[TheDaddy]

Originally Posted by OLD BOY

Privatisation was good because it ensured the badly needed investment that was required.

What is so sacred about water in terms of the public/private debate? The water is free - what we are paying for is the means of getting a pure supply of it to our homes and the means of disposing of the waste as sewerage. We were relying on old Victorian pipes with no public money available to replace them. That's why water was privatised.

As for the railways, nobody surely who used the railways while under public sector control would want to go back to that! Pre-war trains, window frames so dirty that if you put your hand on them, you could only remove the grime with soap and water, revolting turned up sandwiches which I wouldn't feed to the birds.... Honestly, who wants that?

In my part of the world, we had a two-carriage train to London, which was not well used. The fact that we now have a modern eight-carriage service with most seats taken speaks volumes for the difference privatisation has made.

What utter bovine excrement, there has been no real investment in water infrastructure and it's been loaded with debt

As shocking is the way that the former owners of Thames, the Australian bank Macquarie, was able to pass its costs on to the public. Macquarie took on £2.8 billion of debt to buy the company; it then loaded £2 billion of Cayman Islands debt on to Thames Water and its customers, despite giving assurances to the water regulator Ofwat that it would do no such thing. Macquarie has taken its profits. According to Martin Blaiklock, an infrastructure consultant, its investors received returns of 15 to 19 per cent over 11 years — twice the expected level. All it has left behind is a £2 billion debt and a very bad smell.

They promised to bring efficiency. Instead they have brought unsustainable levels of debt that, one way or another, the public will have to redeem. Researchers at Greenwich University say that in the past decade, the nine companies have made £18.8 billion of post-tax profits. Far from using the money to make the water system better, they have paid out £18.1 billion in dividends, and financed investment through loading £42 billion of debt on to consumers.

The university estimates the English are paying £2.3 billion more a year in water and sewerage bills than if the utility companies had remained in state ownership

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/...ter-companies/