Economic Trade-offs for the next government

[TUK020]

Fix the planning system to enable massive new build of housing

[88V8]

Fix the planning system to enable massive new build of housing

That is the last thing we want. The so-called housing shortage is valuable in holding down population growth.

V8

[gryffron]

Well yes, public investment , rather than just day-to-day spending, usually promotes growth. Unfortunately for the current government, they rely on the votes of the elderly who value social and health care. Also public investment is much easier to cut politically than day-to-day spending.
But you make a good point that public spending may or may not promote growth, depending on what it is spent on.

But growth = increase in GDP. And day-to-day spending is GDP.

So if you increase day-to-day spending, you get "growth".
Only it isn't real growth, because if you reduce the day-to-day spend again, it simply evaporates. Leaving behind only the debt that paid for it.

What we need is "investment", something sustainable, rather than fake bubble "growth" paid for with debt.

Gryff

[Adamski]

The next government will almost certainly be Labour. They've said their plans - a new green economy with green investment that'll transform Britain, and world class public services, reversing 13 Years of decline and Tory cuts... funded by taxing non doms, and vat on private school fees. Doesn't add up to me, lol. But sounds good to the voters! The magic money tree, and Labour pretending to be Tories - the electorate lap it up!!

[Lootman]

The next government will almost certainly be Labour. They've said their plans - a new green economy with green investment that'll transform Britain, and world class public services, reversing 13 Years of decline and Tory cuts... funded by taxing non doms, and vat on private school fees. Doesn't add up to me, lol. But sounds good to the voters! The magic money tree, and Labour pretending to be Tories - the electorate lap it up!!

I actually want Labour to be in power just so we can see exactly how this impossible combination of growth, investment and "world class" services combined with not materially raising taxes comes crashing down.

It should be most entertaining, although probably best observed from outside UK tax jurisdiction.

[Hallucigenia]

Underlying everything has to be getting the economy moving again - as the IFS figure 3 shows, household disposable income has never recovered from the shock of 2008, and a good part of that is the fact that productivity has flatlined since then :


Productivity is what makes us richer, the question that should be asked of any proposal is - does it help or hinder productivity and investment?

To take one example - local planners blocking a £1bn national-scale data centre is bad. How can we make that data centre happen?

But the real problem is the disparity between different parts of the UK and different segments of the population, increasingly we look like a bit of Germany attached to a hinterland that's in Eastern Europe, with our poorest having a worse standard of living than eg Slovenia and now it's the bottom 90% are below the average for developed countries.


In particular we have a productivity problem in the cities of that hinterland. Cities are important for productivity as they promote the economic complexity that leads to higher productivity - in general the bigger the city, the more productive each inhabitant is. Historically that was linked to having all the different components of a supply chain in place, increasingly it is about networks of people in service industries. But it also matters for recruitment. One reason that remote high-tech locations like Dounreay or the Pfizer site in Sandwich closed/downsized is the difficulty of recruitment - they needed a lot of highly specialist people, but PhD types tend to fall in love with other techy types; if one half of such a couple is offered a job in a remote location, their other half is unlikely to find a PhD-level job there, so either they take a less-skilled job (reducing total productivity) or the couple go somewhere like Cambridge where they can both get PhD-level jobs, increasing the productivity of Cambridge at the expense of the remote location. It's not just about literal size either - if the two PhD-level jobs require 2-hour commutes (either because of poor transport or housing costs relative to salary) then they will go elsewhere. So high productivity need cities, and those cities need transport and housing markets that work for people.


Cambridge is a success story, it pulls in not just people but companies, like Zeneca who moved lock stock and barrel from Cheshire. But that didn't increase UK GDP, but it did put even more stress on the tight Cambridge housing market. And a lot of that success is based on a huge amount of government funding - Oxford and Cambridge are two of the cities most dependent on government. But both of them have strong NIMBY tendencies that try to kill off attempts to let them grow to take advantage of the growth generated by that government funding. To be fair, there are also infrastructure issues - Michael Gove wants Cambridge to build 150k new houses,the council say that they can't even build the 50k currently planned due to a lack of water. They've at least got as far as planning one in the Thames Valley, but the NIMBYs are protesting against the proposed Abingdon reservoir. Which leads to this stunning graph - we haven't built a new reservoir in over 30 years.


