UK to specify new charging cable standard

:)

So we should stop new house building until the sewage system catches up.

I see some problems here. Firstly this is a crowded island and all land is in use. Have they been trying to build new treatment works? Does this get held up by the planning system? After all, who wants to find a sewage works suddenly plonked next to their house.

Many of the UK nationalised or monopoly industries of the 50/60/70s acted as though they were doing you a favour when accepting you as a paying customer.

That is what the money spenton OFWAT was supposed to prevent.

The water companies were privatised because under public ownership little investment had been provided for a couple of decades. After privatisation the companies were beaten around the head to fix the vast number of leaks mainly caused by the lack of prior investment in the infrastructure.

Royal Mail is in trouble because under previous management they failed to modernise in a timely manner which allowed other more efficient carriers to take and keep a large percentage of the delivery business.

You may consider that under private management they are not doing too well but consider who bad it would have been under private management effectively run by politicians who the public reject as incompetent and corrupt at most general elections.

How many people in the past 40 years have concreted over their front gardens for car parking and their back gardens for a fashion patio. What would have previously drained into the ground now runs off into the sewers or surface water drains.

Probably a lot of the shareholding is from pension funds.

To promote Bojo's ambition to get into number 10. Nothing else mattered to him.

My garden has a patio, a garage, a concrete drive and a concreted front because our local council has got into the residents' parking scam.

None of the rain falling on these hard surfaces at ground level ends up in surface water drains. It all runs off into the surrounding soil, though various gaps in the concrete. All concreted fronts for decades have had to drain to a soakaway, not onto the pavement or road surface. The two surface water drains on our property have raised edgings, so actual surface water, as opposed to roof water, does not go down them.

Indeed, most of the water falling on our roof surfaces ends up in the soil during two-thirds of the year, as we have four water butts collecting from the house roof, three from the garage roof and one from the shed roof.

The road outside our house occasionally floods. This is due to drains being blocked by leaves falling from council trees which the council chooses not to sweep up. Ever. They don't pile up indefinitely as eventually the leaf mould from the year before breaks up and gets washed down the drains. Some of them fall on our front area, and there is no legal way to dispose of them. We cannot collect them and put them either in our own leaf bin or the paid-for council green waste bin, because they do not come from our trees. We cannot sweep them off of our front onto the pavement, as that would be littering.

A number of houses near me have been demolished and two rabbit hutches built where each stood. A few houses have been built in what were domestic gardens, and small blocks of flats have been built just about anywhere possible. As far as I am aware, no new drainage has been installed to serve all these additional households. So upon this perennial 'concreted over' excuse trotted out for inadequate public drainage and maintenance, I call bullshit.

It was Cameron who called it, secure in the knowledge that it would fail. BoJo was brought in to make it happen, as Cameron had been immediately yanked off the pitch and it was obvious that May's heart wasn't in it.

Yes, indeed, and the NHS still does :-(

Normally, the problem with sewage plants, is finding someone to pay for them.

This is just to give some idea what goes on in there.

Staggering the gammon-like inability to comprehend facts or even remember history. Is that a 'coping' mechanism, pure denial of the facts?

The referendum had nothing whatsoever to do with Boris.

No one cares, in politics. Politicians buy bottled water. They didnt want to spend money on water so they sold it to someone else who didn't want to spend money on it.

Parcels certainly. As a massively unionised ex-public sector enterprise without the ability to act as a monopoly (unlike BT) they had no chance against drivers on less than minimum wage. And yet they are still there, because of the spread of post offices where parcels can be dropped off..

AS far as letters go, I received my first letters of the week today, three being junk mail (the postman always waits till these have built up and there is a genuine letter to deliver.) One was from the DHP telling me I wouldn't be getting my winter fuel allowance, and the other was a summary of a hospital appointment last week.

Everything else is by email.

The Royal Mail was set up to provide a service that is no longer required.

Post offices as such, as parcel drop off points, places to withdraw cash and pay in the very odd cheque, are still of value.

Times change and commercial organisation cannot stay the sem forever.

Water companies are the ultimate cash cows. Sinecures for political cronies who needn't worry about building a business that already is as big as its ever going to be. All that really changed is your taxes didn't get as big as they might have been , your water bills did, and any s*it that hit the fan instead of the treatment plant, wouldn't end up on the faces of politicians but on the faces of people taking a sufficiently large salary to not really care

Curiously I do have a sewage treatment plant plonked next to my house. It cost me about £6k

I would say that private sewage plants costs about £5-£10k to install and burn a couple of hundred notes of electricity every year.

The outflow is classed as fully suitable for discharge into open watercourses.

While nobody wants to go down to the Sea or local watercourse to see and swim in effluent it does seem at times not enough emphasis is made to inform people. It was your s*it , your water use is far more than your ancestors because you and your family wash more,use washing machines,dish washers etc which were not available in the past and you won’t want to stop doing that if it is raining so something has to give when the systems get overwhelmed. It gets mixed with the storm water or your bog stops working. And there is another couple of groups who are influential , people who use waters for recreational use at all times, Surfers have done for a long time now we have the wild swimmers * . They want peoples bills to increase to pay for the new investment needed so they can indulge in activities that help with their “mindfulness”etc. Often Wokie types who want the world to be perfect and need counselling when told it cannot be.

• If several of them end up visiting the same spot it is no longer wild.

GH

There were very militant unionised sorting offices in London and my local area. There were long running battles between the union and management about the introduction of automated sorting and the loss of jobs.

I'm aware that where friends live they are now short of staff by around

I think its less a shortage of staff than pure efficiency.

Urgent letters get delivered.

When I worked as a christmas temp in the postal service we would look at the pigeon holes and grab the ones with most letters first.

If we ran out of time outlier deliveries wen in tomorrows pack

Its a matter of efficiency. A 1/2 mile cycle ride up a snowy hill to deliver one second class postcard wasn't something we wanted to do

Round here is really not that bad.

It's not as if politicians spend their own money. Privatisation wasn't some money saving wheeze - it was, in the main an ideological and dogmatic call: private good, public bad. The fact that it made a ton of cash for share adopters and regressive tax breaks was just the icing on the cake.

Polticians hadn't read the next chapter of the Hayek/Smith manual, the bit where it says you tread very carefully around public goods, natural monopolies, and welfare. And so here we are.

Yes, it was likely to be troublesome. An electoral liability even. But that's not a good reason to privatise.