Yes, I know. I bang on about water. There is a reason. Last Sunday, Littlehampton beach closed to swimmers. Why? A sewage discharge. On National Beach Day.
Like a many-headed hydra, water is the single biggest issue in my inbox each week. Sewage. Flooding. Illegal misconnections. Bills going up while trust goes down. Infrastructure failing to cope with thousands of new homes.
That’s why, in April, I brought Southern Water’s CEO, Lawrence Gosden, to face a packed public meeting in Felpham. It was lively, as it should have been. But he’s agreed to return to update on his progress on the priorities you raised.
It’s why I question Ministers repeatedly about Sir Jon Cunliffe’s 88 recommendations and demanded a recommendation-by-recommendation timetable. And it’s why water was what I raised first with our new Prime Minister on Parliament’s first day back.
I asked a straightforward question: would he implement all 88 without delay?
He ducked it. Sir Jon’s review was ‘limited’, he said, and Labour wants to consider ‘all possible solutions’. In other words: more options, more reviews, and more talk about ‘public control’. Everything except a timetable.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I have no desire to replace one remote bureaucracy with another, where a Whitehall politburo pores over Southern Water’s stationery receipts. If ’public control’ means nationalisation, the Government estimates that at around £100billion. That buys ownership. It does not repair one pipe.
What I want is rigorous oversight with teeth: a regulator that can walk through the front door, see what is happening, and act. Customers should have binding redress when they are failed, and the people at the top should answer personally.
You and I should not have to haul the chief executive into a village hall every few months to find out whether anything has improved. The system should already know, publish the evidence, and act when promises are missed.
Until it does, I will keep banging on about water.
You can read my original article for SussexWorld here.
