Thames Water – the Glazers of the UK water industry

The Glazers are notoriously known for taking major dividends annually out of Man Utd and investing very little back into the football club. The same can said about Thames Water and their relationship with their 15 million customers. You only have to look at their performance on water leakages and capital expenditure to see this very clearly.

For the poor performance of their capital works, one need only point to their desalination plant in Beckton which has largely been lying empty since being built in 2010 for £250 million from our bills. It was approved by the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson after the previous Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone had refused planning permission for it. 

It has been built at great expense of Thames Water customers, using a process called reverse osmosis to turn saltwater into drinking water.  It was meant to have had the capacity to pipe drink water into 400,000 homes in London by drawing on 100m litres a day of water from the Thames during a drought but has to be utilized properly. In the meantime Thames Water has admitted the high-tech plant is off-line and been hardly used, if at all.  

According to Thames Water own records water leakages almost run at a quarter of all their pipes and the attempt to replace them has seen no end of road works. Ask any black cabbie in London, who causes the most work roads in Central London? Thats after having this responsibility since 1989 and over 3 decades, we still see no real progress has been made, as it continues to literally be money down the drain for its customers. 

So whilst most campaigners are rightly pointing out the water companies awful record on sewage outputs into rivers like the Thames and its tributaries, let’s also not forget their poor performance with dealing with water leaks and capital investments when they attempt to hike our water prices by up to 56 per cent. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *