A dry spring and the panic buttons are being pressed all over England. But there is no drought – this is normal variability. What we do have is a chronic under-investment in infrastructure – a lack of new reservoirs, new and replacement distribution mains, and still the lack of an effective leakage prevention programme.
What we do have is excessive expenditure on mad EU directives, corporate greed, gross inefficiency, incompetence, and lack of strategic planning, not forgetting of course that we have had four million immigrants, who also use water - and pay water bills (some of them).
But, as always, the corporate leaches get away with it, while the media goes for the cheap and easy shots, publishing water-industry-inspired photo-shots to show how hard done-by the utilities are. The caption to the above photo reads: "Drying out: The high temperatures have reduced the level of the water in a reservor (sic) at Marsden Moor near Huddersfield".
Compare and contrast with this report where Yorkshire Water, owner of the reservoir, comes out the worst authority of all for leakage, losing an average of 295 million litres a day. But nowhere will you find easily the capacity of the reservoirs managed by Yorkshire Water – this is information it does not want you to know in a website full of corporate fluff.
What it cannot conceal, of course, is that each year, the water bills go up and the accountability disappears, while the amount of product available for our money goes down, as it drains into the soil. What a real success this privatisation programme has been.
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