I said above it's about housing and transport - it's so hard to get around our cities, so if that means someone can only make 4 appointments per day rather than 5 or 6, they are being less productive. British cities other than London are caught in the middle, without the good roads of US cities and without the good public transport of European cities. Given that our cities are more like Europe in form, they don't generally have the room for the roads and parking of US cities, which means that improving transport has to take the form of improving public transport. Which is currently crap - take this which looks at the share of the population that can reach the centre by public transport within 30 minutes :


And that's based on the official timetables (via TravelTime Technologies) - the reality is worse. 31.8% of Transpennine Express trains are more than 3 minutes late, compared to 6-8% for the likes of Chiltern, c2c and London Overground. Even the "bad" London ones are only 12-13%, imagine a service that is nearly 3x less reliable than Thameslink or SW Trains!

Buses are not much better - if Leeds buses ran to timetable then 445,000 people would be within 45 minutes of the city centre, using real-world data it's only 165,000.


And there's no option to take the Tube, because Leeds is the biggest city in the Western world without a subway/light rail system. Bristol is not far behind. But what hope for a whole new metro when even small improvements like adding two platforms to Manchester Piccadilly for £200m get cancelled to pay for the overruns on Crossrail in London. Piccadilly currently serves 90 trains per hour with 14 platforms; Euston sees half that number of trains from 18 platforms. It's particularly frustrating given that it effectively nullifies the point of spending £85m on building the Ordsall Chord which was meant to allow an extra 700 trains per day through the congested central Manchester network, but only if there was extra capacity at the stations. You need joined-up thinking and to follow through with plans if you are to get value for money from these kinds of projects.

Then of course you had £235m from the cancellation of the northern bit of HS2 being redirected to filling in potholes in London under the banner of "Network North". We have a productivity problem in the provinces, but instead funds for strategic projects in the North get sucked into London for short-term fixes. I know it might not be good for government productivity but when you hear that the repairs to Parliament will cost an extra £10+ billion less if MPs move out for a few years, I can't help feeling it would be good to build a conference centre for £100m in say Stoke-on-Trent and have them move there for a few years, just so MPs and senior civil servants get to see life outside the London bubble. Nice and central, with relatively good rail/road networks.

But even with more enlightened central government, the problem is still that they are control freaks who don't care or understand about local problems, and hand out and remove funding on a whim between different regions. The Brexiteers had one thing right, too much decision making is remote, but the problem lies in Whitehall more than Brussels. Personally I'd do what the Spanish and French did to reduce their over-centralisation, by giving much more autonomy to the regions (ie roughly the NUTS1/ITL1 regions). The metro mayors are a start, but what's good for the Tees Valley is also good for the West Country and East Anglia. Possibly the way to start is just decentralising transport, creating Transport for Yorkshire etc.

We know it works, because a) London and more recently it's effectively happened in Manchester - Andy Burnham has spent the last few years fighting to get control of transport to enable the launch of an integrated network last September. A key part of that is bus franchising - like happens in London (where bus use has grown) but not anywhere else (where bus use has fallen) - as it allows coordination which makes things a lot more efficient. However there are still problems - Manchester want to launch fully integrated ticketing like London has had for 20+ years with Oyster, but of course London has a special London-only interface to the train ticketing network, the provinces won't get that for another few years.

Another aspect is the form of British cities - they're not dense enough to take advantage of public transport even when it is present and working. Birmingham is a lot less dense than a similar city like Lyon, so even with a bigger transport network it can't serve as many people. We need higher density housing and workplaces around transport hubs. We don't have to go crazy, I'm not talking skyscrapers necessarily, but more mansion blocks and the like rather than single houses. They're also more energy efficient - they can use centralised heating, and the heat lost through the ceiling goes into someone else's flat rather than an attic.

Getting the economy going again is a complex long-term problem, but getting the buses running on time, getting trains to run at all, denser housing and some new reservoirs are all part of the solution.

