Interesting Links for 02-07-2020
Jul. 2nd, 2020 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- 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 )
Privatised water firms
Date: 2020-07-02 06:33 pm (UTC)Re: Privatised water firms
Date: 2020-07-02 06:33 pm (UTC)Re: Privatised water firms
Date: 2020-07-02 07:38 pm (UTC)The companies have to meet high legal standards for quality (and provide unrestricted access for testing) and can be fined/prosecuted if they fail to meet them. The overall standards are set by EU directives and individual sites have quality targets set by the Drinking Water Inspectorate or the Environment Agency. Their ability to extract water from rivers/aquifers is regulated by the EA and the prices they charge households is regulated by the DWI.
Every 5 years, each company has to present its plans to the DWI to upgrade their sites to comply with water quality standards and to meet environmental goals set by the EA. If the DWI doesn't think their proposals are value for money, they don't get the funding (from water bills) but they are still required to meet the standards.
As I understand it, privatisation means that the utility companies are completely separate from the regulators, which has improved transparency and the companies can borrow money to support innovation and investment, beyond the requirements of the DWI/EA. There are some daft things (they are v keen on selling off land and buildings and then finding that they need that land for new treatment stages or to get access for construction) and the process is grindingly slow but I am not aware of a distinction between the public and privatised companies in this regard.
They do fuck up sometimes and not everything works perfectly. However, the impression that I have got from working in the industry (as a designer for construction contractors, who in turn work for all the different UK water companies) is that company staff are genuinely motivated to provide clean, safe water, not to cut corners.
Despite how this post sounds, I am not particularly pro-privatisation or capitalism in general. However from what I have seen, the regulators and laws have kept the water companies from exploitation of resources, price-gouging and pollution that you might expect from a 'purely' capitalist enterprise, or the behaviour of companies like Nestle.
Re: Privatised water firms
Date: 2020-07-02 07:49 pm (UTC)Re: Privatised water firms
Date: 2020-07-02 07:59 pm (UTC)As would comparison with Scotland.
Re: Privatised water firms
Date: 2020-07-03 11:58 am (UTC)Re: Privatised water firms
Date: 2020-07-03 12:26 pm (UTC)In comparison, the highest paid director of publicly owned Scottish Water earned £366,000."
And
"Scottish Water, which is publicly owned, has invested nearly 35% more per household in infrastructure since 2002 than the privatised English water companies, according to the analysis. It charges users 14% less and does not pay dividends."
(Both from the article)
Re: Privatised water firms
Date: 2020-07-03 11:22 pm (UTC)Re: Privatised water firms
Date: 2020-07-04 07:05 am (UTC)(Although if they've been doing so for a long time, and are abusing the privilege, I have no issue with nationalising them by buying them out)
Re: Privatised water firms
Date: 2020-07-04 12:58 pm (UTC)Either of the current UK models are also better than the previous systems where water treatment was run by local councils. That limited investment and innovation and the result was a much more polluted environment. There has been a massive improvement in river and beach water quality in England and Wales since 1991.
Re: Privatised water firms
Date: 2020-07-04 01:16 pm (UTC)Re: Privatised water firms
Date: 2020-07-04 01:39 pm (UTC)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
Date: 2020-07-04 01:57 pm (UTC)