As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, the planning system is also a huge obstacle to infrastructure investment, with numerous important projects being blocked due to spurious environmental concerns.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/687dfcc4312ee...
The economy always goes through these cycles - people find a way to scam/‘extract economic value’ from something no one is worried about at the time. They weren’t worried at the time, because it was well run and ‘what is the worst that can happen’.
Over time, what was working well gets blown up as part of the resource extraction, leading to the thing being a giant expensive scandal now.
The issue starts getting resolved - in the case of a public service often by necessary price increases because of stuff that wore out/deferred maintenance/disasters caused by the prior situation. If it’s a private company, bankruptcy.
Eventually, even the dumbest of the population realizes the prior attitude was wrong and they got scammed. The thing starts maybe not being terrible for awhile.
Scammers move onto another part of the economy as people are looking for them now.
After a generation or so, people forget. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Then dump untreated sewerage in rivers and demand more money from bill payers, because they “can’t afford” to maintain the infrastructure.
In most industries a company so poorly managed would lose customers, go bankrupt, and be replaced by a better run company. But water companies? They have a monopoly, and everyone needs water to live.
In 2023 their interest payments were 28% of revenue. They also made the news for dumping particularly large volumes of sewage into rivers.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/dec/18/water-firms-us...
Yes and they have been fined for doing so, thus proving my point. These companies have statutory obligations. See the Water Industry Act 1991 and subsequent legislation.
I'm having a hard time reconciling the theoretical claims made in the thread with the blinding light of what actually happened.
Many people claim these things happen because "shareholders" however it was completely widespread practice to dump sewage before privatisation and the system is literally designed to do so. This doesn't make it OK, however.
Sure, the sewers might not currently be designed that way, but that can be changed. (It's a logistical challenge, but it needs to be done.)
How does it add anything to the conversation?
That’s true for all organizations.
British water companies are in lots of debt because they aren't really private. They're forced to spend huge sums to repair Victorian-era infrastructure whilst the government sets the prices they're allowed to charge. Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment, resulting in a huge accumulation of debt.
This is exactly what would have also happened if the water companies were not privatized, so the fake "privatization" is a red herring. It's the expected outcome of price controls, not whether the utilities are owned by the state or not.
> Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment, resulting in a huge accumulation of debt.
Bloody Tories, the whole problem isn't that they were in charge for 32 years from 1979-2024, it's the 13 years of Blair. They have been powerless to stop the spooky Left and fix the pipes before the water was privatised (or anything afterwards, because obviously it's still the Left)!
They have had plenty of time to replace them.
Bullocks. All of your argument is bullocks
Oh boy. That's funny.
> much of their base having defected to Reform.
Yes, they found a party they will say the quiet bits out loud, so they don't feel as uncomfortable being bigots and racists.
Turns out I was wrong, all it takes is to no-true-scotsman everything into the "bad wrong left wing" bucket on the quest to move the overton window ever rightwards. Hilarious. The mental gymnastics knows no bounds.
You honestly believe this? If so: Jesus H. Christ!
The post office in the United States is not privatized and yet has been able to set prices in a way that sustains the business for centuries. You can't simply assume that all public entities will ignore fiscal reality.
In fact you may run into the opposite problem: when a utility is public, their debts appear on the government balance sheet and legislators are responsible for them. When it's spun off as a quasi-private monopoly, the government can impose debt on the utility without appearing to increase the public debt.
The US is a very right wing country. It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls. Maybe with Mamdani that's now changing.
Rather than placing price controls on private companies the US slashes taxes to the point where public services then cannot invest in infrastructure and maintenance - and then use that as an argument why public services should be privatized.
If tax cuts aren't populist policies I don't know what are. The magic trick of the right wing parties has been to sell tax cuts as a great thing to the very people who don't benefit from the cuts and are hurt by the fiscal fall-out. That and attaching themselves to Christianity while not following any of Jesus's teachings.
When a service is a monopoly there is no good reason for turning it into a for profit company outside of feathering the pockets of the rich. If the electricity supply to my house (and by extension my street and my city) is controlled by one company and they own the cabling and infrastructure then what is the motivation for them to not jack up my prices to generate profits to their shareholders, as they should as a shareholder owned company? What is their motivation for encouraging renewables or improving infrastructure when those would reduce profits and reduce shareholder value?
