andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2020-07-02 12:00 pm
andrewducker) wrote2020-07-02 12:00 pm
Interesting Links for 02-07-2020
- Water firms discharged raw sewage into England's rivers 200,000 times in 2019
- (tags:UK rivers pollution water )
- England's privatised water firms paid £57bn in dividends since 1991 (Scottish Water is, of course, publicly owned)
- (tags:UK water capitalism )
- Lego joins hundreds of companies and pulls ads on Facebook over hate speech
- (tags:abuse advertising Facebook )
- The government's "rough sex" law doesn't actually change anything
- https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1278411380836708353.html
(tags:law sex murder bdsm uk ) - Sweeping climate-crisis plan would bring US to zero emissions in 30 years
- (tags:USA globalwarming thefuture politics )
- A Former BNP Councillor to Become Mayor of Stoke on Trent
- (tags:racism UK politics OhForFucksSake bnp )
- Finland′s air force logo drops swastika
- (tags:logo Finland Nazis history )
Re: Privatised water firms
The big problems (as I understand it) were
- economies of scale meant that lots of small council owned systems did not have the resources to look into innovative treatment methods or to run trials and evaluate them or run the complex geospatial modelling and modelling required to predict storms.
- you can get around this by combining them into bigger organisations. That works well for Scotland (pop 5.45 mil) but it's harder in England. UU supplies 7 million between Cheshire and Cumbria, which includes 23 local authorities. Cumbria's population and council has different needs and priorities to Manchester.
- council priorities are frequently going to place funding eg social care over funding expensive environmental improvements. And that's before you factor in different political parties running each council.
- local government funding is set by central government and is a perpetual easy target for cuts.
- If the council is fined for failing to meet water standards, will this lead to a change in leadership from the council, who are elected by an electorate who are largely apathetic about this area? And if they do an outstanding job (or turn a failing system into a successful one) - would the effort even be noticed? UU's investors may only care about money but the costs of prosecution means that poor operation puts their investment at risk.
- And slightly more contraversially, the change to non-council ownership resulted in outsourcing the design and construction parts of the process (which is where my company comes in). That costs a bit more per hour spent on design/construction BUT when the design/construction work is not required, the water company doesn't have to keep paying those engineers. And down the scale, my company has a mix of permanent and contract staff for the same reason. The contract staff get paid a higher hourly rate but have a weeks notice (and routinely mock the permanent staff as slackers and lightweights).
Re: Privatised water firms