It was there from the go. Yorkshire, Devon … a complete nonsense. Non were ready for privatisation and now the bill needs to be picked up.
Those Thatcher years were nuts just no practically applied.
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Yeah, diificult to argue that although I do have a little sympathy. Much of the system is ancient and combined with so many above ground changes even relatively simple maintenance schemes can be incredibly difficult.
One example I know of is a small victorian brick culvert sewer in the middle of Chester. It’s close to 4m down, on an extremely narrow cobbled street with grade 2 and grade 1 listed buildings on either side. It’s collapsed and there’s no manhole access anywhere to send a camera down and then look at options to clean and fix it (line it for example). No contractor will go near it without Welsh Water accepting liability for any damage to the nearby buildings. So Welsh Water had been pumping it out for 3 years and counting when I looked at it. So they were spending a lot of money and getting nowhere fast.
So the problem is a huge one. That said I have little sympathy for senior managers etc. receiving huge bonuses for a deteriorating asset and dividends being paid out for what appears to be, not a lot performance wise.
I get the hesitation on works when you start talking about listed buildings, but I do think they are using that as a massive cop-out.
They can build an underwater tunnel connecting England to France, they can dig a tunnel underneath the whole of London without the city caving in, but they can’t build new sewers under coobbled streets?
The company I worked for until it went down the pan 18 months ago had the contract for sending out bills/arrears letters for Thames Water.
Every day we’d send out 20K or more letters to people who owed hundreds of pounds in unpaid bills.
They were owed fucking millions by non-payers, plus there was the cost of the contract itself.
I know it’s the same for all company’s but it certainly doesn’t help. We also had the TV licencing contract and that was insane, upwards of a million letters sent out each week to non-payers. Each non-payer would get 4 or 5 letters threatening them with action before anything would be done (if it ever was).
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In Scotland, the water bills are just a surcharge on the council tax, so collection is taken care of by that. It seems like a case of privatisation creating extra burocracy without any benefit.
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Yep, so I run the tap as long as I want before filling my glass
Nope, cost is way above the benefit in that location, combined with the risk.
My point, is the work is possible in this location, but someone needs to financially cover the risk. That stretches the budget massively. You dont need many of those awkward schemes to blow your available budget, which then means your whole maintenance programme gets extended and stretched out. But as I said still paying dividends while you’re failing is just bad and the above is not an excuse. It just shows how awkward it can be. Personally I think we are at such a critical point that we should be looking to build attenuation into our systems while still trying to catch up on the maintenance. Most maintenance issues do not end up with crap in the rivers, that’s primarliy a capacity problem.
This isn’t unique to the water industry. It’s across all UK infrastructure it’s just that the water industry has more obvious consequences (at the moment).
I think Germany is having issues with its bridges at the moment too. Just to show that its not a UK thing either.
Well someone has just crashed a barge into one over the Dortmund-Ems canal which has completely buggered the thing.
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Found this
Sorry, gone off topic
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The crackdown on taking threads off topic is initially centred on the transfer threads, as those are the most annoying ones to see lots of new posts and find they are actually an extension of a private joke between about five posters.
We’ll see about bring that to other threads. The politics one is going to very hard to police in this way, as politics is a particularly broad topic. However help in the matter, by keeping the in jokes and banter to a minimum would be appreciated.
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Fair point.
Anyway, about these German bridges
Moving on. Unsurprising article
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Turns out it is really easy to make nosie and fling shit…like a bunch of poorly socialised chimpanzees, really.
I live in hope there will be an internal power stuggle and they rise up to rip off the patriarch’s face.
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I think many people are worrying too much about the Reform surge (it’s not even close to being a fucking surge)
They’ve got a poisonous leader and (is it?) 3 other MP’s?
That is a million miles away from even getting close to becoming a real contender for government.
Reform is a fad/craze which will wither into non existence as quickly as it surfaced.
I’m more worried about the other cunts, neither of whom look like credible parties
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Maybe they genuinely thought that the councils were completely staffed by equality officers and have now discovered that there are three of them, and their main task is making sure that the authority is not sued under equality legislation.
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For once I almost agree with you. While Reform’s noises seem to resonate with a lot of people, there also serms to be inceasing noises on how much of a con artist Farage is. I hope for once some of it sticks.
Tories are clearly gone. Labour sadly delivering the same politics when there is obvious frustration with it.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true with you look closer at the swing need in a lot of those seats. Normally you’d expect a 120 seat majority to be worth at least three terms but, it will not take a huge swing for reform to take a lot of them.
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The threshold for the winter fuel payments has been raised to £35,000. It’s probably about right, but it seems a needlessly burocratic way of doing it:
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I think Reform are a genuine threat due to the power of social media. Reform are capitalising on X, TikTok, and the likes. The Southport riots for me was when I first realised how powerful they were, the likes of Farage “just asking questions”, people falling for disinformation, rioting, and then justifying it. We’ve had right wing commentators defending that odious Lucy Connolly for her tweets championing murder of others, almost putting her up on a pedestal as a martyr for free speech. They’ve managed to weaponise the free speech debate so that they want to say whatever they want without consequences, and start spouting out the “hurty words” line. It all feeds back into the idea that Reform are the only party who will defend “free speech”. We have two stations in TalkRadio and GB News who are pro-Reform too, with the latter happily platforming a white nationalist (Matt Goodwin), who views anyone non-white as not British (even mixed race people with a British parent) and who also promotes the Great Replacement Theory on X. Both stations also host commentators who believe in remigration, and lump it in with the narrative of “mass deportations”. Those same commentators have large followings on X and Youtube, and we’ve begun to see the normalisation of some of that talk on mainstream news, with wishy washy phrases that ‘communities have changed beyond recognition,’ and ‘I don’t even recognise this country anymore’, and when pushed, the mask slips, and it’s all about people who don’t look or sound like them. The common theme is they all back Reform, and are promoting simple solutions for complex problems. None of them talk about the impact of technology, which has isolated us further in many respects from face-to-face contact, the impact that has had on human interactions, or the inflationary pressures from war and weather.
I’m 99% sure Nigel Farage will be PM in 2029 as things stand, due to how thick the electorate are, how their brains have been rotted by social media, and how folks will blame anyone for their problems just for the way they look and sound. Reform have tapped into the primal fears of people, and there isn’t an alternative to counter it yet. It’s a problem that’s manifested in the US with the MAGA movement, in Germany with AfD. The problem with social media is that for someone like Starmer, all his mistakes will be played over and over again until the General Election. That will stick with people, those short clips of Starmer saying one thing and doing another, initially ditching the WFA. His administration seem to think we’re living in 1997, and not 2025. The playbook that got Blair elected into power and kept him there no longer applies in this bizarre political period we find ourselves in.
Starmer and Badenoch going into 2029 will be a disaster politically, and a guarantee of a Reform Government. I do think Labour will have to be very open to forming a coalition to be in Government in the next Parliament. I do think the Conservatives may have to try something a little wild i.e. Rupert Lowe as leader, which would split the Reform vote, as many Reform voters like Lowe, and that would likely see a Labour victory in 2029, or at least in a position to form a coalition.
Someone who really needs to be doing much better is Ed Davey with the Lib Dems. There’s a vacuum that Reform are currently filling which the Lib Dems should really be filling too, as people look for an alternative.
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