Mamdani hasn't even been voted in yet. Keep sowing that fear so that the people his policies might benefit don't actually vote for him - because he's a scary socialist (in the loosest, most American, definition).
So, governments of any color have to work with that as a constraint. Given that nobody has worked out how to convince everyone to accept big increases to their tax bills, you can either pay for new expenditures with borrowing or with cuts elsewhere. Sometimes cutting elsewhere is also hard, so either:
1. Everything gets put on the credit card. This ends badly.
2. Stuff is privatized. This yields an immediate cash influx, and voters are usually happy with the results which is why very few privatizations have been rolled back. The reason is that outside of very left wing spaces most people trust private companies on pricing much more than governments. Private companies run special offers, sales, sometimes cut prices even in the face of inflation and can be visibly seen competing on price. Government owned organizations never do this.
It's also (quietly) popular with governments on both left and right for another reason - it means they have less stuff to manage and less stuff that can blow up. If there's a problem with a privatized industry they can just tell you to switch to a competitor instead of needing to campaign on it and promise to do better.
Natural monopolies do exist and sometimes governments just have to bite the bullet and run such things themselves. But there's a lot of room to debate what is and isn't a natural monopoly.
They should try it. We desp3rately need to move the Overton window on this.
Tax is good. We need more of it. A screamingly obvious fact. Give us a chance, please, to vote for it.
In the US we have a problem with fantastically underpricing public roads. We don't expect their books to break even, much less generate a profit. Meanwhile everyone asks why train systems are not profitable.
> The US is a very right wing country.
Yeah, at least compared with most of Europe.
> It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls.
You didn't notice when the current president (somewhat successfully) bullied retailers into swallowing tariff-caused price increases, so they wouldn't damage his popularity? That almost seems right-wing socialist.
It's true that the US subsidizes its road network. The effect is somewhat different though. If TfL doesn't get enough money in due to price controls then the network just degrades. If the US subsidizes its roads, the network can be maintained using subsidies. For it to be equivalent, roads would have to be privately owned but unable to charge the true cost of maintenance.
I'm just going off what you said above:
> The US is a very right wing country. > It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls.
I don't think he is a traditional conservative either, but rather a right-wing nationalist ethno-socialist.
However, the fact is that he has the near unanimous support of most "textbook conservatives", both in Congress and in the broader Republican party, as evidenced by their voting for and supporting a massive debt-exploding budget and their silence in the face of his ethno-nationalist executive actions.
If he isn't a textbook conservative, neither are they.
But US politics plays out in many ways, including at the local level. For water supply who the POTUS is doesn't matter that much, it's not handled at the federal level. American political outcomes vs the rest of world are the result of long term social trends beyond any one man.
Only rhetorically, but that's just fodder for his blue collar base.
In practice he's done the opposite. His massive tax cuts for the wealthy and gutting of the social safety net is Reaganism/Thatcherism at its most explicit, and his broad tariffs are a tax on people who spend most of their income in survival.
> a textbook conservative, especially not economically
Wtf is a text book conservative supposed to be, exactly? And have we ever had one?
All the republicans in my life have raised the national debt and spent their time passing laws about culture war issues.
This is a myth that has the effect (intended or not) of normalizing Trump's economic policies with Bernie supporters.
Bernie Sanders only says that Trump speaks politically about the same working class struggles that he speaks about. That's it.
Bernie opposes 99% of Trump's actual economic policies, including the broad tariffs that are hitting the working class the hardest.
The only other economic policy Trump has done is tax cuts for the wealthy and cutting social safety net programs. Those are in direct conflict with everything Bernie stands for, but they are wholly supported by nearly all pre-Trump Republicans. If you have any doubts about that, just review the vote tally from the big beautiful bill.
The reasons why Western systems often don't recoup even operating expenses, let alone capital costs, from fares are because transit is a public service with public externalities. Drivers on the road contribute to pollution and congestion, especially relevant in dense areas like London. Some level of subsidy is appropriate to account for the positive externalities of discouraging these negative outcomes while still encouraging regional mobility.
This is not to say TfL is as efficient as it could be; there is a well-documented capital costs crisis in the Anglosphere, particularly when it comes to transit. The issues here are more complex, though, than vote buying from an allegedly "socialist" mayor.
The freezes eliminated investment projects needed to keep pace with population growth. There's also just big problems maintaining the stations and doing more than the bare minimum needed to keep the lights on. Travel on it and the stations are dirty, overly hot, etc.
