Thames Water

You could have put OT in the subject.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but much of this debt was from Thames Water buying up its own shares in return of debt.

The basis being:

Apologies if I am wrong in my summary and happily put right.

The facts speak for themselves no matter how you spin it. When the water companies were privatised they had no debt. Now they are snowed under. 'Since the late 1980s, water companies in England and Wales have paid out £72bn to shareholders. To help pay for this generosity, the water companies – which were sold off without debts – have borrowed on an exceptional scale, accumulating a debt pile of £53bn. 'What has this meant for customers? In real terms, bills have increased by around 40% since privatisation, yet investment by the companies has gone down by 15%'

All nationally important utilities should be nationalised, under a progressive government.

Am 29/06/2023 um 10:33 schrieb fred:

If only the world had listened to you, but no, they didn't! Damn!

Yep, that worked really well in the past :)

Very few people trust any of the political parties to run the country but still want tem to run our utilities :(

fred snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

The fact remains that this is an OT subject and it would only be polite to display an OT: prefix to your heart felt objection.

The major problem with a government run company is that any investment comes under public sector borrowing.

The next alternative is a nationalised company, where the shares are owned by the government, much like RBS and others after the Credit Crunch. That didn't end so badly.

The issue with water companies and similar utilities is that generally there is no risk to being a monopoly, and it's all profit.

It's time for a wake-up call and the Treasury to call in the administrators for a bankrupt company.

As your complaint is OT, I have added an extra OT to the thread title. :)

GB snipped-for-privacy@microsoft.invalid wrote in news:u7k68j$26c7g$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Actually huny, the complaint about whether a post is on-topic or not is on- topic.

Thought you'd been around long enough to know that . . . :-)

No, I didn't know that.

And, just to be on the safe side, I've added an extra couple of OTs in the title. :)

My LibDem sister used to go on about how low the water rates were before water was privatised. The reason for that was not that no money was being paid to shareholders, but that little maintenance was being done.

It's not that easy to cook the public borrowing books. If the government owns or controls a company it gets counted as a public sector entity for the purposes of the government accounts.

They are *regulated* utilities where - if the regulator is doing its job

- a loss is perfectly possible. See eg the energy companies which failed to hedge.

OTT

Yes you are.

Wrong.

A Jap would at least have the decency to disembowel itself.

Do it outside on the grass so we can just hose the mess away.

Quite a bit of that was spent on infrastructure. The megasewer alone wasnt cheap.

Bullshit.

Only because the billions of debt they had prior to privatisation were written off as part of the deal.

Only if the investment is borrowed. If its paid for out of the income, that doesnt happen.

Or in other words, nothing comes for free. The investment/payouts to the shareholders is always at the bottom of it. These should have been companies who had to invest properly to be allowed to continue, or what has happened always will. No wonder I'm having trouble getting them to agree their meter reading was incorrect. They substituted a 7 for a 2, which was the real number ten refused to believe the lower reading and until they do I'm not paying them a penny. Brian

Well either way its a shambles. if you invest in debt, you end up with debt, and that is unfortunately the way capitalism has gone. There is nothing worth anything any more and its about time we all realised it. Brian