A drought has officially been declared across vast swathes of England. Rivers and reservoirs are evaporating in front of our eyes. Water may soon be rationed and crop irrigation restricted. Drought, and the extreme heat that exacerbates it, isn’t some occasional freak occurrence that can be brushed off as “super scorchio” fun once or twice a year. It’s a consequence of years of inaction on the climate emergency. This is producing a perfect storm of energy insecurity, food supply chaos and extreme weather that is wreaking havoc on society.
Getting a firm grip on this crisis requires both immediate and long-term solutions. Our lame duck government is offering neither. It’s clear that the privatisation experiment for water companies has failed. They’re fit for profit, not for purpose. The head of Thames Water – the company responsible for the supply fiasco at Northend in Oxfordshire – is set to receive a £3.1m “golden hello” for signing on as CEO. English water firms across the board have handed over £72bn to shareholders in dividends.
Ed Vaizey claimed on Good Morning Britain this week that “you get better run companies in the private sector”. Are these the same companies that dithered over hosepipe bans for fear of annoying customers, further intensifying our drought crisis? Companies that failed to meet their own targets on fixing leaks and faulty mains pipes? Companies whose incessant dumping of raw sewage has blighted our waterways?
All that profit, yet investment in our waterways is falling woefully short. Not a single new reservoir has been built in the past three decades, and our Victorian water pipes are being replaced at a rate 10 times slower than our European neighbours. So we need immediate action. The Green party is calling for an urgent enforcement order on water firms, a cut to bosses’ obscene executive pay, an end to dividends to shareholders and for the water supply to be brought back into public ownership as soon as is practicably possible.
Public ownership works, and is popular. Publicly owned Scottish Water is the most trusted public utility in the UK, while not-for-profit Welsh Water has helped 60,000 low-income customers to pay their bills. They invest more, too. Scottish Water has invested nearly 35% more per household in infrastructure since 2002 than privatised firms in England; it charges 14% less in water bills; and it doesn’t pay out costly dividends to shareholders.
Making ourselves more resilient to droughts in the future requires long-term solutions that tackle the climate emergency at its source. Yet just when we need real climate leadership to address this urgent crisis, our government has gone awol. During last month’s heatwave, Boris Johnson ducked out of chairing several Cobra meetings, and has barely been seen in public since. Prospective leader Rishi Sunak thinks letting his daughters do the recycling will help us get to net zero. This is hardly the muscular and resolute decision-making we need to tackle the climate emergency.
Meanwhile, Liz Truss is on a bizarre crusade complaining about solar panels in fields, when solar is the cheapest form of energy and covers just 0.06% of UK land, far less than the amount of land used by airports. To top it all off, Truss has also refused to increase the windfall tax on energy companies, and has pledged to lift the ban on climate-wrecking fracking.
The solutions to this crisis are clear. We must keep fossil fuels in the ground and deliver a clean, green and affordable energy system. We need publicly owned utilities to do what they say on the tin, rather than simply siphon off obscene profits to shareholders. The climate emergency affects us all – and we can all be part of the solution.
Caroline Lucas is the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion
