2.3 million last year.
Yet he was not even the best paid in the industry. That dubious position is held by 42-yearold Liv Garfield, who collected £2.45 million last year as the boss of Severn Trent Water.
There’s not a shred of justification for this largesse. It’s not as if water provision is a complex, risky business. The bosses pretend to be entrepreneurs, but they are really over-paid bureaucrats. Theirs is a simple model, with a captive market, an absence of competition and guaranteed revenues.
Last year, water bills, which have risen by 40 per cent in real terms since privatisation in 1989, brought in £11.7 billion, providing the companies with whacking profits of £2 billion.
It is this lucrative cash flow — not the interests of the British public — that really matters to the water companies.
This is because they are not connected to the customers they so ruthlessly exploit. Too many are remote entities, in the grip of international equity firms and foreign investors.
The abysmally run Thames Water, for instance, was owned from 2006 by Australian investment bank Macquarie, which paid no corporation tax and loaded the firm with debts of £10.6 billion.
Sold off last year, Thames is now in the hands of a consortium of 11 funds, including the Kuwait Investment Authority, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and the China Investment Corporation.
Profits
In similar vein, Northumbrian Water is owned by the investment vehicle, C. K. Hutchison, headed by Hong Kong billionaires, while Southern Water is the property of Greensands Holdings, an arm of the mighty international bank J.P. Morgan.
It’s not surprising, therefore, that rather than focusing on customer service, the aim of so many water companies has been to maximise profits and shareholder dividends.
Earlier this year, Environment Secretary Michael Gove attacked the water firms’ ‘keen use of sophisticated financial engineering’, through which they established ‘multi-layer corporate structures of dizzying complexity, involving multiple subsidiaries, many of them based offshore’.
Most water companies now claim to be changing their ways and are withdrawing from links with havens such as the Cayman Islands. But it is too late — the damage has been done.
It will take far more than that to rebuild public trust, particularly when disruptive hosepipe bans are introduced.
The author C.S. Lewis once wrote that ‘of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than omnipotent moral busybodies’.
Tragically, the water industry today manages to embody the traits both of robber barons
busybodies.