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The New Statesman’s Will Dunn on why our water bills are rising. Subscribe on YouTube: …
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23 comments
I find it irritating that, to this day, so many people celebrate a politician whose greatest achievement was to steal what the nation owned and sell it the highest bidders.
In May 2025 Yorkshire Water were fined £40m for their incompetence around leaks, sewerage and other issues. There have been other, smaller fines from OFWAT since.
The result? My domestic water bill has almost doubled. There is little point in fining these state monopolies as they’ll recoup the money from their captive customer base. I can take my business elsewhere if the leccy or gas goes up too much. YW can charge what they like and, because we need water to function in modern society there is nothing their beleaguered customers can do.
What incentive is there to improve the service? If you privatise there needs to be competition for improvement. That doesn't work with water, rail or the nhs. We have been victims of enshitification. Also they've introduced water meters. We weren't ever supposed to pay for water. Water is free, it's a human right. The piped and maintenance is what we pay for. Metered water is a crime.
PROFIT. That is why. Look at WHOS making all the MONEY and go from there. It is SIMPLE.
Because privatised water companies drained as much money as they could into shareholder dividends and skimped on the maintenance to do it. Same as with the privatised railways. The lack of maintenance piles up over time until things go badly wrong – and they still pay huge dividends, plus bonuses to those making it all happen. Next, with the system falling apart around them, they toss it back to the public sector so that things can be brought back up to proper standards using taxpayer money. A decade or two after that, the Tories (or whoever replaces them) will be squealing about inefficiency in public services and trying to re-privatise.
Water bills are going up 26% over 5 years though right not one year? I think water should be public but lets not pretend that solves the problem. There are more problems than just investment though it is a big one obviously. And we would still actually have to invest which the government doesn't seem to do with any other service they run
His face reminds me of a man with whom I met through matrimonial site with family at a temple !!!! And he was mentally unfit, but still looks normal !¡!! That's how good people are cheated and having divorces !!!! Relating game and face matching are not working with me nowadays !!!!!!! Sorry dear @ The New Statesman ❤.
And the shareholders take their cut again and again and again ,till the tax payers have to cough up to repair the damage of 30 yrs underinvestment ,same with the railway.
No, when a government signs bad contracts you pay for it again again and again .
And these contracts were done by the civil service.
The public sector would be in just as much of a mess if they held onto the water. But instead they made bad contracts and messed it up again.
Nothing to do with privatisation, more to do with useless civil service who can't run organisations and can't get others to run organisations
It's rains 8 months of the year yet we have one of the most expensive water bills.
The private sector has never been a good substitute for state control.
We are all being ripped off cruelly.
The decision must be reversed.
Of course everythings Thatcher's fault. She actually made decisions and changed things. Not always for the good. Can any other Prime Minister since say they changed much?
Thatcher may have privatised these services but successive governments both labour and conservative failed to properly regulate the private companies and ensure that a proper amount of profits were used to improve the infrastructure. Sounds like the investment was forthcoming during the Thatcher years but allowed to dwindle during subsequent years.
So then, it wasn't due to Thatchers decision to privatise water, but in fact, the decision of the private companies, over the years, to invest less.
Wasnt a great idea, sewage in the seas, lakes and rivers now. Hasn't worked.
And Labour won't do a thing to stop this…
If British conservatives weren’t so corrupt or thick they’d realise that their beloved Maggie is the root cause of most their problems.
The milk snatcher is still giving……. Anyone remember the yuppies…… Look around you today they are everywhere and it's really funny to watch them.
Rubbish.
Those bills have gone up mainly due to the cult of climate change.
Corporate criminality
less of the 'we' Englishman. My water is not private.
Well you'll end up with higher taxes instead if it hadn't been privatised, so you'll still end up paying one way or another. At least this way the spending is kept of the government books.
Maybe the EU would have blocked the rises in energy bills as they did in EU 😢
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