No other country has a public water supply that's not in public ownership - Yorkshire Post Letters
From: John Rayner, North Ferriby.
Two years after ‘Mr Bates vs the Post Office’ on ITV forcefully brought public attention to the plight of prosecuted postmasters, the recent Channel 4 docudrama ‘Dirty Business’ has emphatically exposed the farce that is the supposed regulation of this country's privatised water monopolies. If you haven't seen the three-part series, find it online.
It should tell us something that this failed experiment of political dogma is unique in the world. No other country has a public water supply that's not in public ownership.
Yes, some dramatic content was written to link the historical events, but the overall gist was unmistakable. The use of contemporary social media clips of sewage pollution, and news footage of senior politicians - prime ministers no less, from Thatcher to Starmer - crowing about releasing industry from the red tape of excessive regulation, spoke volumes.
Behind the scenes, the Environment Agency was progressively emasculated, underfunded by the government, while its senior executives joined a merry-go-round of alternating employment with water companies or directorship of industry bodies. Conflict of interest isn't the half of it.
Meanwhile, their conscientious professional staff were stopped from making site inspections, instead having to rely on ‘industry self-monitoring’ whereby water companies had to monitor their activities and kindly inform the regulator whenever they had broken a rule. As the staff asked, ‘what if they don't?’
The atmosphere of the office scenes with Environment Agency staff and managers were reminiscent of the BBC satire ‘W1A’, but that was meant to be comic. The truth behind ‘Dirty Business’ is anything but.