Drivers on London's roads are very heavily taxed already, supposedly to reflect those externalities. Public transport obviously also contributes to pollution and congestion, especially when building underground lines, it's not externality-free.
I don't think TfL has a cost crisis. Crossrail overran but that was mostly due to the software complexities of the signalling tech debt around the Heathrow tunnels and other issues that can affect any kind of project. It's just hard to tell right now because they can't build at all.
The fare freeze was broken by central government briefly, but only by bribing Khan with central government money for upgrades. Exactly the outcome he wanted!
https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/6407
The overwhelming majority of people would disagree that the Conservative Party can be described as "left". Since 1979, the Conservatives have been in power for all but 14 years.
I thought it was on the basis of the whole Nazi thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany#Neo-Na... Everyone except Nazis agrees that Nazis are inherently evil.
So far as I can make out, here in the UK the near-universal view is that the Conservatives are a centre-right party, Labour are somewhere between a centre-left and a just-plain-centre party (unsurprisingly, people who are further to the left see it as further to the right and vice versa), and Reform are a not-so-centre right party. (People who aren't Reform supporters would mostly describe them as far-right. Not many people like to use that sort of terminology to describe themselves, so people who are Reform supporters would say other things.)
Pretty much no one other than extreme rightists would describe the Conservatives as a centre-left party. Likewise, some people further to the left would describe Labour as a centre-right party. I think more people would do that than would describe the Conservatives as centre-left, but that may just reflect the people whose opinions I happen to be most exposed to.
(I mean, specifically, in the UK. Other countries have different overall political leanings. Someone in the US, comparing with the parties there, might accurately describe the Conservative Party as centre-left. But in terms of the UK political landscape: no, of course they are not a centre-left party.)
If an election were called tomorrow your next government would be Reform with a massive majority of 339 seats. It is the most popular party in the country by far. It would collect 33% of the vote vs Labour's 18% and the Conservatives would get only 17%, translating to their near-total destruction (only 35 seats).
Reform's popularity is driven by the belief that the Conservatives have become so captured by left wing "wets" that they cannot be fixed. Otherwise it makes no sense to split the right, and right wing voters there resisted doing so for a long time. The most commonly cited reason for switching to Reform is a belief that the Tories won't actually enact any right wing policies no matter what they say, and so that's a third of the country saying through their votes they think the Conservatives are a center-left party.
The fact that you believe "pretty much no one other than extreme rightists" has this view and that Labour is seen as a "centrist" party indicates that indeed, your gut feel is correct, and the people you know aren't a representative slice of the population. How many people do you hang out with regularly who read the Telegraph or Daily Mail? Maybe it's none?
If centrism means anything it means trying to adopt mid-way positions that appeal to the majority, but Labour's support for far-left ideology is so intense they're reacting to continuously dropping approval numbers by doubling down. That's not what centrists do, they chase votes, doubling down is what ideological extremists do. They'd rather drive their own party into the ground than compromise on modern left wing goals like unlimited mass immigration.
Ahh and there we are. It's the immigrant's fault. Once all those illegals are out the of the country we'll be great again - the world will once more bend to Queen Victoria's will and Bobby Charleston will again lift the world cup for England, it's rightful owners (hard /s btw).
No major party on either side of the Atlantic are pro-illegal immigration or advocating unlimited mass immigration (or anything close to unlimited).
Labour following their desires instead of trying to boost their polling numbers isn't "centrism" by any definition.
Only if you believe propaganda. What is the sample size of this poll projection, and what are the election policies being put forward for this election ?
It's clear that Labour are unpopular, but an actual election is not something that anyone is thinking about right now, because it is so far out. Reform would like to suggest they are, but they have yet to show any actual policies other than the usual right-wing rhetoric that may be populist but doesn't fix anything.
Shouting loudly like certain Americans, and pretending you have answers, may be good for headlines, but doesn't convince many real voters.
If. But since the Labour government has a massive Labour majority that doesn't have to hold another election until 2029, that's not going to happen any time soon. Four years is a long time in politics.
For non-European readers, Reform are the equivalent of Germany's AfD or France's RN - or America's MAGA. It's a populist culture war party.
In response, far from doubling down, Labour has swung dramatically to the political right (by UK standards) of their normal political position in terms of the culture war issues like immigration and transgender rights that have been driving support for Reform.