But we also need to stop fetishising the industries of the past and concentrate on helping the ones we are good at. But our politicians don't play video games and don't have enough of a science background to understand pharmaceutical development. We need to stop doing stoopid stuff that harms those industries like setting up a whole parallel drug regulation system, it's daft for a country that is 3% of the world market. Looking through this from the Institute of Export & International Trade, you can only agree with their conclusions :
● Ensure policy stability.
● Deepen trade relationships.
● Ease immigration and mobility rules.
● Economic complexity and sector specialisation.
● Improve connectivity.
● Increase levels of education, training and opportunities.
● Boost higher education R&D expenditure.

Policy stability is perhaps the number 1 requirement - a major cause of the lack of investment has been industry not knowing what government is doing from one week to the next. Personally I think it would be helpful for any government with a majority over over 30 to say when elected that the next election will on date X. Then everyone knows what's happening and you don't get the drift that happens after three years as noone wants to commit in case it's decided to have an early election. The Fixed-Term Parliament Act has its problems with small majorities, but at least everyone knew what the timetable should look like. Then each department can do a 5-year plan (and in certain instances a longer-term one, the US Navy publishes a 30-year shipbuilding plan to cover the effective lifetime of a ship and building a new one) with suitable contingencies, and then they can be assessed on how well they deliver that plan.

None of this is the full answer - but it's a start.

[gryffron]

our poorest having a worse standard of living than eg Slovenia and now it's the bottom 90% are below the average for developed countries.

That graph is disposable income. Is it not true that disposable income is so low because our housing costs are so staggeringly high? At least in 30% of the country. Immigration and govt subsidy both serve to make this worse, not better.

e.g. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/r ... region=150
London is second in Europe behind only Geneva.

Gryff

[Nimrod103]

Policy stability is perhaps the number 1 requirement - a major cause of the lack of investment has been industry not knowing what government is doing from one week to the next.

Policy stability is a great idea. Starting from when? Interest rates have been near zero for 15 years because they were needed to counter a massive financial heart attack, for which the BoE and the government of the time must share the blame (along with those from other countries). Interest rates have subsequently risen to over 5%, and are unlikely to fall by much in the future. And as for taxation, that has risen to unprecedented post war levels, and under Labour will only go higher.

I refuse to believe that the lack of investment by UK industry is due to government indecision, though it doesn't help. I would blame very high corperate taxation, and taxation in general. But the principal problem is that we are not saving enough, so there is not enough for investment. In today's Telegraph:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/20 ... s-economy/

The same shift in mindset is required to address the nation’s wider savings deficit. The numbers here are stark. As a proportion of national income, Britain has one of the lowest savings rates – the part of disposable income that is available to acquire financial and non-financial assets – in the OECD at just 1.7pc. This compares with 6.1pc for the European Union, and 9.1pc for Germany. Like Aesop’s grasshopper, we prefer to live high on the hog and trust in the future to take care of itself. In the US, the savings rate is admittedly even lower, but the US still has the luxury of a world that seemingly wants nothing more than to finance the American penchant for consumption. Alas, this is not true of the UK. We long ago lost the “exorbitant privilege” of dominant reserve currency status.


Too many in the UK are unproductive, receive benefits which are too high, and don't do anything useful. As a result our taxes are too high, and there are a lot of productive people who are saying to themselves - why bother?

[funduffer]

Underlying everything has to be getting the economy moving again - as the IFS figure 3 shows, household disposable income has never recovered from the shock of 2008, and a good part of that is the fact that productivity has flatlined since then :


Productivity is what makes us richer, the question that should be asked of any proposal is - does it help or hinder productivity and investment?
.

Thank you Hallucigenia, for this epic post! One of the best I have seen in a long time, and backed up with data. I can’t disagree with any of it.

I live in Leeds, and I can confirm the bus map you showed is totally in line with my experience. Population density is very low in Leeds compared to European cities and there are still many areas of wasteland around the city centre, which could be built upon. I agree that Leeds should have much more control over its own economic development and not be subject to the ebb and flow of decisions made in London (e.g. HS2). It is a city of huge potential, but we are still waiting for our mass transit system which has been talked about for decades. We rely on unreliable and expensive privatised bus companies and Northern Rail to get in and out of the city, need I say more. I live 5 miles from the centre, and it takes more than 30 minutes to get to the centre by any means of transport, including by car, and I am lucky because I live less than 15 minutes walk from a local station. If I had to commute each day, I have no idea what means of transport I would use, but I am retired, so I don’t.

