John Milne

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. Sometimes public ownership is best, and sometimes private is; I have no ideological view either way, but when it comes to the water industry, privatisation has been nothing short of disastrous. The main reason is inadequate regulation. In their blind assault on quangos and the civil service, which continues to this day, the Conservatives cut funding for the regulator so badly that it entirely lost the ability to do its job. No one noticed all the sewage going into our waterways, because there was no one left to look. Left to their own devices, water company bosses responded by extracting billions from the industry in excess profits while allowing the fabric of the system to slowly rot. It has all been exposed now and we know the sorry truth, but however angry we feel, in most cases that money cannot be recovered because the original investors sold out long ago. In my area of Horsham in West Sussex, Southern Water was one of the worst offenders. Things were so bad that the former CEO Matthew Wright now faces criminal charges for presiding over fraudulent sewage data. Painful as it is, we are now obliged to pay for the same infrastructure investment all over again through higher bills.