Politics always has the ability to surprise, but some things are constant. As everyone who has ever stood to be a councillor tells me, dog excrement is one of the most regular concerns raised with them. To be less subtle, the simple fact is that people do not like shit.
So it was hardly surprising that when Tory MPs voted against spending money to improve sewage overflow systems, with the inevitable consequence that human excrement would end up in rivers and on our coastlines, they really should have anticipated the anger coming their way.
The government's argument is that they cannot possibly afford to spend between £150bn and £650bn to update the UK's Victorian sewage systems. So, they say, we must live with the shit. This makes no sense at all.
Firstly, as I point out time and again, the UK is awash with savings looking for a secure return. What better than to issue accessible savings accounts to attract money for this purpose as well as for a Green New Deal? £70 billion a year goes into ISAs. More than £100 billion goes into pensions. The subsidy to them costs £60 billion a year, which we can apparently afford although we cannot afford a decent sewage system. And a sewage system can recover its cost through charges to cover the cost of interest and even capital repayments in the long term to pay a return to savers. But the government refuses to join up these dots. Why is that?
Second, why too are questions on the affordability of this tolerated? That makes no sense, at all. Those Victorian sewage systems on which we still rely created the greatest transformation in public health in our history. Let sewage go out of control now and we can be sure health will suffer immeasurably. But it is claimed we cannot afford to do anything about this. The reality is that we cannot afford not to. Add it to the list of things that we have no choice but do.
The simple fact is that we actually give a shit. It's time the government noticed.
It's time it secured the readily available funding to make a difference on this issue: offer people sewage bonds at 1% or so and they would buy them.
It's time we got the people together to deliver such projects. We cannot afford not to.
And yes, I know a lot of very ungreen concrete will be involved. The imperative to drive the rest of the economy to net zero is even stronger in that case.
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We have been reliant upon crumbling Victorian infrastructure for far too long. Thank god our ancestors had some vision, and understood the need to invest for the future.
I understand the difficulty – imposing a legal duty doesn’t create a plan to fix the problem. And many of the water companies are breaking the law as it stands, spilling raw sewage contrary tens or hundreds of thousands of times each year to the existing regulations. The Environment Agency does not have the funds or the people to enforce the existing rules properly, so what difference would some new rules make?
Please, let’s just have the plan to fix this. For example, the Thames Tideway Scheme is one such solution.
Sure we need pl;ans
But we also need to take the private water companies out of the equation
Ofwat could require that they invest. If they cannot it could declare them insolvent….then move on.
The truth is that the privatised water/sewage companies have been drawing billions of pounds in dividends for shareholders (many from overseas) rather than as they’re required by law, to invest in the maintenance and updating the sewage and water supply systems. The official overseer of the industry Ofwat, has criminally neglected the supervision and penalties required under law to meet minimum health and safety standards let alone the awful ecological damage caused by this negligent and exploitative behaviour by the companies.
If the government has to pick up the tab for this what was privatisation for ?
Private gain
But it was a surprise.
Of all the disasters – Brexit, shortages, NI protocol, 160,000 dead,etc etc that they have got away with unscathed, it was ‘brexit sewage in our newly sovereign clean rivers’, that seems to have made a tiny breach in their wall of invulnerability.
BBC have mentioned it, but still haven’t probed the 30 year privatised record with any govt spokesperson.
( See the £bn’s wasted on Thames super sewer by an ex contact
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/sep/22/london-super-sewer-cheaper-projects)
I don’t see that many people caring now as they used to 30 – 40 years ago.
That is a whole two generations that have been desensitised to ignore their own personal bs detectors and have the MSM/Social Media/ bland entertainment and football cultural hegemonies rule their every single thought and opinion and direct what they are supposed to ‘care about’
For example back in the late 80’s when we took to the streets and supported the nurses by demanding voluntary income tax increases upon us, so that their pay would increase to match the costs of living increases; last year we were button pushed to clap for them on Thursday evenings! But now we have gone back to disdaining them. Just like that – Because the media Ken and Barbies and gobshiteradio jocks tell us to.
