{"id":80276,"date":"2025-02-18T08:04:01","date_gmt":"2025-02-18T08:04:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=80276"},"modified":"2025-02-18T08:04:01","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T08:04:01","slug":"treasury-incompetence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2025\/02\/18\/treasury-incompetence\/","title":{"rendered":"Treasury incompetence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/669d941e-7de2-4086-b2aa-c441adcc906d?segmentId=b0d7e653-3467-12ab-c0f0-77e4424cdb4c\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FT notes<\/a> this morning that:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Treasury is seeking greater clarity on the cost of\u00a0renationalising Thames Water ahead of a crucial court judgment this week that could decide the future of Britain\u2019s largest water supplier.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As is often the case, what is not said here is at least as interesting as the words published by the FT.<\/p>\n<p>What this paragraph says is that, so far, the Treasury has not even considered the cost of nationalising Thames Water.<\/p>\n<p>Presumably, as a result of the dogmatic objection of ministers, this issue has not been considered a strategic option, even though the need to consider this issue has very obviously existed for some time.<\/p>\n<p>As a consequence, it is only now, in a situation of extreme stress, that the Treasury is turning its attention to something that was glaringly obviously always going to be essential.<\/p>\n<p>As an indication of incompetence under the management of Rachael Reeves, this is quite striking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The FT notes this morning that: The Treasury is seeking greater clarity on the cost of\u00a0renationalising Thames Water ahead of a crucial court judgment this<br \/><a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2025\/02\/18\/treasury-incompetence\/\"><em> Read the full article&#8230;<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-labour"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80276"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80277,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80276\/revisions\/80277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}