DAYS after three-quarters of Britain was officially declared to be suffering from drought, plans have emerged that will allow the privatised water companies to charge their customers higher prices during water shortages.
Under plans due to be passed by the water regulator Ofwat these private companies would be allowed to impose ‘surge pricing’ and ‘water scarcity’ into household bills.
The intention behind this change to pricing structure is to make water more expensive for households during certain times of the year when water shortages are increasingly common in order to reduce consumption.
Surge pricing will enable the water companies to charge more during times of acute water shortages caused by extreme weather conditions such as the five heatwaves that have gripped the country so far this year.
Both surge pricing and water scarcity would require households to be fitted with water meters.
Ofwat is reported to be making a final decision within weeks for a proposal that has the backing of both Labour and, unsurprisingly, the water industry.
Last week, it was announced that Ofwat plans to allow five water companies to increase water bills to pay for ‘infrastructure projects’ designed to put right the decades of neglect of this vital human resource.
This decision by Ofwat coincided with the news that Thames Water had handed its finance chief a one-million-pound sign-on payment.
Thames Water is gripped by a massive debt pile of around £20 million but still found the money to pay out this massive bonus.
This is on top of last month’s decision by Thames Water to award its chief executive Chris Weston a pay rise that pushed his salary to £1.16 million a year and handed out over £4.09 million in bonuses to the rest of the company’s bosses.
This caused a backlash amongst the public which prompted Labour Prime Minster Andy Burnham to weigh in and criticise Ofwat’s decision saying that water customers ‘cannot be treated as a blank cheque’, adding: ‘I understand why people are angry – I am too.’
Not angry enough to do anything about it, apart from issuing vague promises to use public money to bail-out the company and take over its financial debts under some form of partial nationalisation.
Now it appears that the Labour government is fully behind the latest scheme to make workers pay for the total failure of the private water companies to ensure adequate water supplies by imposing increased costs in an effort to drive down consumption in times of acute shortages caused by increasingly common extreme weather conditions.
The Sunday Telegraph joined in the condemnation blaming the privatised water companies for their ‘failure to invest in the infrastructure that would allow enough water to be supplied to the places that need it’ and the ‘successive governments’ that ‘have sought to cover their backs by forcing the problem onto consumers.’
Feargal Sharkey, a prominent water campaigner, delivered a more accurate and scathing condemnation saying: ‘For 40 years, these companies have had legal obligations to help customers reduce their demand and they have failed at that comprehensively, just as they’ve failed to keep our rivers clean and failed to deal with our sewage. Now they’re going to penalise consumers for that failure.’
Regarding the ‘surge pricing’ Ofwat and Labour are proposing, Sharkey added: ‘We’ve all been treated with contempt and forced to pay for our own exploitation for decades.’
The working class has had enough of being treated with contempt and exploited mercilessly by the privateers and hedge fund speculators, who enjoy the support of a Labour government completely under the thumb of the capitalist class.
The time has come for the working class to take action by forcing the TUC to call a general strike to bring down the Labour government, replacing it with a workers government.
A workers government will nationalise the water companies along with the banks and major industries placing them under the control of the working class, building a socialist planned economy for the benefit of all, not the profit of the capitalist class.
