Hosepipe ban – from Thursday morning

Doesn’t feel like very long ago when the rain was incessant, wet every day and for months on end. It wasn’t until April that it started to become drier. Between September last year and March there was rain on almost every day. Not torrential (very often) but regular so that the ground was continually soaked.

For those of us in the Thames Water area – say goodbye to watering flowers, cleaning the car, filling paddling pools or cleaning the windows. Anything that uses a hose, taking water from the tap and mains will be a ‘no no’. Banned.

Even in May it was wet – and in the first couple of weeks, cold. But two months later – a hosepipe ban. Predicted, and sure enough it’s with us.

Not the place to dissect the abilities of Thames Water or their competence to retain and supply water (Isn’t that what they are there to do?) but within two months of the rain stopping we get hit with the hosepipe ban. Easy to comment that if they had actually invested what we put in over the decades of their existence rather than skim off what they could in dividends, may be the ‘leakage’ we talk about would be regarding the fractures in their water supply pipes rather than money out of their balance sheet. Lots of leaks (roads, verges etc.), always slow to fix (if ever?) and similarly slow to staunch in the financial context. It’s us, the customer who pays that gets penalised by being told to stop using a hosepipe. But the leaks flow……

Even now much of what we have to pay Thames Water goes to service the ‘debt mountain’ that was created mainly by those ‘investors’ taking out their dividends. It is estimated that 33p in every £1 is needed to pay for what Macquarie (and others) syphoned out. Thames Water may like to claim that the figure is about ‘3p per £1’, but that is an extremely ‘narrow’ definition and the widely accepted proportion is about the 33p per £1 to pay for this debt.

The new Government is talking about bringing the company back into public control. Some form of ‘nationalisation’. If that happens, let’s hope that the investors who have created the current day fiasco that is Thames Water aren’t able to take their funds out, or get the Government to fork out for the privilege of taking back control. If this sounds ‘Political’, so be it. But if it is, ‘politics’ is about stopping us, the customers, getting ripped off rather than liking or disliking the colour of one party or another. Water is life. We can’t exist without it.