#shitinrivers — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #shitinrivers, aggregated by home.social.
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"Water companies to face regular MOT-style checks in industry shake-up"
No doubt these reforms are well meaning, but they're not going to make a real difference until there are meaningful penalties for water companies breaking the law.
Something that's punishable only by a fine on the company is not meaningfully illegal, it's just a cost of doing business.
Jail time for directors of water companies that break the law would focus minds.
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I am not optimistic that this review of the water industry is going to bring meaningful improvements.
Given that the scope of the review explicitly ruled out nationalisation before the review even started, how can we be sure that keeping the water industry in private hands is the best option?
Especially as experience so far tells us that privatisation has failed miserably.
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CW: UK Politics
In case you're wondering why the government is being so lenient on the water companies when they are so spectacularly failing in their obligations, you may be interested to know that the minister responsible has been taking bribes from the owners of a water company.
But he declared the bribe so it's all within the rules, and anyway he didn't know who the money was from. Honest.
So that's all right then.
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One of the promises of privatisation is that the free market would bring improved efficiency.
This isn't remotely a free market. In a free market, companies who fail go bust and, if they provided something useful, get replaced by someone who does it better.
This is just legalised extortion.
It really is time to let the water companies go bust and nationalise them.
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So if the water companies are fined an amount amounting to less than £10 per customer, but are allowed to put bills up by £94 per customer, I suggest that the fine is not a serious deterrent to lawbreaking.
May I humbly suggest a more appropriate punishment for water companies who break the law would be to fine the directors personally, or for serious breaches, jail them.
That would be an actual deterrent.
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This sounds like a nice idea in principle, but I'll believe that water company bosses can go to jail when I see it.
Maybe they should concentrate on enforcing existing laws before coming up with new ones that they also won't enforce?