[News] Ofwat to basically deregulate water companies….

[chickens]

Correct. I personally have a policy of not investing in former essential utilities or oil, but I am clueless as to where my pension is invested. There are ramifications for ordinary folk if a major company goes down.

That said, I agree that dividend payments are a no no.

The best analogy I can give you is that of a forest. Without the very largest trees occasionally either succumbing to high winds or a forest fire, only stunted things can grow beneath them. The massive tree takes most of the nutrients from the soil below, and the sunlight and rain from above.

If we artificially keep zombie companies operating (Won’t somebody think of the pension funds?) then smaller, more agile competitors will never prosper.

The above is not entirely useful in the case of essential utilities such as drinking water, but that’s because there cannot be meaningful competition without giving most of the UK up to the building of reservoirs and treatment plants, and running twelve sets of identical pipework to every home in the UK. Which is why the service should never have been privatised in the first place.

 

[chickens]

Here’s the lowdown on Southern Water. I wonder how pro-privatisation Southern Water customers will be upon realising precisely how much of their bill will be going toward servicing the debt that has been loaded onto it.

You will need to devote some time to the article linked to, it’s detailed.

Southern Water's ghost from the past

The financial product that blew up the world in 2008 is haunting the highly-indebted privatised utility

open.substack.com