South Hams District Council recently welcomed South West Water to the council chamber to discuss the ongoing issues of sewage discharges and the cryptosporidium poisoning in Kingswear and Brixham. It’s fair to say that anticipation was not high amongst many councillors. After all, we had invited chief executive Susan Davey, but she was too busy; in her stead we had three underlings. We had seen South West Water’s previous public engagement about their manifest failings, most recently in Brixham, and only the most foolhardy of us really believed that we had what it takes to pierce their wall of evasion.
And so it went. Apparently, the company representatives we had with us were either not senior enough to answer the questions that councillors had, or were not expert enough in the specifics. The most important thing that we wanted to know was their plan to improve the infrastructure to reduce the number of sewage outflows into our rivers and to prevent any more poisonings. Sadly, although we were assured that there is a plan, our visitors could not share it with us.
However, through the evasions some truths did sneak out if you were listening carefully. South West Water were asked about dividend payments to shareholders and they were unusually forthright. It was not, we were told, the business of a committee at a District Council to be asking about the dividend policy of the company. So that told us. But there was a smidgen more: dividends, we were told, were necessary if investors were expected to stump up the cash to pay for the repair of, what our guests described as, the company’s “ageing infrastructure” – the cause, they admitted, of the poisoning of our waterways. And here was the truth. The privatised system is always going to serve investors, they cannot avoid this. The price of shareholder investment is the movement of revenue away from investment and towards dividends. The question as to whether the scale of necessary investment is incompatible with generous dividends, appears not to have been considered.
Our guests were asked what they would do, if they had the power, to improve the current situation, and so another truth slipped out. It was, they admitted, a good question. It was a good question because the correct answer – have a clear investment plan that systematically reduces discharges of raw sewage into our rivers – could not, of course, be said. What we were told was that, to solve the current problems, South West Water needed to communicate better. Yes, South West Water sees this as a communication problem, rather than one of human effluent poisoning the rivers. Such a parody of corporate insanity would, in other circumstances, be funny.
But the greatest concern from this encounter was that, despite South West Water professing the need to rebuild trust with customers, they seem to lack any sense of what this would actually look like, or have any desire to make it happen. It is simple really, to begin to rebuild trust South West Water needs to be open and honest about their own failings and present a clear and credible plan that describes how they can get out the mess we are in.
So, where do we go from here? We will continue to welcome representatives of South West Water to the council, because we need to get further than we have done. We will continue to ask South West Water to present a clear and credible plan to the public. We will work with members of parliament, such as South Devon MP Caroline Voaden, to ensure this issue is kept in the national spotlight. And we will work with members of the public and organisations to help to shed light on the problem and demand action.
Dr David Hancock is a councillor for South Brent ward, South Hams District Council