FD

[TUK020]

Underlying everything has to be getting the economy moving again - as the IFS figure 3 shows, household disposable income has never recovered from the shock of 2008, and a good part of that is the fact that productivity has flatlined since then :


Productivity is what makes us richer, the question that should be asked of any proposal is - does it help or hinder productivity and investment?

To take one example - local planners blocking a £1bn national-scale data centre is bad. How can we make that data centre happen?

But the real problem is the disparity between different parts of the UK and different segments of the population, increasingly we look like a bit of Germany attached to a hinterland that's in Eastern Europe, with our poorest having a worse standard of living than eg Slovenia and now it's the bottom 90% are below the average for developed countries.


In particular we have a productivity problem in the cities of that hinterland. Cities are important for productivity as they promote the economic complexity that leads to higher productivity - in general the bigger the city, the more productive each inhabitant is. Historically that was linked to having all the different components of a supply chain in place, increasingly it is about networks of people in service industries. But it also matters for recruitment. One reason that remote high-tech locations like Dounreay or the Pfizer site in Sandwich closed/downsized is the difficulty of recruitment - they needed a lot of highly specialist people, but PhD types tend to fall in love with other techy types; if one half of such a couple is offered a job in a remote location, their other half is unlikely to find a PhD-level job there, so either they take a less-skilled job (reducing total productivity) or the couple go somewhere like Cambridge where they can both get PhD-level jobs, increasing the productivity of Cambridge at the expense of the remote location. It's not just about literal size either - if the two PhD-level jobs require 2-hour commutes (either because of poor transport or housing costs relative to salary) then they will go elsewhere. So high productivity need cities, and those cities need transport and housing markets that work for people.


Cambridge is a success story, it pulls in not just people but companies, like Zeneca who moved lock stock and barrel from Cheshire. But that didn't increase UK GDP, but it did put even more stress on the tight Cambridge housing market. And a lot of that success is based on a huge amount of government funding - Oxford and Cambridge are two of the cities most dependent on government. But both of them have strong NIMBY tendencies that try to kill off attempts to let them grow to take advantage of the growth generated by that government funding. To be fair, there are also infrastructure issues - Michael Gove wants Cambridge to build 150k new houses,the council say that they can't even build the 50k currently planned due to a lack of water. They've at least got as far as planning one in the Thames Valley, but the NIMBYs are protesting against the proposed Abingdon reservoir. Which leads to this stunning graph - we haven't built a new reservoir in over 30 years.


I said above it's about housing and transport - it's so hard to get around our cities, so if that means someone can only make 4 appointments per day rather than 5 or 6, they are being less productive. British cities other than London are caught in the middle, without the good roads of US cities and without the good public transport of European cities. Given that our cities are more like Europe in form, they don't generally have the room for the roads and parking of US cities, which means that improving transport has to take the form of improving public transport. Which is currently crap - take this which looks at the share of the population that can reach the centre by public transport within 30 minutes :


And that's based on the official timetables (via TravelTime Technologies) - the reality is worse. 31.8% of Transpennine Express trains are more than 3 minutes late, compared to 6-8% for the likes of Chiltern, c2c and London Overground. Even the "bad" London ones are only 12-13%, imagine a service that is nearly 3x less reliable than Thameslink or SW Trains!

Buses are not much better - if Leeds buses ran to timetable then 445,000 people would be within 45 minutes of the city centre, using real-world data it's only 165,000.


And there's no option to take the Tube, because Leeds is the biggest city in the Western world without a subway/light rail system. Bristol is not far behind. But what hope for a whole new metro when even small improvements like adding two platforms to Manchester Piccadilly for £200m get cancelled to pay for the overruns on Crossrail in London. Piccadilly currently serves 90 trains per hour with 14 platforms; Euston sees half that number of trains from 18 platforms. It's particularly frustrating given that it effectively nullifies the point of spending £85m on building the Ordsall Chord which was meant to allow an extra 700 trains per day through the congested central Manchester network, but only if there was extra capacity at the stations. You need joined-up thinking and to follow through with plans if you are to get value for money from these kinds of projects.

