Just finished  a book, “The Mercenary River” by Nick Higham.

It’s a hard read, but worth the effort.

Hard, because It has to be. It covers four hundred years of history and does it in detail. Necessary detail to understand what happened and its implications.

I am not going to precis, summarise or extract from the book. It needs to be read, and deserves to be read, cover to cover. What follows is based on my impressions and probably, historically, well wide of the mark.

It seems that for at least four hundred years the supply of water to London has been in the hands, one way or another, private enterprise.

Throughout that time, the leaders and owners of those businesses have been so influential and intermingled with government and the machinery of government that attempts at control and regulation have been pathetic, to say the least. When and where sanctions and fines have been imposed, the effect has simply been passed on to the consumer and the real controllers have cruised on in untrammelled luxury with a mere shrug of their podgy financial shoulders.

One aspect that struck me is that, throughout, storm runoff, foul sewage, drinking water and industrial water have all been treated as the same commodity. To my mind, this seems ridiculous.

Certes, not until the late 19^th century, with the discovery of bacteria, was there a proper scientific rationale for the separation of these facilities. But, seriously, would you want to collect your bucket of drinking water from a stream while you watch turds and dead dogs float past? Because this is what the “underserving poo-er” of London had to do until far too recently.

Again, this is my impression, even to this day, all four commodities are handled by the same entities, frequently using the same infrastructure.

Now, London is a bit of an oddity. I hope she will excuse and understand the term. She just growed and growed. Why not? She’s gorgeous and why wouldn’t people want to live in and be a part of her?

London sits on a stretch of the Thames which is tidal. The configuration of the estuary gives rise to quite a large tidal range, which means the water flow down the Thames through London is not continuously seawards. It flows back inland with each tide. And that means debris, dogs and turds could swish back and forth for quite a while before making it to the sea, the ultimate sewage treatment and recycling plant – as it should be. I think this makes her one of a very few major cities in this situation.

The continuous growth and development of London means that the poorly maintained infrastructure could not be replaced and redesigned without a major upheaval, digging up literally every road and street end to end for months at a time.

Throughout these four centuries the government and the governance of this country has been an oligarchy. Of course, from time to time the populace are trotted out for a ballot, but that makes no real difference to most of the stuff that actually happens to them.

Figure this: you get one vote to choose: the  party of government, the leader of that party, foreign policy, home policy, education, welfare, defence, immigration, and anything else. This means that vested interests can more or less trundle on thanks to their carefully cultivated connections and influence with upper echelons of all political parties.

You’ll find this in all countries, so don’t start ranting.

The water industry cottoned on to this centuries back and that has allowed them to resist and ignore any proposal that might interfere with their real business of drilling for wealth and piping it to their shareholders. Currently, after privatisation again, those shareholders are offshore and the dividends, excessive dividends, cannot be recovered. This allows the water companies to wring their hands and bleed all over the carpet, wailing that they don’t have the funds to update and maintain the infrastructure as it should be.

Depressingly, I cannot think of anywhere further to go with this.

Obviously, something as fundamental as clean drinking water should  not be, and never should have been, at the whim of private companies.

Obviously, as always, “inward Investment” means “Outward Cashflow”.

Obviously, that cashflow is unrecoverable.

Somethings which might not have been obvious four hundred years ago ought to have become obvious probably two hundred years ago.

Obviously, now, foul sewage should be in completely different infrastructure and under separate control and regulation. Possibly this category should include industrial/commercial/agricultural effluent.

Obviously, now, storm runoff needs to be segregated from drinking water prior to adequate treatment.

As always, “Inward Investment”, the much vaunted advantage of privatisation, has resulted in outward cashflow, to the tune of billions which should have been used to update creaking and inadequate infrastructure.

It is understandable, though unacceptable, that in the first few hundred years the problems we now face were not understood. But it is clear from the ravenous exploitation of the owners of the water companies even then, a fuller understanding of the problems, the future growth, the hygiene requirements would have made no difference.

It is also unacceptable, though regrettably all too understandable, that government of the past couple of centuries has wimped out of its duty to take charge of what was always a government responsibility – the essential for human life – clean water.

Joseph Bazalgette took a giant step towards diverting the outflow of foul sewage from the Thames tidal basin, but that has been overtaken by metropolitan growth. Now we await the commissioning of the new Thames Tideway Tunnel. As with all mega-projects, this will almost certainly be obsolete or inadequate before commissioning is complete.

For the future, we face another aspect of the problems of water supply, treatment and disposal.

It is expected that the UK population will rise to 74 million in the next decade. What will they drink instead of water?

Yep, we’ve had some wet winters. But that just dumps raw water all over the place. Without a massive upgrade to the water supply process and infrastructure, we will be back to more or less square one. And that does not even look at  the disposal side of the issues.

Let’s face it, we’re in the shit. Again. And government has done, is doing, and will do nothing about it. That is, judging on the past performance of all parties.

Enjoy your day.