https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/neoliberal-model-privatised-water-sunk

INVESTMENT in Britain’s water utilities took a dive under Thatcher’s government. By 1980 investment by the regional water authorities dropped by two-thirds as the neoliberal straitjacket into which public expenditure was confined limited their ability to raise capital.

Contrast this to the present situation where the now privatised water companies have racked up millions in loans that seem more valued as a source of ready cash to pay bonuses, dividends and sweeteners than infrastructure investment.

The total debt burden of the dozen privately owned water companies stands at £65 billion which this year’s Commons report says is perilously close to the 70 per cent gearing at which commercial credibility is compromised.

Jo Maugham, director of the Good Law Project, which has been involved in legal challenges to a number of water companies, says: “The water sector has been poorly regulated for decades. It has been poorly regulated primarily by allowing water companies to over extract water from aquifers and reservoirs but also cash from operating entities within the water companies, and they’ve been allowed to underinvest in water infrastructure.”

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The logical case for public ownership is sometimes challenged by the suggestion that taking these failing enterprises into public ownership would be prohibitively expensive.

This is, of course, true if these enterprises were to offered for sale at the price their owners value them. A socialist government armed with a popular mandate and backed by a working class armed with both resolve and the necessary instruments of coercion might simply dispossess these rapacious incompetents and instruct them, individually and as a class, to find an alternative way of making a living freed of the responsibilities of ownership.

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/neoliberal-model-privatised-water-sunk