Then of course you had £235m from the cancellation of the northern bit of HS2 being redirected to filling in potholes in London under the banner of "Network North". We have a productivity problem in the provinces, but instead funds for strategic projects in the North get sucked into London for short-term fixes. I know it might not be good for government productivity but when you hear that the repairs to Parliament will cost an extra £10+ billion less if MPs move out for a few years, I can't help feeling it would be good to build a conference centre for £100m in say Stoke-on-Trent and have them move there for a few years, just so MPs and senior civil servants get to see life outside the London bubble. Nice and central, with relatively good rail/road networks.

But even with more enlightened central government, the problem is still that they are control freaks who don't care or understand about local problems, and hand out and remove funding on a whim between different regions. The Brexiteers had one thing right, too much decision making is remote, but the problem lies in Whitehall more than Brussels. Personally I'd do what the Spanish and French did to reduce their over-centralisation, by giving much more autonomy to the regions (ie roughly the NUTS1/ITL1 regions). The metro mayors are a start, but what's good for the Tees Valley is also good for the West Country and East Anglia. Possibly the way to start is just decentralising transport, creating Transport for Yorkshire etc.

We know it works, because a) London and more recently it's effectively happened in Manchester - Andy Burnham has spent the last few years fighting to get control of transport to enable the launch of an integrated network last September. A key part of that is bus franchising - like happens in London (where bus use has grown) but not anywhere else (where bus use has fallen) - as it allows coordination which makes things a lot more efficient. However there are still problems - Manchester want to launch fully integrated ticketing like London has had for 20+ years with Oyster, but of course London has a special London-only interface to the train ticketing network, the provinces won't get that for another few years.

Another aspect is the form of British cities - they're not dense enough to take advantage of public transport even when it is present and working. Birmingham is a lot less dense than a similar city like Lyon, so even with a bigger transport network it can't serve as many people. We need higher density housing and workplaces around transport hubs. We don't have to go crazy, I'm not talking skyscrapers necessarily, but more mansion blocks and the like rather than single houses. They're also more energy efficient - they can use centralised heating, and the heat lost through the ceiling goes into someone else's flat rather than an attic.

Getting the economy going again is a complex long-term problem, but getting the buses running on time, getting trains to run at all, denser housing and some new reservoirs are all part of the solution.

But we also need to stop fetishising the industries of the past and concentrate on helping the ones we are good at. But our politicians don't play video games and don't have enough of a science background to understand pharmaceutical development. We need to stop doing stoopid stuff that harms those industries like setting up a whole parallel drug regulation system, it's daft for a country that is 3% of the world market. Looking through this from the Institute of Export & International Trade, you can only agree with their conclusions :
● Ensure policy stability.
● Deepen trade relationships.
● Ease immigration and mobility rules.
● Economic complexity and sector specialisation.
● Improve connectivity.
● Increase levels of education, training and opportunities.
● Boost higher education R&D expenditure.

Policy stability is perhaps the number 1 requirement - a major cause of the lack of investment has been industry not knowing what government is doing from one week to the next. Personally I think it would be helpful for any government with a majority over over 30 to say when elected that the next election will on date X. Then everyone knows what's happening and you don't get the drift that happens after three years as noone wants to commit in case it's decided to have an early election. The Fixed-Term Parliament Act has its problems with small majorities, but at least everyone knew what the timetable should look like. Then each department can do a 5-year plan (and in certain instances a longer-term one, the US Navy publishes a 30-year shipbuilding plan to cover the effective lifetime of a ship and building a new one) with suitable contingencies, and then they can be assessed on how well they deliver that plan.

None of this is the full answer - but it's a start.

Top class rant! Have a rec

[ursaminortaur]

Cambridge is a success story, it pulls in not just people but companies, like Zeneca who moved lock stock and barrel from Cheshire. But that didn't increase UK GDP, but it did put even more stress on the tight Cambridge housing market. And a lot of that success is based on a huge amount of government funding - Oxford and Cambridge are two of the cities most dependent on government. But both of them have strong NIMBY tendencies that try to kill off attempts to let them grow to take advantage of the growth generated by that government funding. To be fair, there are also infrastructure issues - Michael Gove wants Cambridge to build 150k new houses,the council say that they can't even build the 50k currently planned due to a lack of water. They've at least got as far as planning one in the Thames Valley, but the NIMBYs are protesting against the proposed Abingdon reservoir. Which leads to this stunning graph - we haven't built a new reservoir in over 30 years.

