Sure thing!

According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgleg70r7rno

> When Thames was privatised in 1989, it had no debt. But over the years it borrowed heavily and its total debt - which includes all of its borrowings and liabilities - now stands at £22.8bn, according to latest financial results, external.

> Its debt pile increased sharply when Macquarie, an Australian infrastructure bank, owned Thames Water, with debts reaching more than £10bn by the time the company was sold in 2017.

According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41152516

> Macquarie and its investors paid £5.1bn for Thames Water, of which £2.8bn was money Macquarie had borrowed [...] £2bn had subsequently been repaid. Not by Macquarie and its investors, who had originally borrowed the money, but from new borrowings raised by Thames Water through a Cayman Islands subsidiary.

> Martin Blaiklock said: "That letter was a red flag to me because it showed clearly that the debt which Macquarie funds had used to buy Thames Water had been transferred over to Thames Water." [...]

> the total returns made by the bank and its investors from Thames Water averaged between 15.5% and 19% a year. Mr Blaiklock has 40 years of experience in such matters and said these returns were "twice what one would normally expect"

According to https://news.sky.com/story/approval-for-higher-bills-and-loa...

> The company, which has been crumbling under a £16bn debt pile, was due to run out of money in about a month's time. It has now received court approval for another £3bn loan [...] the company's gearing ratio is 80% and its annual debt interest bill is around £900m (about a third of the revenue it gets from customer bills) [...]

> The water regulator has sanctioned bill increases of 35% by 2030.

> However, Thames wants more. It is seeking a 53% increase, which would take the average bill to £677 a year

This stuff's all pretty widely documented and reported, if your idea of fun is getting angry and depressed while also reading about business accounting.

> My provider is Thames Water. They are losing money.

Are they losing money because costs exceed revenue, or are they losing money because they are servicing massive loan interest on money they already distributed to shareholders?

What is the debt load of TW? Cost of servicing it?

Based on "a third of customer bills go on interest payments", I'd guess the original comment was about Thames Water.

In 2023 their interest payments were 28% of revenue. They also made the news for dumping particularly large volumes of sewage into rivers.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/dec/18/water-firms-us...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67357566

You really twist yourself around here. But this?

> Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment, resulting in a huge accumulation of debt.

Bloody Tories, the whole problem isn't that they were in charge for 32 years from 1979-2024, it's the 13 years of Blair. They have been powerless to stop the spooky Left and fix the pipes before the water was privatised (or anything afterwards, because obviously it's still the Left)!

>This is exactly what would have also happened if the water companies were not privatized

The post office in the United States is not privatized and yet has been able to set prices in a way that sustains the business for centuries. You can't simply assume that all public entities will ignore fiscal reality.

In fact you may run into the opposite problem: when a utility is public, their debts appear on the government balance sheet and legislators are responsible for them. When it's spun off as a quasi-private monopoly, the government can impose debt on the utility without appearing to increase the public debt.

> This is exactly what would have also happened if the water companies were not privatized

This clearly isn't always true and when it does happen the public has the ability to require the transparency from their government to catch it happening quickly and the ability to hold the elected officials responsible for it accountable by voting them out and replacing them. Private corporations don't allow the level of transparency the public needs and aren't accountable to the public either.

Maybe the government could work out some deal that gives the public the right to put webcams in every meeting/board room of the private company, force their bookkeeping to be published to the internet, allow the public to request internal email and other communications, require independent audits/reports, and grant the public the ability to fire and replace any and all employees or executives at the private company who fail to do their jobs, but even then you'd still have the problem that private companies demand extra money on top of what is required to do the job just to line their own pockets. Why should we accept that?

>Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment

The overwhelming majority of people would disagree that the Conservative Party can be described as "left". Since 1979, the Conservatives have been in power for all but 14 years.

<< Perhaps a better plan would be to replaces cranes with horses and ropes such that we can once again afford windows

No - just bring back window taxes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax

That's a good thing to re-evaluate. The government shouldn't dictate people's preferences. People's lifestyles have changed. It's now normal for this generation of people to prefer a dark cave-like room where they play video games and socialize online. Glare from windows restrict where monitors could be placed. If they want natural light, they would prefer to go outside for a walk or a hike.

