Thames Water says without steep bill increase it’s ‘neither financeable nor investible’ | Thames Water
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/aug/28/thames-water-says-without-steep-bill-increase-its-neither-financeable-nor-investible
Posted by DystopianAbyss
28 Comments
>Britain’s biggest water supplier could collapse into a government-handled administration process, with its debts added to the taxpayer’s balance sheet.
Why would taxpayers be on the hook instead of banks and investors ?
Scumbags sucking the company dry and expecting the government to bail them out. Should be an inquiry.
Good. Go take a loan or private funding and run your business exactly like anyone else would in that position
Wouldn’t it make more sense to nationalise it if the tax payer is going to fork out for the bill
Just fucking renationalise it, why are we even having the discussion
Capitalism 101. The market has decided that Thames water is going bust.
Bill payers ALREADY paid massive increases that they were told were an investment in works that have not even BEGUN, and this was nearly 20 bloody years ago. The water companies can jolly well give the people what they paid for, and never got, back then, and as for their price increase, they can shove it up the overstuffed arses of their top brass. Turn these punks upside down, and shake them until all the money made by the water company between 2014 and 2024 comes out, and pay it out of that. Someone took that money, and it wasn’t workers, infrastructure, or taxation. It was the super rich.
They caused the problem, they can pay to solve it.
If the government does not step in and force Thames Water to capitulate without a price rise, the customers should refuse to pay their bills until people who understand right and wrong are put in charge of it, and the finances of those they replace!
But it’s debts shouldn’t be added to the taxpayer’s balance sheet. Fixing the water infrastructure is going to be expensive but anyone stupid enough to lend money to a private company so they can pay it straight to their shareholders with no plan to pay it back shouldn’t expect to be bailed out by the taxpayer.
Thames water is held together by being a monopoly and has the increased problem of being held up with pension funds.
So the directors know by paying insane dividends and increase the debt of the company that if it all goes down hill the government will have a problem if the company goes bankrupt with no bailout from the government as it will be pensioners that will be left with the bag at the end and not the directors of the company.
Let them collapse and then nationalise them. Essential utilities like water, electricity, public transport and telecoms should never be in the hands of private firms.
Fold the company then and let the state take over.
Ridiculous that England is one of only two countries in the world with privatised water.
Got to hand it to the tories, they can really fuck a country up like no other political party.
They stole billions of pounds and want more. Lock the executives up for fraud and theft
The value of your investments may go up as well as down?
So it’s refunding all it’s investors then I take it for bad mismanagement.
I’m not an investor by the way but I’d a company is admitting this then surely they should be culpable for investors losing out?
Sounds like a “them” problem.
Weird because I’m sure we’ll be paying for it like it’s an “us” problem.
I’m not Thames Water please don’t downvote me for their despicable practices 😅 they also decided to pay out [billions to shareholders in April of this year](https://www.cityam.com/despite-its-problems-thames-water-still-aims-to-pay-2bn-in-dividends-over-the-next-decade/)
Ironically if they cry themselves a river it might dilute the shit in the pipes
Maybe cut back on those massive shareholder dividens.
Realistically, what is Ofwat going to say? Are they going to agree?
Dissolve Thames Water. It only serves its shareholders with not one thought for the consumer. Sooner we get rid the better! And do it before it goes bust and Shareholders cream off all the income.
Then it should be taken off them and nationalised (without buying it off them), they had their chance and blew it. We will foot the bill as tax payers but we should then own it.
I swear, if Thames Water managed to get through all this without being returned to public ownership, I will lose what little trust in the system I have left.
Big mistake from Ofwat here, they should be free to charge their customers what’s necessary to get things back on track. It absolutely shouldn’t fall upon the (nation-wide) taxpayer to subsidise Southerner’s water bills.
So they can say they have had massive profits and give it to share holders?
I work for one of these water companies and bullshit managerial jobs are rife. Positions that could be emails everywhere.
Processes that need to be modernised are stopped from happening because doing so would erode certain managers influence.
People that run into rooms and interupt everyone already working to tell you how important a project is. They know very little about the actual project while asking embrassingly simple questions, and then run into the next room to tell board members how they are “Driving the work”.
Now cost cutting is starting to happen, they have began to rapidly fire people that actually do the work. They are going to become even more inefficent, left with all of the dead wood allowed to build up over the years.
Nationalise it and foist any debt onto the shareholders and executives from before that. Seriously why the fuck is water being ran as a for profit business. *Water* for fucks sake
So nationalise it. I’ll pay some extra tax for clean water thanks.