No bailout for Thames Water's shareholders — bring it into public ownership!

The Guardian just revealed that Thames Water’s financiers think they have just six weeks to save themselves and keep it in private hands.

They want the regulator to let them pass the bill for cleaning up their mess to households through higher bills or a public bailout.

Send our template letter to Environment Secretary Steve Barclay demanding he makes Thames Water’s shareholders pay the price for their failure and brings it into public hands.

Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

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<div>I was very concerned to read that Thames Water’s lenders are threatening that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/14/thames-water-is-everyones-problem-and-time-is-running-out-to-fix-it">“there are six weeks left to save it.”</a></div>
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<div>I’m writing to you to ask you to do the right thing for households, taxpayers, and our rivers and seas — punish the shareholders and creditors who got us into this mess and put our essential infrastructure in competent local hands.</div>
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<div>Thames Water was privatised with no debts and a green dowry from the Government. It has racked up over £14 billion in debts. It has paid out £7 billion in dividends. It has polluted our rivers and seas for 650,000 hours in the last four years alone.</div>
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<div>Please don’t make ordinary households or taxpayers like me bail out the shareholders who got us into this mess. If Ofwat allows Thames Water — and other water companies — to raise our bills in the next period, that is what will happen.</div>
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<div>I agree with Feargal Sharkey that <a href="https://www.cityam.com/feargal-sharkey-customers-shouldnt-pay-for-water-firms-failures/"><em>“we have already paid water companies to build, operate and maintain a functioning water and sewerage system.”</em></a></div>
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<div>I’ve also read that you have <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/378dcb3e-4559-489d-b4f1-f959bd3de920">stacked the law in favour</a> of making the public protect shareholders if Thames Water goes bust, prioritising using our resources to get them back on their feet through a “rescue” rather than transferring them into public hands.</div>
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<div>Households, taxpayers, and our waterways should come first.</div>
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<div>If you don’t act now, I think you will be signing a blank cheque for other water companies. They will know that even if a water company fails as spectacularly as Thames Water has, their shareholders will be bailed out by us, the public. You can’t let that happen. It’s financially reckless.</div>
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<div>That’s why I am asking you to take Thames Water into Special Administration on performance grounds and transfer it to a new, publicly owned company as happened with Railtrack in 2001.</div>
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<div>England’s water privatisation experiment is unique. No one else has copied it. The countries with the cleanest water in Europe have water companies in public hands.</div>
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<div>Public ownership would mean we can put local water users, campaigners, and workers on water company boards, ending the ‘profit from pollution’ culture. I know that borrowing would cost less if it was in public hands, making it cheaper and faster to end the sewage scandal.</div>
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<div>And rather than emerging from this crisis with shareholders let off the hook at the public’s expense, public ownership means Thames Water would be making money for the public, not the foreign governments in China and the Middle East who own it now.</div>
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<div>The profit-seekers who got us into this mess say they have just weeks to save themselves. Please, do the common sense thing and save the public by using Special Administration to put the public back in charge of Thames Water.</div>
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