The inadequacy of Southern Water

This afternoon, I attended a workshop with other local stakeholders to discuss Southern Water’s ‘Turnaround Plan 2023-25’.

The need for such a plan shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. In 2021, the company was fined a record £90m for illegally dumping sewage along the coast, around the same time the news of untreated sewage being regularly dumped into the region’s rivers broke, and in our part of the network there is a ban on all planning changes which would increase local water usage–limiting the Crawley’s economic development and preventing the delivery of new affordable housing.

Unfortunately, what was shown at the workshop gives little hope for the future, with the proposed improvements falling well short of what is needed to either resolve the problems with water supply or sewage treatment. I was far from alone in this view, with 72% of participants voting that the proposals were inadequate.

Not that this will change anything much. Privatisation of the water industry gave private companies a monopoly over supply in their areas with inadequate oversight, the end result is that if consumers and residents are unhappy about the way they are being treated by their water company they have two choices: put up with it or relocate out of the region. It’s really quite ridiculous and it is exactly this lack of accountability which has produced the unacceptable situation our local communities now face.

It wasn’t always like this. Water is our most precious natural resource. The network these companies are operating today was built using taxpayers money to ensure the needs of their communities were met. Privatisation was supposed to improve the sector for all of us, yet 34 years on it appears very little of the anticipated investment ever occurred. The Government didn’t even get a good deal on the sale, within a day the value of the shares sold had increased by almost half, with the benefit all going to day traders rather than the Treasury.

Polling indicates that there is strong public support for renationalising the water industry and where a proposal is popular enough for long enough one Government or another usually puts it into place. It seems obvious to me that Southern Water is now drinking in the Last Chance Saloon. Rather than hiring more public affairs officers to try to manage the politics they need to get on with fixing 34 years of failure. If they don’t, it won’t be their problem much longer.