I am not seeing anger and angst especially in the young who are content with their lot; as recipients of usurious ‘education’ loans and degrading McJobs – they just want to travel and have fun like they hear the stories of previous generations doing – backpacking around Asia, South America etc – it just isn’t going to happen for them as easily as we used to do it or at all.
The only anger I see is from these middle aged and approaching retirement types who – broken by the decade and half of austerity and loss of public services and affordable/ social housing – voted for BrexShit.
Or they thought they did and that anger is still directed at immigrants (and non-white British! ), GP’s, hospitals , councils …and most of all at their own football team managers and players and not at the despotic owners of their ‘own’ clubs or the lying media or the utterly corrupt government, who strut around like untouchable nazi supremos and aristo classes of the early C20th.
Rivers of shit running down their own streets as visible during recent unprecedented summer downpours in London where the council and Thames water both deny responsibility for the blocked sewers is what I see.
The gobshites say it’s because of The Council and these remoaners who keep saying Brexit means BrexShit.
“Second, why too are questions on the affordability of this tolerated?”
Hasn’t this been an effective excuse for this government? Doesn’t it get used for funding the NHS, education, the welfare state etc?
But it is not an argument – we can do something about it
Private water companies paying dividends out of monopoly profits, producing business plans premised upon the continued deterioration of treatment and disposal systems and the increasing despoilation of our environment. The response being “well it’s always been like this and it’s too costly to fix.
I wonder if the disposal infrastructure constituted part of the fixed assets transferred to the private entitities and, if so, if they were given an assurance that they would not need to maitain and develop it.
Perhaps the infrastructure responsibilities remained with society thus ensuring that profits were not reduced by the need to provide for modernisation.
Moral hazard.
It’s high time that people realised that all Thatcher’s privatisations have done is divert vast sums of money that could have been invested into infrastructure into the pockets of investors and pension funds instead.
It’s one of the biggest legacy lies of Thatcherism. How often has ‘value creation’ been just monetising assets or sweating every penny out of them or diverting cash away from R&D, better products and services?
I work in an arms length management organisation in housing and our surpluses go into building new affordable homes as well as investing in infrastructure and staff to deliver services. I wonder if we’d be able to spend that money if we had investors?
The tragedy is that you don’t have to be a genius to work it out do you really?
As for the Government and Tory MPs creating the artificial choice of either discharging into rivers and the sea or putting up bills – this tells you all you need to know about where the shit really lies (literally) in this mal-administrated failed state we live in.
Appalling, simply appalling.
Buy it all back and have done with them!
As someone who worked for Southern Water for twenty years, I think it’s a disgrace that sewage spills are allowed to continue and, even worse, that my former employer deliberately flouted the rules. When I was with Southern Water, working on capital works projects, it always seemed that the operational staff were keen to ensure that the discharges met the targets set by the EA. It may have been that, at the time, the EA had sufficient funding to properly police the rules! If the EA needs more money, take it out of the sewage company coffers.
As for the difficulty of water companies complying with tighter regulations, I recall our area manager complaining that he had spent the morning in court following a sewage flooding incident caused by a mattress being put down the sewer, no-one could work out how the mattress could get through the available openings! Apparently, the sewage companies had (have?) an absolute duty to keep the sewers working and they were fined for the incident.
One way to make the sewage companies comply with the rules would be to give a senior executive (preferably the CEO) a few months in prison, forget fines as they appear to be cheaper they doing the job properly.
Noted
Thank you
There may be more on this tomorrow
In response to your suggestion, indeed – if we can create bonds to facilitate the horrors of Flanders, the Somme, Ypres etc as we did, and in the absence of public enthusiasm for the issue we can then have the BofE create the money to buy said bonds, as we did, leading to the sending to their deaths of the flower of a generation in the cold and distant mud of foreign fields, as we did… then the case for not creating bonds to support provision of clean rivers and beaches clearly has no substance.
I admit I really cannot follow your logic
It seems really bizarre
This debacle is going to stick to the government like a bad smell for years. Imposing a weak duty on the water companies to try to reduce spills, with no mechanism to enforce it, butters no parsnips (and treats no waste).
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2021/oct/26/ben-jennings-on-boris-johnsons-partial-u-turn-on-sewage-cartoon