Nothing to Lose but Our Mains

Thames Water, the private utility providing water and sanitation services for a quarter of the UK’s population, is floundering. Nearly £23 billion in debt, with a pipe network leaking a concerning amount of sewage, outdated but lacking funds for modernization, the company, in the words of the Financial Times, is “the poster-child for the failures of England’s experiment with privatizing formerly public regional water companies.” To make up its shortfalls, the utility recently petitioned to increase water bills beyond the regulator Ofwat’s stipulations, further incensing customers, while hovering over the company is the continued threat of either insolvency or the emergency takeover of the utility by the state: the British government recently began planning for a special administrative regime to manage the company in the event that a last-ditch rescue plan by its creditors fails and the utility collapses; while an earlier £4 billion deal with private equity firm KKR which would have allowed it to escape insolvency has since fallen through.

Poster child though it may be, Thames Water is no only child. Like other utilities in England and Wales, its current form took shape during the sell-off of public water and wastewater services to the private sector in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This privatization was supposed to encourage water conservation through the greater use of price signals—in some cases, alongside markets for allocation of water to its highest-value uses—and to make operations more efficient through the streamlining of corporate management practices, thus expanding provision to hard-to-reach populations. Instead, water provision has plateaued.

The questions that this raises—about who has access to water and how, and about the nature of the water being accessed—have been made starker by the climate crisis. The large-scale threats the crisis poses—punishing floods brought on by supercharged storms; the prolonged droughts that threaten to to permanently change life in arid areas—come readily to mind. But the effects of climate change will be felt throughout the system of water provision, refracting through the institutions that manage and distribute water, and exacerbating the difficulties of water governance by changing both when and where water is available. Surface water shortages will lead to over-extraction from groundwater systems, racing toward their depletion; “flash droughts” will hit normally water-rich areas; water quality will suffer when algae blooms in warmer water. Woe to those charged with ensuring that these ruptured hydrological systems are smoothly abstracted and incorporated into the societies depending on them. As several groups of critical water researchers recently argued, in the Global North as well as Global South, climate change, decomposing infrastructure and institutional inertia mean we may have already passed “peak water security.” Paraphrasing Stuart Hall, for many, water will be the modality through which the climate crisis is lived.