That graph is shocking. One or two reservoirs completed just after water privatisation, which most likely were started before privatisation, and then absolutely nothing compared with lots being created in the preceding decades. That abrupt a change can't be just down to NIMBYs protesting but must be down to the privatised companies just wanting to sweat their assets and provide bigger dividends for their owners rather than to invest.

[Lootman]

That graph is shocking. One or two reservoirs completed just after water privatisation, which most likely were started before privatisation, and then absolutely nothing compared with lots being created in the preceding decades. That abrupt a change can't be just down to NIMBYs protesting but must be down to the privatised companies just wanting to sweat their assets and provide bigger dividends for their owners rather than to invest.

Or maybe the problem is that the water companies, whilst being privatised, were never really freed from the kind of regulations and price controls that undermine the business case for large-scale capital investment? And even more so when Labour chirps about "windfall taxes" for utilities and the like.

I have not invested in UK utilities for at least 20 years because the returns are low and the political risk is high. I do own a couple of US utilities because they do not suffer the same level of interference, and they do invest heavily.

[ursaminortaur]

That graph is shocking. One or two reservoirs completed just after water privatisation, which most likely were started before privatisation, and then absolutely nothing compared with lots being created in the preceding decades. That abrupt a change can't be just down to NIMBYs protesting but must be down to the privatised companies just wanting to sweat their assets and provide bigger dividends for their owners rather than to invest.

Or maybe the problem is that the water companies, whilst being privatised, were never really freed from the kind of regulations and price controls that undermine the business case for large-scale capital investment? And even more so when Labour chirps about "windfall taxes" for utilities and the like.

I have not invested in UK utilities for at least 20 years because the returns are low and the political risk is high. I do own a couple of US utilities because they do not suffer the same level of interference, and they do invest heavily.

The water companies had been able to build tons of reservoirs when they were under public ownership. They were then privatised in 1989 under the Tories - Labour didn't get back into power until 1997 - hence any such regulations and price controls must have been brought in by the Tories along with privatisation if they are to explain the abrupt change.

[Nimrod103]

Cambridge is a success story, it pulls in not just people but companies, like Zeneca who moved lock stock and barrel from Cheshire. But that didn't increase UK GDP, but it did put even more stress on the tight Cambridge housing market. And a lot of that success is based on a huge amount of government funding - Oxford and Cambridge are two of the cities most dependent on government. But both of them have strong NIMBY tendencies that try to kill off attempts to let them grow to take advantage of the growth generated by that government funding. To be fair, there are also infrastructure issues - Michael Gove wants Cambridge to build 150k new houses,the council say that they can't even build the 50k currently planned due to a lack of water. They've at least got as far as planning one in the Thames Valley, but the NIMBYs are protesting against the proposed Abingdon reservoir. Which leads to this stunning graph - we haven't built a new reservoir in over 30 years.

That graph is shocking. One or two reservoirs completed just after water privatisation, which most likely were started before privatisation, and then absolutely nothing compared with lots being created in the preceding decades. That abrupt a change can't be just down to NIMBYs protesting but must be down to the privatised companies just wanting to sweat their assets and provide bigger dividends for their owners rather than to invest.

I thought the ending of reservoir building coincided with the push by government (and pursued by the private water companies) to stem leakage from the water mains. It coincided also with the aftermath of the narrowly averted disaster during the construction of Carsington Water, due to mismanagement by the then state owned regional water company.

This cut back in leakage eliminated the need for new reservoirs - until the present time when people are waking up to the needs of the 10 million new water consumers in the country. Unfortunately, AIUI the Nimbys don't want a new reservoir built where it is presently most needed, on the upper Thames near Abingdon.

[Lootman]

Or maybe the problem is that the water companies, whilst being privatised, were never really freed from the kind of regulations and price controls that undermine the business case for large-scale capital investment? And even more so when Labour chirps about "windfall taxes" for utilities and the like.

I have not invested in UK utilities for at least 20 years because the returns are low and the political risk is high. I do own a couple of US utilities because they do not suffer the same level of interference, and they do invest heavily.

