[SA Chris]

Pay hundreds of thousands is sadly cheaper than spending tens of millions improving infrastructure.

[Dingdong]

Whilst paying their shareholders 70 million in dividends 

[Johnny Brown]

Over a thousand times more actually, 78 billion.

[stone]

Whilst paying their shareholders 70 million in dividends 

It is so important that we include all payments to capital rather than being blinkered into only seeing dividends. Yorkshire water paid £360.9m in interest to creditors in 2022/23.

It is such BS when a regulated company does an equity to debt conversion (as the water companies have done), and then claim that they subsequently aren't extracting much as dividends. Of course they aren't because they now take it out by way of interest payments.

[Dingdong]

Don't mind me, just gonna periodically drop in here and leave articles proving that water companies such as Yorkshire Water are polluting our waterways and getting away with paying insignificant fines whilst paying their shareholders dividends.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/09/englands-rivers-to-remain-in-poor-state-as-eu-laws-ignored-post-brexit-says-watchdog

[teestub]

Don't mind me, just gonna periodically drop in here and leave articles proving that water companies such as Yorkshire Water are polluting our waterways and getting away with paying insignificant fines whilst paying their shareholders dividends.

Hopefully you’re writing to your MP with your concerns, as well as posting here

[Dingdong]

When the gas network in Stannington flooded destroying a number of my neighbours homes thanks to yorkshire waters incompetence, you can bet your ass I complained about them to Olivia Blake who was nothing but excellent. Sadly they have free reign to do what they want as long they pay measly fines.

Until the water companies are back under public ownership they'll continue to funnel money to their shareholders pockets instead of using that money to upgrade vital infrastructure.

The gas network was flooded because yorkshire water decided not to invest in pipes in the area despite numerous warnings and previous instances of pipes cracking and flooding areas of stannington.

This is not dissimilar to what's happening with the raw sewage discharges, these same bastards are keeping all of our money and using it to get richer whilst our waterways are filled with shite.

[Will Hunt]

When I said before that the quality of reporting around this was poor, this is the kind of thing I meant.

While Britain was in the EU, a national chemical and ecological survey of rivers was conducted annually. After Brexit, the WFD was transposed into English law.

From 2016, the government decided to test water quality under WFD every three years rather than annually.

A single sentence separating two contradictory statements, each presented as fact. Can the Guardian really not be aware of when Brexit occurred? This is typical of the paper, which is happy to report on the water environment provided it can be used as an argument for nationalising the water industry/being in the EU (I mean, I absolutely hate Brexit, but the reduction in sampling frequency has nothing to do with Brexit and everything to do with budget cuts).

Ideologically, I'm in favour of nationalised water. That doesn't necessarily mean I think it would be a pragmatic thing to do now. Do I think that nationalisation is a solution to the "problem" (what is that exactly? Reduction of storm overflows? Elimination of storm overflows? Reduction of pollution incidents? Improvement of bathing water quality? Improvement of water ecology? All different things with different solutions)? Not really. Dwr Cymru have all these challenges; they have no shareholders. The same goes for plenty of other water and sanitation providers around the developed world.

[Moo]

It’s worth noting that not even feargal sharkey is arguing in favour of nationalising the water companies. His argument being ( the last time I saw him speak about it ) that as soon as we do so then we all foot the bill. He’s arguing for tough regulations on the water companies, get them to sort the mess out they created and the shareholders will just have to suck it up for a while.

The basic premise of that argument makes sense to me but I’m certainly not wise as to how difficult that would be to implement.

I guess if you did nationalise the water companies then you could hopefully be surer of their governance being in our best interests.

[Will Hunt]

For what it's worth, I'm sceptical that nationalising would lead to better regulation, which is how you change internal governance. The reason the Thatcher government privatised in the first place is because they balked at funding themselves the future investment that was needed to pull the industry out of the hole it was in in the late 80s. Governments since have been able to enact the WFD and now the Environment Act (which, as I've said before, is a mind bogglingly costly thing to implement) and not had to worry about borrowing the money themselves to finance it, that's the water industry's problem. I personally don't think the Environment Act would have been enacted as it is if the government was going to have to do the borrowing and taxing to pay for it.