All Change

Been thinking about my water supply, pressure seems to be low compared to what it was, but then that just maybe an ageing thing with me. If the Supply Company did set about reducing the water pressure there could be significant savings. Low pressure means less leakage, an insufficient pipe network can cope for longer before replacement and lower pressure means slower take up of reservoir water and lower volume to treat. These are big cost considerations. The point is, there is nothing to stop them from deciding to lower the mains pressure. Their objective is not any longer to provide the best possible service. Their primary, if not overriding objective, is to return an increasing profit to their shareholders. User concerns are not on their agenda other than running as minimal a service as they can get away with, just short of referral to any regulatory body or generating a nuisance level of complaint. Providing a good service cost them and brings them no dividends. There are not more customers to win, it is, to all intents and purposes,a fixed quantum. Their consumers have no where else to go to and no one to champion for them. So what, the water pressure is low, what are you going to do about it? There is no statutory requirement. The consumer is left in a hard place.

Not just water of course but all the old public utility industries, electricity, telephones, rail, and good old Royal Mail. Where are the safeguards that keeps electricity at the target voltage and not allowed to settle to the lowest percentile, or what is supposed to stop a next day delivery becoming 'within three days' norm, what checks are there in the time taken to renew a telephone line fault or what ensures there is a seat, on a clean train which is running on time? Nothing tangible that I can see or find. With the need to generate a profit replacing the previous desire to provide a good service, the luckless consumer, without any real alternate choice or options, has to get on with using these declining services. The politicians are in the clear, privatised, nothing to do with them, (except of course the creation of these monsters). The private companies are untouchable, they provide to the standard required when they were setup. Their regulatory bodies, which are supposed to provide a complaints procedure, seem unable to deal with the deluge of ordinary day mishaps and lack of performance. They have no remit to respond to your actual experienced real or imagined complaints. These private companies loyalty is to their boards of shareholders, (predominately pension plans to a tee), you as a consumer have no voice. Those individual share-owners who bought into the bonanza have no meaningful voice against the institutions that ended with the more than lion's share. So, within the prescribed remit, they meet the requirements and you have only to look at the profits and enhanced values returned to 'their' shareholders to see they are successful. Except by that one essential bottom line, service to the consumer.


When there is a more or less fixed market for your 'goods', when that market is stable and will not suddenly disappear, when the regulators have been left toothless, when the glory goals of 'privatisation' far out shines a dimly held desire to give a good service, when there is no tie between making profit and providing that high quality of service, then any incentive to do better evaporates. In this short-sighted flawed application of supposed commercial energisation the consumer has been sold out. Utility services are just that, essential core services to keep the country turning over efficiently, not optional, not marginal, smack dead central. A Nation has to get its utilities working if all other commerce and industry is to thrive. When shareholders around EU and the globe are in control of your utilities, controlling the infrastructure investment and the level of return required, you as a Nation are left powerless. Your citizens, the consumers of these utilities, doomed to declining poor unreliable services putting them disadvantaged against other nations better serviced. We were sold out of our birth right by a shrews fantasy, sold again into servitude for just a few pieces of gold. Long live the revolution.