Andy Burnham to set out plans for public control of water companies before end of year
Yorkshire’s three Labour mayors have urged the Prime Minister to bring Yorkshire Water under greater public control through mutualisation.
Andy Burnham will set out plans to take public control over water companies before the end of the year, saying this will make “them work for people and places again”.
He revealed this would form part of his 10-year plan for Britain, as he made his first statement in the House of Commons as Prime Minister.
Mr Burnham said he would set out this plan before the end of the year “for stronger public control over essentials”, such as water, energy and transport.
He told MPs that people see no hope in “a failed economic model, which does not trickle down much to places like theirs and instead allows wealth to be extracted and siphoned out”.
Mr Burnham said: “Britain's water industry stands as a leaking monument to that approach, a country run in the private rather than public interest, and that is now abundantly clear to voters of all parties.
“The government I lead will be relentless in giving people and places what they were promised 10 years ago, ownership and control, and from that control over their destiny comes change and growth.”
The former Greater Manchester mayor hit out at the deindustrialisation and privatisation of the 1980s, and the impact of austerity and Brexit on areas of the UK outside of the South East and London.
But Mr Burnham said taking back public control over services and utilities will be at the centre of the Government’s efforts to create economic growth.
“Household energy bills are the highest in Europe, and the cost of energy is impacting business and inward investment,” he said.
“Too many areas have seen water supplies disrupted this summer due to a lack of reservoir capacity.
“Our tourism industry is damaged by too many sewage spills.
“This summer has shown us very clearly that water companies are failing to rise to the climate challenge. It can't go on.
“Later in the year, our 10-year plan for Britain will set out plans for stronger public control over these essentials, making them work for people and places again.”
What method of public control Mr Burnham uses remains to be seen. He appears to have backed off putting Thames Water into a special administration regime over fears of costs.
The report says this would see the firm be turned into a membership model, deployed by building societies, which would avoid the big costs of nationalisation.
Earlier in the summer, Mr Burnham told The Yorkshire Post that “all ideas can be looked at as part of that reform”.
The company has said the proposal “has no credible answers to the central questions of where regions would find the money to buy water companies, nor how they would fund the many billions of pounds of investment needed to deliver better outcomes for customers and the environment over the years ahead”.
She said while Thames was an “extreme case”, there is scope for different approaches elsewhere in the country - based in part on Mr Burnham’s template for working with United Utilities in Greater Manchester.
Ms Shaw told this paper: “Nationalisation, it is pretty clear, doesn’t make a lot of difference.
“If you look at the Welsh or Scottish businesses, they are owned in very different ways to English businesses and the outcomes are pretty similar. I don’t think that is a key defining feature.
“Control is interesting. In Manchester, the way the city council and combined authority was working with United Utilities was very much in partnership focusing on the goals they wanted to work on together. If we can do that in Yorkshire, that will be really effective for us.”