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As the water table rises across much of the country, so we are also reaching saturation point in the co-ordinated lobbying of water executives to discredit their regulator Ofwat and foist bill rises of hundreds of pounds a year on their captive customers.
Water bosses are a funny lot. They might not be able to tell you exactly what your monthly bill is, but they can say you should be paying a lot more for the unquantified impacts of climate change and investment in a supply and sewerage infrastructure that hasn’t been upgraded in the 35 years since privatisation.
In the bleak midwinter, just when we will hit peak carping about the scrapping of pensioners’ winter fuel allowance, Ofwat will determine what household bill increases will be for the next five years. They will be inflation-busting, though only half as much as what your local water supplier has been demanding.
Nascent campaigns to launch a water bills boycott are being mobilised, buoyed by the knowledge that, unlike the energy companies, water companies cannot legally cut off households if they don’t pay their charges. What worked for the poll tax in 1990 can work again, is the thinking.
Water bosses think this is all poppycock:. The rises will be only a couple of hundred quid a year, they argue, and householders know that this is needed to beat excess weather and replace Victorian pipes. If you want to blame anyone, so their narrative goes, blame Ofwat for misregulating the sector all these decades.
They might be right. Or it could be a heroic misreading of the public.
Most folk know who to blame for the mess in the water sector. Just because a burglar can hire a lawyer to argue that householders should have spent more on their home security and that the police haven’t been doing their job properly doesn’t mean the burglar isn’t a burglar.
Busy for Byrne
MPs wanting to hold the government to account have to wait only a few days before the start of term. And none more so than one of their own: Liam Byrne, the re-elected Labour chairman of the business and trade select committee.
The number of inquiries he will want to call is stacking up, not least the impact of the collapse of ISG. The failure of a private construction company may not ordinarily detain MPs too long, but there are deep echoes of the 2018 collapse of Carillion.
The present chancellor made her name leading the business committee’s skewering of the arrogant, incompetent and complacent among the dramatis personae of the Carillion fiasco. It is difficult to quantify whether Rachel Reeves’ report on Carillion moved the dial on poor corporate governance, accounting and pensions regulation, but the failure of ISG asks awkward questions once more of the Cabinet Office and government departments for whom ISG was a prime contractor.
Government contractors, especially those in construction and fit-out, are still in a race to the bottom in which tenders go to the lowest, not the best, bid. Why, it should be asked, were departments still contracting with ISG when for months they knew the company was in trouble? And was ISG’s shareholder, William Harrison, the heir to a Texan oil fortune, a fit and proper person to own a key UK government contractor when he could so abruptly step away and leave the business to the administrators?
That work on dozens of prisons, justice facilities, schools, fire stations and job and welfare centres has now ground to a halt and will go above budget suggests that Reeves’ demand back then that Whitehall gets a grip on its relationships with strategic suppliers to ensure better value for the taxpayer has gone unheeded.
Betting on cheap
The business select committee might also take a long look at the form of the £3.6 billion takeover of the Royal Mail group, now called International Distribution Services, which yesterday celebrated its tenth annual general meeting as a privatised listed company at, rather incongruously, Newbury Racecourse.
The recommended takeover of the Royal Mail by Daniel Kretinsky, allegedly known in punting circles as the “Czech chancer”, is already the subject of a stewards’ inquiry by ministers.
When Royal Mail was sold off 11 years ago next week, the Conservative-led government handicapped the business with the obligations of the universal service. Badly hampered ever since, Royal Mail has lost ground to more flexible and nimble competitors.
Ofcom is now signalling that the burden of the universal service could be relaxed. Royal Mail is welcoming that as a winning ticket to sustained profitability. That suggests Kretinsky’s offer for the company was made under materially different circumstances. Notwithstanding the dubiousness of allowing a national asset like Royal Mail to be owned by some foreign chap, if ministers conclude Kretinsky is acquiring Royal Mail on the cheap, then the value bet could be that the takeover is a non-runner.
Price buzz
Is the Leapmotor T03 the long-awaited gamechanger to kick-start the stalling market in the sale of electric cars? Sure, it’s Chinese, so you’ll have to worry about Beijing hackers running through your playlist or logging your visits to the supermarket; yes, it does look a lot like a Trabant reimagined for the 21st century; and, of course, everyone will know you are the sort that buys the very cheapest electric model. But come on, at only £15,000, what’s not to like?
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