The water companies had been able to build tons of reservoirs when they were under public ownership. They were then privatised in 1989 under the Tories - Labour didn't get back into power until 1997 - hence any such regulations and price controls must have been brought in by the Tories along with privatisation if they are to explain the abrupt change.

This is not a Labour versus Tory issue since we have had both parties in power since privatisation.

My point was that the government retained so many powers that long-term investment was deterred. And often there was the perceived risk of renationalisation by Labour. So why risk long-term capital spend? It makes far more sense to go for short-term profits.

The reality is that waters cos are neither fish nor fowl.

[Tedx]

In response to the post by Hallucigenia.…

The UK must have the most potential of all the developed countries in the world - even if only to get us up to a reasonable standard.

We are the low hanging fruit of developed nations.

We just need a government willing to adopt a suitable long term strategy to let us get there.

[Lootman]

In response to the post by Hallucigenia.…

The UK must have the most potential of all the developed countries in the world - even if only to get us up to a reasonable standard.

We are the low hanging fruit of developed nations.

We just need a government willing to adopt a suitable long term strategy to let us get there.

Or maybe we just need a government willing to get out of the way and stop meddling, tinkering and interfering?

[ursaminortaur]

That graph is shocking. One or two reservoirs completed just after water privatisation, which most likely were started before privatisation, and then absolutely nothing compared with lots being created in the preceding decades. That abrupt a change can't be just down to NIMBYs protesting but must be down to the privatised companies just wanting to sweat their assets and provide bigger dividends for their owners rather than to invest.

I thought the ending of reservoir building coincided with the push by government (and pursued by the private water companies) to stem leakage from the water mains. It coincided also with the aftermath of the narrowly averted disaster during the construction of Carsington Water, due to mismanagement by the then state owned regional water company.

This cut back in leakage eliminated the need for new reservoirs - until the present time when people are waking up to the needs of the 10 million new water consumers in the country. Unfortunately, AIUI the Nimbys don't want a new reservoir built where it is presently most needed, on the upper Thames near Abingdon.

Have the water companies stopped leakages ? I didn't think they had.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/19/water-firms-england-wales-litres-leaky-pipes-ofwat

The industry and its financial regulator, Ofwat, say the water companies lost an average of 2,923.8m litres of water a day in 2021-22, equating to 1.06tn litres over the year, although Ofwat said the figures remained provisional until it has completed validation checks.

The figure amounts to the equivalent of 426,875 Olympic swimming pools or more than three and a half Lake Windermeres.

Under pressure from Ofwat they may have reduced leakage slightly in the last few years but the amount of leakage is still gigantic.

[Nimrod103]

I thought the ending of reservoir building coincided with the push by government (and pursued by the private water companies) to stem leakage from the water mains. It coincided also with the aftermath of the narrowly averted disaster during the construction of Carsington Water, due to mismanagement by the then state owned regional water company.

This cut back in leakage eliminated the need for new reservoirs - until the present time when people are waking up to the needs of the 10 million new water consumers in the country. Unfortunately, AIUI the Nimbys don't want a new reservoir built where it is presently most needed, on the upper Thames near Abingdon.

Have the water companies stopped leakages ? I didn't think they had.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/19/water-firms-england-wales-litres-leaky-pipes-ofwat

The industry and its financial regulator, Ofwat, say the water companies lost an average of 2,923.8m litres of water a day in 2021-22, equating to 1.06tn litres over the year, although Ofwat said the figures remained provisional until it has completed validation checks.

The figure amounts to the equivalent of 426,875 Olympic swimming pools or more than three and a half Lake Windermeres.

Under pressure from Ofwat they may have reduced leakage slightly in the last few years but the amount of leakage is still gigantic.

I'm no expert, but I am sure that the water companies have done a great deal to reduce losses from leakage. This is not easy because AIUI the roads (under which the water mains run) have received an increasing pounding from much heavier lorries, and now also from heavy electric cars. It is also my observation that installing water meters at domestic properties is a two edged sword, because the meters and their connections seem to be an additional source of frequent leakages.

[Oggy]

Or maybe we just need a government willing to get out of the way and stop meddling, tinkering and interfering?

Or maybe we don't need politicians of any kind at all and just let businesses get on with it?