Drip, drip, drip, Britain’s biggest water companies have all posted results this week. Prices frozen at South West Water; we’ll shoulder some of the price rise, said United Utilities.
No such luck for Londoners. Next year’s households won’t just have to cope with soaring energy costs, but our water bills are to rise by 1.4% above inflation too — and that after Thames’ request for an extra 8% increase was turned down.
So it’s the timing that is the most galling part of Thames Water’s 19% leap in pre-tax profit for six months. Rivals heeded the advice of Ofwat’s chairman Jonson Cox, who wrote to all water companies asking them to consider whether they needed to increase their bills by the full amounts set in the last price review, given the hard time customers are facing.
Thames has kept the price-rise tap on. It claims, as the big utilities always do, that it needs to offer a decent return to keep investors happy and to keep spending money digging up roads to fix pipes.
But Severn Trent’s £5 billion foreign takeover bid this summer shows investors like what they’re getting from our water companies: the chance to cash in on a series of monopolies with a gushing income stream. And customers have no choice but to pay up.
