The Government is still ruling out public ownership of water when it is the only solution that makes sense to crumbling infrastructure, polluted waterways, astronomically high bills and very, very well paid bosses. The water privatisation experiment has utterly failed.
I am certain every person in Brighton and Hove has been affected in some way by this disaster. Our coastline is regularly contaminated with horrendous sewer releases, our streets are continually flooded with sewage, and burst mains and leaks are as bad or worse than ever.
Patcham locals have rightly been outraged by the 280 sewage leaks in the past four years. I am horrified that in my constituency school children are regularly forced to walk through raw sewage on the pavement. When Caroline Lucas showed me the response she had received from Southern Water last year which tried to blame the local high school for the faulty drains, saying they should educate students “on what to flush down the toilets and drains”, I was astonished.
Residents in Patcham are worried this problem will get even worse (Image: Sian Berry)
I am often in Patcham and have seen these stomach churning scenes myself. One of my constituents, Rebecca, who grew up in Patcham has made the link between climate change and the increasing likelihood of heavier rain: “Since 2021 more storms and global warming have increased the flooding. Now it’s often raw sewage flooding Patcham’s streets. When there’s heavy rainfall the drains can’t cope.” In both May and April this year, I was alerted by Southern Water to two separate “spills” from the Shoreham Wastewater Treatment Works. I have met residents and sea-swimming groups who have been very sick after swimming in our waves and I have seen beach lovers of all kinds at massive protests. One sea swimmer, Jo, told me she was outraged that we have all been left in this predicament for so long.
Sian Berry (Image: Sian Berry)
This year Southern Water bills were hiked by an average of 47 per cent – the highest of any British water supplier. Is that money being used to fix the many, many problems with Brighton’s Victorian water system? No. In the last three decades, £78 billion was paid out in dividends to shareholders of water companies, for every pound of your water bill, 35p goes on interest payments and shareholder payouts. All the while, the infrastructure these companies are responsible for maintaining is being run into the ground. It is diabolical.
The Government knows this cannot go on. In October it established an independent commission to review the industry, and this confirmed what we already knew: “deep-rooted, systemic” problems that are the fault of companies, the Government and industry regulators. However the Government actively prevented commissioners from considering public ownership of water as a solution.
In contrast, my Green colleagues and I have long called for water to be brought into public hands, and my constituents overwhelmingly support this. A clean water supply, a basic human need, should never be based on profit, and the money we pay for it must go towards cleaning up our seas and rivers and fixing broken infrastructure like Patcham’s sewage system, rather than lining the pockets of executives.
When we push them, ministers always say that bringing water companies into public ownership would cost too much, and that money from the public purse must be spent elsewhere. But the often-quoted cost of £99 billion to re-nationalise is based on the estimate from a think tank funded by… water companies.
Their suspiciously precise figure is not based on any real market value of the companies. Ewan McGaughey, a professor of law at King’s College London, writing for not-for-profit Common Wealth points out: “it would be possible for the government to argue that their appropriate value in law was notably less, even close to zero.”
I am glad that there is some good cross-party work happening in Parliament on this, but we need many more MPs to join us, and I have also been supporting Labour MP Clive Lewis’s Water Bill, which advocates for public ownership. Resources like water should be above both marketisation and party politics.
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