We're having bad times in the UK, and no-one likes the incumbent government during bad times. (Never mind that the bad times are largely due to factors beyond their control, as is generally the case until a party has been in power for long enough to start turning the ship.)
Reform, meanwhile, are currently playing on easy mode; voters can say anything they like at the moment, and Reform are picking up the fantasy-football protest vote based on making wild promises they are unlikely to be able to fulfil.
None of this is to say Reform are not a serious threat. But the concept that their victory is inevitable is part their schtick, and should be resisted.
(Just remarking in passing on what a terrible electoral system we have in the UK. But, also, precisely because we have this terrible system, it is likely that a lot of the 67% who would prefer Reform not to win would, if there were actually an election tomorrow, vote for parties other than their first preference in the hope of keeping them out. Voters who don't like Reform often really don't like Reform.)
> that's a third of the country saying through their votes they think the Conservatives are a center-left party
Assuming for the sake of argument that it's actually true that 1/3 of voters would vote Reform if there were an election tomorrow (polled voting intentions far away from actual election dates aren't super-reliable) and that all those people agree with Reform about everything, that's 1/3 of the country who are to the right of the Conservatives.
That is not the same thing as 1/3 of the country thinking that the Conservatives are a centre-left party.
(There are plenty of people to the left of the Labour Party but wouldn't call them a centre-right party.)
Also, by your own numbers, we have: 33% to the right of the Conservatives; 17% to the left of the Conservatives; 60% voting for other parties, mostly the Lib Dems and Greens who are also to the left of the Conservatives, typically followed by the SNP and Plaid Cymru, also to the left of the Conservatives, and a few percent of random others most of whom are also to the left of the Conservatives.
A party that is to the right of (let's say) 55% of the electorate is not in any useful sense a centre-left party.
> Labour's support for far-left ideology is so intense they're reacting to continuously dropping approval numbers by doubling down
This is laughably different from anything that is actually happening. For instance:
> They'd rather drive their own party into the ground than compromise on modern left wing goals like unlimited mass immigration
Here is an instance from each of the last five months of the Labour Party demonstrating, or at least claiming, that it does not want unlimited mass immigration.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wgrv7pwrzo "Sir Keir Starmer has promised the government's new immigration measures will mean net migration falls "significantly" over the next four years." and https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/starmer-immig... "Sir Keir Starmer unveiled drastic plans to slash migration on Monday (May 2025; these are about the same white paper)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/starmer-small... "Sir Keir Starmer has signalled a new hardline approach to tackling illegal immigration by limiting visas for countries which did not do enough to tackle the irregular migration crisis, like taking back failed asylum seekers." (June 2025)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/10/starmer-and-... "Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron will announce a “one in, one out” migration deal on Thursday that will involve the UK accepting some cross-Channel asylum seekers but returning others to France." (July 2025)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/04/starmer-hires-of... "Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, announced a £100 million investment in border security which will pay for the NCA to get an additional 300 officers to work on organised immigration crime." (August 2025)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y5379djl3o "Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed for the first time the government is looking at digital ID as a way to tackle illegal immigration." (September 2025)
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting that these are all things that would please or satisfy your, or the typical Reform voter's, preferences around immigration. I am sure it is true that the Labour Party is less opposed to immigration than you would like it to be. But it is flatly untrue that they would do anything rather than compromise on unlimited mass immigration; if they want unlimited mass immigration at all (which all the evidence suggests they don't) they are compromising on it rather a lot. In other words, doing exactly what you say centrists do and far-leftists don't do.
> the Labour Party demonstrating, or at least claiming, that it does not want unlimited mass immigration
Yes, they lie about it because they know it's incredibly unpopular. And then they refuse to do anything that'd actually solve it. That's what non-centrist parties look like. A centrist party would be panicking over their immense unpopularity and trying to actually stake out the center ground with real policy movement.
Your list of links is a good example of my point. In turn:
- Publishing a white paper.
- "Vowing to take tougher action".
- An announcement that didn't have any effect on the ground (there is no one-in-one-out happening in reality).
- A commitment to spend more money! This is at least a believable commitment from them. It's been tried many times before and doesn't work. They know this already.
- An announcement to look at something.
