Water Industry

Debate between Gareth Thomas and Daniel Zeichner

Tuesday 22nd January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the future of the water industry in England and Wales.

Customers and employees should be helped to take back control of the companies providing our water and taking away our sewage. The people of England should once again be front and centre of their water industry. Democratic, publicly owned businesses operating in the private sector, regulated with vigour by a more effective Ofwat is the Co-operative party’s vision of the future of the water industry. I am proud to chair that political party. I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for the opportunity to explore that agenda through this debate.

Nationwide, John Lewis, the Co-operative Group, the Royal London insurance company and NFU Mutual are just five successful examples of people-run businesses—mutuals—where profit is sought not to line the pockets of wealthy investors, but to reward customers and employees, and to invest in local communities. Such businesses are inspiration for reform of the water industry.

Margaret Thatcher’s decision 30 years ago to privatise our water industry has created an expensive, unaccountable and unfair system. No other country has a fully privatised system of water and sewage services with so little competition. The resulting monopoly businesses are overseen by a woefully weak water regulator. Unsurprisingly, the consumer voice in England carries little weight against the interests of distant investors, whose decisions have seen water bills rise by 40% above inflation since privatisation.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the rather poor practices of some water companies have led to widespread public disillusionment? When I worked for Unison a few years ago, an excellent report was published showing some remarkably creative accounting, which seemed to suggest that money was being diverted not to investment, but to shareholders.

[Gareth Thomas]

My hon. Friend and the trade union movement in general have pointed that out on a number of occasions. I will come on to one of the trade union movement’s particular campaign issues.

Water companies have become a desirable global financial commodity, bought and sold by big banks, international infrastructure investors, pensions and sovereign wealth funds. Since privatisation, as my hon. Friend just pointed out, dividend payments have been very high, at an average of £200 million a year per company, and £2 billion a year in total. Over the past 30 years, at least £48 billion has gone directly to shareholders.

Analysis by Greenwich University suggests that the more than 40% increase in household bills in that time was driven mainly by the need to finance growing interest payments on debt—a point that the trade union movement in particular has highlighted. That analysis shows that accelerating debt levels are the result of the high dividend payments paid by water companies to their shareholders, which exceeded the privatised companies’ cash balances in every year bar one since 1989. Indeed, it is striking that total payments to shareholders are very similar to the total outstanding debt burden of privatised water companies, with at least £48 billion in payments in the past 30 years and at least £51 billion in total debt.

The Leader of the Opposition and, in particular, the shadow Chancellor deserve considerable credit for highlighting the lower cost of water bills in Scotland, where Scottish Water is publicly owned. While bills in Scotland are 2% less in real terms than they were 18 years ago, English water bills increased by some 13% in real terms over the same period.

Privatisation has not meant more investment. Indeed, annual investment in water supply infrastructure was lower in 2018 than it was in 1990 and has fallen by about 10% in the past 10 years. All of the capital investment made since privatisation could have been covered using only the money generated by customer bills. Instead, much of the income generated by water bills appears to have been used to pay the interest on debt built up by the privately owned water companies, in turn to fund dividend payouts.

Despite similar levels of capital investment, we are now in a situation in which, according to research by the University of Greenwich, consumers in England are paying £2.3 billion a year more for their water and sewerage bills under the current privatised system than if the utility companies had remained in state ownership.