Sewage, leaks and hosepipe bans: Should our water companies be nationalised?
This Is Why
Sky News
4.0 • 552 Ratings
🗓️ 29 June 2023
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It comes after the sudden resignation of Thames Water’s chief executive and Sky’s exclusive report into government contingency plans for the firm’s potential collapse.
On Sky News Daily, host Niall Paterson speaks to business correspondent Paul Kelso about how Britain’s biggest water company came to be on the brink of collapse and the chairman and founder of River Action, Charles Watson, about whether decades of problems with sewage, leaks and supply could lead to the renationalisation of water firms.
Producer: Emma Rae Woodhouse
Interviews producer: Alex Edden
Editor: Danielle Weekes-Chilufya
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Add water to your will. |
| 0:02.0 | And know that from that single drop, |
| 0:05.0 | life will grow. |
| 0:08.0 | Communities will flourish. |
| 0:10.0 | A better world will be left. |
| 0:13.0 | By leaving a gift in your will to Water Aid, |
| 0:16.0 | you'll help bring essential clean water to people who need it, |
| 0:20.0 | to change their own lives for generations |
| 0:22.4 | to come. Add water aid to your will. Search WaterAid legacy to find out how. Easter eggs? M&S, of course. |
| 0:32.2 | I mean the new Chok Marks egg with salted pretzel pieces and honey almond new guy is pretty spectacular and what |
| 0:39.1 | about the big daddy loaded half egg filled with caramel and peanut chunks and dark chocolate pieces |
| 0:45.2 | or the Swiss chocolate crispy cloud egg with crunchy corn flakes salted caramel and |
| 0:51.2 | almond yes please so if you're looking for amazing eggs, it's got to be M&S. |
| 0:56.4 | This is not just food. |
| 0:57.7 | This is M&S food. |
| 0:59.3 | Selected stores. |
| 1:02.5 | Given the typically inclement conditions the country enjoys most of the year, |
| 1:06.7 | you'd think the UK wouldn't have a problem with water. |
| 1:09.7 | It might not grow on trees, but it does fall from the skies with alarming regularity. |
| 1:15.0 | And yet, raw sewage is dumped into our rivers and seas with even greater frequency in 2022, on average 824 times. |
| 1:26.4 | A day, that is. But where there's muck, there's brass, and since |
| 1:30.9 | privatisation in 1989, water firms have paid 66 billion pounds in dividends. So why then is the |
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