How is the Government going to send water executives to prison when they’re all full? - David Behrens
How does that square with Labour’s other big idea – to fill the cells instead with the bosses of our failing water companies?
According to the Environment Secretary Steve Reed, prison is the next likely career move for under-performing executives who have grown fat on a culture of pumping sewage into the seas and rivers while stuffing their own wallets with nebulous ‘performance’ bonuses.
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Hide AdBut the crush inside B Wing means the head of Thames Water is going to have to share his cell with someone like Harry ‘The Trousers’ Trubshawe, the phantom flasher of Hampstead Heath. And he’ll have to empty his own slop bucket, which will be the closest he’ll have been for years to an actual water pipe.


Given the outrage over their environmental transgressions, you’d have thought the water companies would be falling over themselves to try to salvage their reputation. And you’d be wrong.
Here’s what I mean: last weekend road contractors removed an entire railway bridge from the M62 between Leeds and Manchester in just two days. Further along the motorway an experimental detached house was put up in seven days.
Yet it took Yorkshire Water nearly a week to fill in a single hole that closed the only road through a busy town in the East Riding.
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Hide AdYou might have read about the railway bridge because even though the work was done efficiently and on time, it delayed hundreds of thousands of journeys. The hole, however, was in a coastal backwater and went almost unreported.
But residents and holidaymakers in Withernsea had to endure nine-mile detours on single-track roads through surrounding villages to get from one end of town to the other. School buses on the first week of term had to be diverted. Ambulances couldn’t get through. Trade on the high street suffered.
A burst water main was the cause. That was repaired in a few hours but filling the hole it left was a pantomime worthy of a Bernard Cribbins song. I asked Yorkshire Water’s press office how it could possibly have taken five days to drive a lorry load of Tarmac the 17 miles from Hull. Their dismissive reply had condescension written all over it.
“Returning a road to normal can be a lengthy process,” they said. “We worked as quickly as possible.” They didn’t even try to explain the delay, let alone justify it.
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Hide AdFilling a hole in a road is a “lengthy process” if, and only if, you don’t pull your finger out. If the M62 contractors had taken the same approach it would have been closed until Christmas. And while one seaside road is a minor issue compared to the repeated release of sewage into the sea beyond, it betrays exactly the same mindset: minimum effort for maximum reward.
It is no coincidence that later this month, Yorkshire Water and four other regional suppliers will appear in court for the first time, to face allegations that they under-reported pollution incidents and overcharged customers as a result.
And it’s why the government is right to threaten their bosses with hard time behind bars. The prospect of palpable personal punishment is the one thing that might shake them from their complacency.
It’s not as if effort and innovation are incompatible with our arthritic economy. That experimental house – constructed, remember, in little more than the time it took the water workers to fill a hole – stands outside the Liverpool convention centre where Labour is holding its annual conference.
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Hide AdIt’s intended as a first step in tackling the housing shortage and although it’s a factory-built unit assembled onsite – a practice once synonymous with leaks – it actually looks quite desirable. It’s certainly very cheap to heat; handy if you’ve just lost your winter fuel allowance.
Keir Starmer will see it on his way into the conference chamber. And it’s bound to dawn on him that if we can put up houses this quickly, we can build prisons the same way.
As a matter of fact, a few new cell blocks to accommodate disgraced executives – not to mention those old lags who got out early and reoffended before they got as far as the benefits office – could be the ideal way of testing these quick-build units. If the roofs leak, who cares; they can use their slop buckets.
All of which means that if Labour makes good on its intentions, you’ll have to wait until prison visiting time to tell anyone when the water main bursts again.
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