Public health catastrophe or upset the financiers?
- Ash
- Sep 15
- 5 min read
From a confidence in government point of view, can it get any worse than this?
Water Minister Emma Hardy was speaking at the cross-party Efra Committee hearing in Parliament on Tuesday 9 September, explaining what would be the level of failure required of Thames Water before taking control of this company under Special Administration. Suddenly, she dropped this bombshell, admitting the government would only act if;
" ...Fundamentally, water doesn't come out of the tap and your toilets don't flush and sewage goes away..."
Special Administration for essential services is set in law to protect the public in the event of a utility failing in its duties, but now it has been subverted to protect financial interests and let the public take the hit instead.
Seriously, what do the Environment Minister and her Defra advisors think would be the consequences of letting Thames Water fail to that extent?
16 million people would be terribly affected, people would almost certainly die, and a public health emergency would unfold. The economic consequences would be huge.
We hope it can be avoided but only because we think the good and honest staff of Thames Water would fight hard to not let that happen - we already heard some of them say in the BBC2 'Inside the Crisis' documentary that they would go to work to keep the processes running if the company stopped paying them (not the bosses, we suspect) but this is the message from government to the water industry, loud and clear;
Behave as badly as you want and treat the customers, staff, and environment with contempt as you wish because government will not interfere.
Labour MP and Efra Committee member, Henry Tufnell, chuckling incredulously at the Minister's previous responses, had just asked;
"Under what circumstances does a water company have to get to in order to get to Special administration on your, from a government's perspective?" (sic)
The Minister was talking hesitantly about statutory duties and enforcement orders, missing crucially important insolvency issues and stumbling unconvincingly through a distorted interpretation that defies logic and common sense. You can watch the clip here as she delivers the killer comment.
We don't think this is what Emma Hardy really intends as she delivers what she has been told to say, but she has to face facts - water is far too important to be used as a gaming chip like this, and we expect more from Ministers than to simply follow orders when they are so clearly very wrong.
Here is the short clip. It is shocking.
And this is the full hearing, if you want to see more. https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/67c00d49-cc37-4a5b-89c6-9c075462938c
They were talking about Special Administration https://www.pwc.co.uk/services/business-restructuring/insights/water-industry-special-administration-process.html for the dramatically failing Thames Water - a legal safety net where an essential infrastructure company gets taken under control and protected by administrators acting for the State (and the public) - a temporary public ownership to work out how to sort out whatever has gone wrong and decide on the company's future. A law made specifically to protect the country from the terrible consequences of a catastrophic infrastructure failure, not to protect the interests of those benefitting from the collapse of the company, like the Hedge Funds and predatory creditors.
Thus, the Minister set, not a bar to trigger a response, but a cliff edge to fall off.
In case you can't imagine the chaos https://climatecosmos.com/climate-science/what-happens-when-cities-run-out-of-water/
The problem that campaigners and the public face now is that it is not enough to take the truth to power - it doesn't matter what the truth is or what the law is, government decisions on water, at least, are not being made in that context.
And for the NGOs that think they are being listened to on the inside track with Defra, not calling this nonsense out and thereby helping to prop it up, in exchange for a 'seat at the table' and a route to funding - this is what+ you have achieved. Uncomfortable as this may be, it is time to wake up before it is too late.
As Thames Water approached a financial meltdown and frequently failed to deliver on its statutory requirements (broke the law routinely yet continued to take money out to shareholders and bosses), the financial vultures circled, landed, and are still feasting, even now.
Meanwhile, our government failed to appear at the High Court (previous WASP blogs) to defend the public in the restructuring debacle, and the reasons why are becoming clearer by the day.
The cash extraction from the Thames Water shamble to creditors, lawyers and consultants was established by Barrister William Day, to be due to reach over £800M in the first 6 months after the bailout - paid for by the billpayer of course.
Organisations such as KKR (aka 'the Barbarians at the gate' https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-14555973/Barbarians-gate-US-buyout-firm-KKR-set-snap-Thames-Water-races-avoid-renationalisation.html) had donated £27K to Chancellor Rachel Reeves and, more worryingly, embedded a staff member in her team, and subsequently became the preferred bidder for Thames Water's highly contested and lucrative restructure, until they pulled out a couple of days before the donation story broke in the iNewspaper. https://inews.co.uk/news/reeves-27k-lobbying-firm-linked-thames-water-bidder-3723572#
Then there was the £4million donation from Hedge Fund Quadrature to Labour on the run up to the election, revealed by Open Democracy https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/labour-given-4m-from-tax-haven-based-hedge-fund-with-shares-in-oil-and-arms/
and the story of the influential government job that was given afterwards..
The Canary rightly credited Michael Crick but also exposed worrying links to the influence that the same corporate money has on NGOs - another story in waiting.
And then we saw other Hedge Funds using Thames Water's debt as a financial game and the regulators controlled yet also blamed by our government, let them do it.
And as we prepared to publish this blog, the next shocker landed in our inbox from one of our supporters:
Headline from the Guardian: Thames Water paid £1m-plus to corporate spooks firm part-owned by Starmer adviser
So, with our government's compromised position on privatised water based on two very big lies:
It is too expensive to take water back into public ownership - no it isn't https://www.common-wealth.org/publications/how-to-clean-up-our-water
and
Government has secured £104 billion of private sector investment - No it hasn't, that is billpayers money as usual and we don't need 'investors' becasue they don't. https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/47165/3/47165%20HALL_Ownership_Without_Investment_In_English_Water-net_Capital_Extraction_2024.pdf
We ask the question - Has privatised water ever looked so murky?
Sewage fungus from Thames Water's Witney Sewage Works - how the industry and 'investors' who own but don't invest their own cash, just ours, have made money from neglect - and crime.
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