Lock up criminal water bosses – and nationalise the industry

Last month saw a record number of criminal investigations being launched into water companies, under a government crackdown on sewage dumping.

There has been a 400% increase in inspections for sewage pollution since last July, which has revealed widespread law-breaking from private water companies across the country.

This clampdown on water criminals has been made possible, in part, through increasing resource to investigate their waste.

The Environment Agency is responsible for holding water companies to account for their pollution. By the time the Conservatives left power, the agency’s budget had been cut down to half of what it was in 2010. Since last July, the Environment Agency has hired 400 more staff to carry out inspections into water companies and pollution.

It is time we call it how it is. Those who break the law should be made to pay for it. Water company bosses are clearly breaking the law at an industrial scale, and should be treated as they industrial criminals they are.

Criminal water bosses should be locked up – for polluting our waters, but also for the decades of failure they have inflicted upon us.

Sheffielders are currently being threatened with a hosepipe ban, because of the risk of drought. Yes, we have just had the driest spring since 1852, but there is another cause for the need for a hosepipe ban that they are not mentioning.

Private water companies have not built a new reservoir in decades. In over thirty years, in fact: the last one being built before Margaret Thatcher privatised the water industry. That means that at no point in their existence has a private water company invested to develop the reservoir capacity they are responsible for.

Greenpeace tell us that England is the only country in the world to have privatised its entire water system.

We have all watched in confusion and shock at Donald Trump’s handling of the US economy, and the economic stupidity that his so-called Department of Government Efficiency has let lose, sabotaging their own country with cuts. Yet even with that level of self-inflicted economic pain they have not gone as far as fully privatised their own water supply.

That we tolerate it boggles the mind. I was born into a post-privatised world, and learning about privatisation – that the government willingly let people profit from providing the water we all need to survive – is something that on paper sounds only possible in a dystopian novel.

I only learned later that those companies have for years dumped raw sewage into our waterways, and without any repercussion. Dumping raw sewage into our rivers and seashores is the behaviour of a cartoon villain, but as they say, the truth is madder than fiction.

Private water is a fictious market. Water companies were gifted natural monopolies over geographic areas. It is not a market in the sense that you can choose to go with another water provider that, for example, does not pollute our water with faeces because a) you can’t change providers and b) they are all at it.

A public service, which this so evidently is, should be treated as a public good. Water is core to human survival and flourishing. It must be brought under public ownership, so that our waterways can be given the protection and stewardship they need and deserve, not exploited to the point of ruin in the pursuit of shareholder profit.

Those who have for years dumped sewage into rivers, refused to invest in infrastructure, and gotten wealthy at our expense, should all be in prison. For the good of all of us, the government must take back control of our water.