Announcements that they will study the possibility of taking action, one day, possibly, is what it looks like when a government likes a situation the voters don't. Here are some things you didn't include which show their actual position:
- Arguing before the court that the rights of migrants take precedence over the rights of native Brits.
- Saying "of course we do" when an interviewer asks a minister if they really believe that.
This clearly isn't always true and when it does happen the public has the ability to require the transparency from their government to catch it happening quickly and the ability to hold the elected officials responsible for it accountable by voting them out and replacing them. Private corporations don't allow the level of transparency the public needs and aren't accountable to the public either.
Maybe the government could work out some deal that gives the public the right to put webcams in every meeting/board room of the private company, force their bookkeeping to be published to the internet, allow the public to request internal email and other communications, require independent audits/reports, and grant the public the ability to fire and replace any and all employees or executives at the private company who fail to do their jobs, but even then you'd still have the problem that private companies demand extra money on top of what is required to do the job just to line their own pockets. Why should we accept that?
My provider is Thames Water. They are losing money.
Are they losing money because costs exceed revenue, or are they losing money because they are servicing massive loan interest on money they already distributed to shareholders?
https://www.thameswater.co.uk/media-library/l13deqmw/thames-...
Poor shareholders, mainly Ontario Municipal retirement fund pensioners, who are the biggest ones (32%) and retired British academics (20%).
However, any money paid to shareholders while accumulating debt, including deferred maintenance, etc was financial smoke and mirrors not actual profit.
but apparently not if you wrap it in half a dozen companies in various tax havens
(that have no legitimate purpose other than various types of laundering)
> £1,271 million of expected credit loss provision recognised against the intercompany loan receivable from TWUL’s immediate parent company, Thames Water Utilities Holdings Limited. This balance is fully provided for, as it is not deemed recoverable
They are a scam operation, frankly.
According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgleg70r7rno
> When Thames was privatised in 1989, it had no debt. But over the years it borrowed heavily and its total debt - which includes all of its borrowings and liabilities - now stands at £22.8bn, according to latest financial results, external.
> Its debt pile increased sharply when Macquarie, an Australian infrastructure bank, owned Thames Water, with debts reaching more than £10bn by the time the company was sold in 2017.
According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41152516
> Macquarie and its investors paid £5.1bn for Thames Water, of which £2.8bn was money Macquarie had borrowed [...] £2bn had subsequently been repaid. Not by Macquarie and its investors, who had originally borrowed the money, but from new borrowings raised by Thames Water through a Cayman Islands subsidiary.
> Martin Blaiklock said: "That letter was a red flag to me because it showed clearly that the debt which Macquarie funds had used to buy Thames Water had been transferred over to Thames Water." [...]
> the total returns made by the bank and its investors from Thames Water averaged between 15.5% and 19% a year. Mr Blaiklock has 40 years of experience in such matters and said these returns were "twice what one would normally expect"
According to https://news.sky.com/story/approval-for-higher-bills-and-loa...
> The company, which has been crumbling under a £16bn debt pile, was due to run out of money in about a month's time. It has now received court approval for another £3bn loan [...] the company's gearing ratio is 80% and its annual debt interest bill is around £900m (about a third of the revenue it gets from customer bills) [...]
> The water regulator has sanctioned bill increases of 35% by 2030.
> However, Thames wants more. It is seeking a 53% increase, which would take the average bill to £677 a year
This stuff's all pretty widely documented and reported, if your idea of fun is getting angry and depressed while also reading about business accounting.
Ofc, that doesn't claw back the billions that the PE pirates made off with, but at least the UK wouldn't have to pay them even more to get its water supply under control again.
[0] even if the UK had to pay market value for it, the market value for a business so drowning in debt would be close to zero.
"Perhaps a better plan would be to replaces cranes with horses and ropes such that we can once again afford windows" was my first thought when I read that in my turn of the century starter apartment with giant windows in every room.
Like, GDP and productivity has tripled since that apartment was last renovated, let alone constructed. The idea that we can't afford a 20th century living standard anymore is nothing but absurdist propaganda.
And that's not to mention rooms like kitchens and bathrooms. Older houses invariably have windows for kitchens too since you need to open the windows to let out the fumes from gas cooking. And they would have windows in the bathroom to let out moisture. These days newer houses are already designed not to have windows in either kitchens or bathrooms.
You can buy curtains, you can't retroactively insert a window as easily nor should you have to my lord.
