What next for water?
The Bottom Line
BBC
4.6 • 615 Ratings
🗓️ 20 July 2023
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
England’s water companies are under fire – there’s public anger over sewage spills and leaks, and now regulators and government ministers are worried some of them are drowning in too much debt. So what’s gone wrong, and who will pay the price of fixing the industry?
On the face of it, running a water company seems like a licence to print money – there’s guaranteed revenue, and no competition – but there’s a lot of infrastructure to build and maintain, and strict targets that are getting even tougher and more expensive to hit as environmental concerns grow.
Many of England’s water firms have taken on very high levels of debt, but have they used it to invest, or pay off their shareholders? And does the regulator, Ofwat, have questions to answer for strangling spending on improvements in a bid to keep customer prices low?
Evan Davis is joined by:
Nicola Shaw, CEO, Yorkshire Water; Sir Ian Byatt, Ofwat Director General from 1989 to 2000; Verity Mitchell, UK analyst at Global Water Intelligence.
PRODUCTION TEAM:
Producer: Simon Tulett Editor: China Collins Sound: Graham Puddifoot and Mike Woolley Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown
Produced in partnership with The Open University.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.3 | Hello, welcome. No one can be happy with the state of England's water industry. The public |
| 0:10.9 | clearly feels it isn't working, what with the sewage being run into our rivers, endless |
| 0:15.3 | hosepipe bands, while water leaks away underground in the pipe network, not to mention, of course, the prices. |
| 0:22.3 | What about the shareholders? They're generally considered to have done very well. Thank you, |
| 0:26.2 | but now, in one or two cases, the companies have somehow conspired to be on the edge of toppling over. |
| 0:32.7 | How on earth have we made it so difficult? It's an old business. There's no shortage of customers. There's |
| 0:38.0 | no prospect of there ever being one. We're meant to have professional regulators. There's no |
| 0:43.6 | competition. It should just be a sector as dull as dishwater. But it's ended up more like |
| 0:48.5 | white water rafting. So what has gone wrong? How do we fix it? What's it really like running |
| 0:53.1 | a water company? Well, I have three guests to help us shed some light on this. |
| 0:58.5 | First of all, Nicola Shaw, Chief Executive of Yorkshire Water. And Nicola, you joined what last year. |
| 1:04.7 | Yes, that's right. |
| 1:05.4 | So you can't take any blame for anything that has gone before. But you had a career and indeed you've been on |
| 1:11.0 | the bottom line in the past in other jobs. National Grid, High Speed One. What's the difference |
| 1:17.4 | between Yorkshire Water and those other utilities? I think the biggest difference is how every |
| 1:22.1 | day there's something to work at. We have people taking stuff out of sewers every day that people have put down for some |
| 1:29.3 | reason that just blocks it. We have people making sure our pumps and we have thousands of pumps |
| 1:34.7 | across the network are all working. And you can imagine with rotating bits of equipment, they |
| 1:39.4 | fail more frequent than you'd like. And we cover all of Yorkshire, so there's a lot of space to get around, beautiful space, |
| 1:46.2 | but there's a lot to do. |
| 1:47.7 | How did you find morale when you arrived at Yorkshire water? |
... |
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