And that's not to mention rooms like kitchens and bathrooms. Older houses invariably have windows for kitchens too since you need to open the windows to let out the fumes from gas cooking. And they would have windows in the bathroom to let out moisture. These days newer houses are already designed not to have windows in either kitchens or bathrooms.

This is why the state owned company structure exists. The board and management are correctly incentivized and the profit can be reinvested if necessary. No parasites.

You need a counterbalance to efficient resource use, usually competition ensures they don't skimp, that doesn't work with natural monopolies.

Kind of shows how toxic things have become in our culture when people need to be bribed with profits to provide the basics necessary for a society to function, instead of just being incentivized by wanting a functioning society.

I can't understand the perspective of those who defend privatizing natural monopolies. I'm not against privatization in any way, but good governance is impossible without consequences for failure.

Focusing on Thames Water's particular example, if we assume malice as the cause, what would be the potential consequences? While the government could impose fines, the possibility of non-payment exists and what would happen in that case? Instead of debt collectors taking action, like ripping pipes from the ground or causing pension fund collapse, the government would act as a last resort investor, potentially providing further funding for a few additional years before the situation likely repeats.

> Taken together, the fall in shareholders' investment and retained earnings - or profit - and rising dividend payments mean that, according to the University of Greenwich, owners have withdrawn £85.2bn. > > — BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cw4478wnjdpo)

It might be a rounding error vs the scale of investment needed for water, but that investment is needed regardless of public or private ownership.

It's not a rounding error in terms of gov investment elsewhere — imagine an extra £85bn invested in, say, social housing? Even as a single one-off

That says more about the British people than it does about the ability of a government to be efficient.

Competition is possible, it just is rarely worth it. NYC subways worked fairly well as a competitive system until the city started passing maximum price laws (which in turn meant they couldn't maintain the system and eventually the city took it over). However the competition meant redundant service to the dense areas as each built there, at the expense of less dense areas that should have got service. It also meant that where lines did cross each other (a complex task even in 3d) they generally didn't built transfers even though a single system would have.

The claim competition is not possible is therefor false. We can debate if we want it, but it is incorrect to claim it cannot work.

Competition in rail does exist in the UK and privatization turned around the network's fortunes. The ridership graph is very clear:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail#...

Traffic dropped a lot in the Great Depression but stabilized immediately after, and remained stable right up until nationalization in 1948 at which point the network entered a period of continuous decline, eventually falling to a level of ridership last seen in 1865. That is a staggering failure.

The moment the railways were privatized ridership starts going up again, despite the privatization not being complete and being unable to roll back the huge damage done under the decades of state ownership (before nationalization the railway companies were entirely self sufficient, which they no longer are).

So to argue that privatization makes "no sense" you have to ignore the fact that when privately managed usage of the railways goes up and when run by the state it goes down. If the goal of the railway is to be used, then it does make sense.

Thus my comment about competition regulation.

If "food" were a singular universally used product, and units of food were totally interchangeable I'd say that food should be treated like a utility. Instead there's a lot of different types of food from ultra-processed crap that's sat on a shelf for years to whole/fresh foods and everything from the skill of the manufacturer/baker/chef to the quality of the ingredients used will result in massive differences in the food and its costs.

That isn't really the case with water and power (or even internet access). Water is water. Electricity is Electricity. There's no artisanal organic Electricity made from the finest ingredients that powers your stuff any better. You either have a safe, functioning product or it isn't. Everyone needs the exact same stuff, it makes sense for the government to supply it. Not everyone needs, or even wants, the same foods.

Not normally considered infrastructure.

Food distribution networks might be infrastructure, but POS stores aren't, generally. Drinking water supplies are infrastructure; drinking fountains aren't.

Food production is largely nationalised due to heavy subsidies provided to farmers. Different countries have different policies here, but in my country of Australia it meets the definition of a nationalised industry by everything but name.

Food distribution as not, and again in my country we are having constant investigations into monopolistic anti consumer behaviour by the large supermarkets.

they sell water, too!