The stench of British privatisation is becoming evident in the run up to COP26. Government ministers are running for cover and attempting to hide under stones after a Government motion was defeated which would have forced the private water companies to clean up their act. However what happened was actually very embarrassing for the government because the bill was defeated which actually looked liked a huge endorsement for the behaviour of the private water companies and a signal that it was OK to keep discharging untreated sewage in the rivers of Britain and into the seas around the UK. This is a huge embarrassment to the government in the run up to COP26. Again it is a stench resulting from the privatisations of the water companies pioneered by previous Conservative governments.
It appears that ministers voted on the matter in the way that they did mainly because of huge investments in the infrastructure that would be needed to update the antiquated system currently in place. Cost in this case was prohibitive to improving and maintaining the environment so the choice preferred was to continue to pollute and degrade the environment.
So why haven’t these private companies been investing in making these improvements themselves and why are they still reliant on funding from the government and the tax payers? What has gone wrong with privatisation? Surely the idea of privatisation was to become independent of the tax payer and yet these companies still manage to bother the tax payers to subsidise their profiteering enterprises.