Thames Water’s creditor drama shames a Labour Party pledged to reverse Thatcherism

Editorial / 8 November 2026 War, law and Remembrance Sunday 8 November 2026 Editorial / 6 November 2026 Reject Mahmood and Rowley’s reheated British FBI 6 November 2026 Editorial / 5 November 2026 British workers still paying price of Trump’s war 5 November 2026 Editorial / 4 November 2026 Trump’s mid-term debacle compels a rethink of US alliance 4 November 2026 Editorial / 3 November 2026 Scrap plans to send troops to Ukraine 3 November 2026 Editorial / 2 November 2026 Why slavery and reparations are live issues globally 2 November 2026 Editorial / 1 November 2026 The youth of Europe demand different political choices. So should we 1 November 2026 THAMES Water’s ongoing battle to defer debt payments and secure new finance from creditors is a drama that should be over by now.

When Andy Burnham replaced Keir Starmer as Labour leader back in July, he promised to reverse the privatisation of economic power in Britain dating back over four decades to the Thatcher years.

No sector is a more obvious starting point than water for that process to begin.

The privatisation of England’s water is completely anomalous. No other country sold off control of this natural and essential resource so completely as Thatcher sold our water in 1989, handing the management, infrastructure, land and water rights over entirely. Even the other nations of the UK have control over their water, which England lacks.

Over 70 per cent of England’s water is owned abroad. The “investors” in this resource have no incentive to improve performance since they control regional monopolies and households cannot choose a different water supplier. They have no stake in the health of our waterways or wider environment — and they show it, having allowed sewage discharges to poison the rivers and coasts. The very safety of drinking water is increasingly compromised.

We pay 40 per cent more in real terms for our water than we did when it left public hands, but this money is not reinvested to improve performance or resilience. Accountable only to shareholders, since privatisation the water companies have paid out over £80 billion in dividends while loading themselves with over £50bn in debt.

This year Ofwat approved further steep rises in bills over the next few years — supposedly to fund the very improvements that have not been made because all that money was splashed on shareholders.

No major new reservoirs have been built since then, though almost 100 reservoirs were built in the 35 years before the sell-off.

Companies have not bothered to maintain the pipe network, leading to waste on a staggering scale — roughly a fifth of treated water leaks away before reaching taps, amounting to 955 billion litres a year. As climate change causes harsher summer droughts, those same companies imposing hosepipe bans leak four to five times as much water each day as is saved.

More than four in five people want water taken back into public hands. And Thames Water, the biggest provider of all, is contender number one: the company is worthless, crippled by its own debts, effectively controlled now by creditors rather than owners, the largest being US hedge funds.

Likely enough to collapse into administration anyway, Thames Water could be nationalised tomorrow. The failure to do so has costs: those creditors negotiating liquidity and debt relief do not do so on compassionate grounds. They seek concessions, including exemptions from fines for poor performance and pollution, to safeguard their investment at the public’s expense.

The climate emergency is placing real strain on water resources. At the same time, the AI revolution is driving the construction of data centres with huge energy and water requirements. But upgrading our water network, stopping the leaks, building the reservoirs is being left up to the same crooks who have screwed the public over for the last 37 years.

The government pretends it is acting by bringing forward legislation to end the ban on public ownership and by creating eight regional councils to “bring local leaders, customers and businesses together” and “give communities a greater say” in the water sector.

It’s a cop-out, and undermined by the same revolving door between politics and the boardroom that sees industry body Water UK chaired by former Labour minister Ruth Kelly and which will always militate against effective regulation of what remains a for-profit industry.

Nationalising water is the bare minimum Labour could do to show it is serious about reversing Thatcherism. Its timidity casts doubt on its readiness to deliver on any of its stated goals.

Britain / 9 November 2026 Thames Water plans to push back debts amid talks of rescue deal 9 November 2026 Britain / 24 September 2026 Nothing less than full renationalisation, campaigners tell Burnham 24 September 2026 New report urges PM to ‘reverse Thatcher’s 40-year legacy of privatisation’