Why not?
Apparently Thames Water will run out of money by this time next year, unless OFWAT gives it permission to ramp millions of customers bills by 59% by 2030.
It is also in debt to the tune of £18 billion and apparently its infrastructure is at the point of collapse.
And yet none of the coverage of the story I heard yesterday, asked the obvious questions.
How do you run up debts of £18 billion and still have collapsing infrastructure?
Surely you borrowed the money to upgrade the infrastructure?
Where is the money you borrowed?
and most importantly. What the hell was OFWAT doing when Thames ran up massive debts and let its infrastructure collapse?
Really, we are going to let the organisation whose job it was to ensure that the water flowed pure and clean and yet which has let vital parts of Thames water purifying plants get to the edge of collapse, decide on what our bills should be?
Let’s be clear Thames is trying to blackmail OFWAT into letting it heap insult on injury and have us, its customers, pay for this work to be done again; while still paying its managers a fortune and its shareholders dividends.
It thinks it can do this because the government doesn’t want to be ladened with its problems and borrowing.
The obvious answer is NO. Go bust, we don’t care, your shareholders will lose everything and your bond holders too. They got you in this mess, they can take the hit. Then we run Thames as a proper company devoted to serving its customers.
Anything else runs the danger of moral hazard, that companies know they can run themselves into the ground and demand more money from customers or the state.
But these are privatised companies, red in tooth and claw, the state has no responsibility to them or their shareholders, they are more efficient than state ownership, better run and better managed. We were told that for 40 long years, now apparently they want state aid.
But the government only needs to keep the taps flowing, in the cheapest way possible, it is their duty to the tax payer and to the customers of Thames Water.
It is the government which should be blackmailing Thames, not the other way round.
Do your job or everyone loses their money and we pick you up for nothing.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
Was it Thatcher who said that ‘you can’t buck the markets’? (not even Liz Truss could do that). Of course the customers have nowhere else to go, but that’s still no reason why a monopoly can’t fail - in an open market you’d expect a 59% price rise to drive customers away in droves. So let the useless execs fail, the company fall and then nationalise and put decent bosses in. Oh - and sort out the regulator, get one that’s not too cosy with its charges
And apparently now they are making a profit - so where does that go? To the shareholders of course. This is no way to provide an essential public service which its 'customers' have no option other than to use. The whole model was flawed from the outset, as many of us realised. Let them go hang.