I can't imagine living in a dark, centrally ventilated container. Most Swedes agree (massive pushback when this happened, gov backtracked).
So is the suggestion of less light and more isolation in Sweden. One of the darkest and most lonely countries in the world. There is already no requirement for windows in bathrooms and kitchens, as you can't regularly open windows in winter anyway.
No - just bring back window taxes
It seems like the voters actively encouraged this kind of behavior.
Eventually people figure it out (maybe) and go all fire and pitchforks - but that sounds like a problem for ‘future me’ eh?
And if you’re good at structuring everything, maybe they’ll never even have anyone concrete to blame but themselves! (Classic referendum/politician behavior there)
Focusing on Thames Water's particular example, if we assume malice as the cause, what would be the potential consequences? While the government could impose fines, the possibility of non-payment exists and what would happen in that case? Instead of debt collectors taking action, like ripping pipes from the ground or causing pension fund collapse, the government would act as a last resort investor, potentially providing further funding for a few additional years before the situation likely repeats.
In theory, with privatization the gov’t can arrest people or the like. The gov’t very rarely does that to itself.
Politicians can be swapped out of course, but most smart ones setup scape goats and a lot of levels of abstraction so they can claim successes and point the finger elsewhere if it goes wrong.
It might be a rounding error vs the scale of investment needed for water, but that investment is needed regardless of public or private ownership.
It's not a rounding error in terms of gov investment elsewhere — imagine an extra £85bn invested in, say, social housing? Even as a single one-off
The water system is like the electricity system. It's perfectly possible to have inflows and outflows be fully private, as long as the government keeps its hands off the pricing. The network itself can also be run privately, as both supplier and buyers want supplies to flow. The trick is to ensure there are numerous different companies with the expertise to maintain pipework and then allow local communities to quickly change to different contractors.
You need a counterbalance to efficient resource use, usually competition ensures they don't skimp, that doesn't work with natural monopolies.
https://www.water.org.uk/about-us/our-board
We must look at the reality more critically.
We already know that the investment is open to profit extraction, the companies doing the work are owned by the same investors and there's low oversight, they have occasionally been caught using inflated prices. We don't know the extent though as OFWAT has been criticized for only really catching the really obvious ones.
All that investment is our own money, it's now apparent they've not taken on debt to pay for that investment. They claim they have, but it's now turned out that they've taken on that debt simply to pay for dividends to shareholders. Debt is around £60 billion, while share holder dividends over the years are about £80 billion (this figure varies depending on who you believe, but it's always higher than the debt). And that's without accounting for the inflated cost of "investment".
And that debt is now apparently tax-payer guaranteed because it's all to people who are too big to fail.
So they've basically made off with £20 billion in 35 years, plus however untold billions in profits from related companies in "investment", and we've got a water crisis developing, constant sewage discharge into rivers, etc.
I am not British, but this is confusing. Was private capital forced to take on the burden of privatizing the water system? Or did private investors err in their economic analysis? (Or did those investors just assume the problems would happen long after they personally had gotten paid?)
Now divide that by C-suite wages + monies paid as profits.
Well the estimated industry profits of ~£20B pa over the last 30+ years would have got us some way to replacing the worst of the sewage system. Instead that money went to yachts and pushing up rental costs, or whatever.
Very little in our world was designed to do what we need it do 50 years later. It's unlikely that anyone will even know what our needs 50 years from today will be. This is why the expectation is that systems we build will be constantly maintained, upgraded, modified, expanded, and redesigned as needed and with the next several decades in mind (to the best of our ability).
It's what we've always done with all infrastructure and even our cities themselves. Neglecting things like sewer systems until they are overwhelmed, failing, and prohibitively expensive to fix isn't inevitable. It's just bad governance. It doesn't matter if it's private companies or governments, neglecting infrastructure so that a few people can line their own pockets until the situation becomes critical should be criminal, but at the very least nobody should accept them throwing their hands up and saying it's just too expensive to fix now.
Cumulative capital investment by water companies in England and Wales since privatisation: £250bn.
The infrastructure they inherited was never designed for the things it's being asked to do today, and it has a life expectancy. It would literally cost trillions to upgrade the entire sewerage system.
This isn't apologia, it's just reality. The road network will also face the same fate since much of it was built >50 years ago and has a life expectancy of roughly 50 years. The country simply can't afford to replace it.