T here was a time when privatised British water companies were as unpopular as they are now. During the hot summer of 1995, the managing director of Yorkshire Water , Trevor Newton, achieved notoriety when he urged customers to use less of his company’s product by issuing a motivational message: “I personally have not had a bath or shower for three months.” After a round of jokes about “the filthy rich” – because megabucks pay for water company bosses was also in the headlines in those days – Newton invited the press to watch him washing with a flannel and bowl.
It later emerged he had been popping out of Yorkshire for a soak at his parents’ and in-laws’ homes. The serious aspect of the farce was that, just as now, the public was outraged by the mismatch between rewards for investors and the standard of service being provided by a privatised utility. Yorkshire had just paid a £50m dividend to shareholders and yet the city of Bradford was at risk of running dry.
A new grid was behind schedule and the company was reduced to transporting water by tanker through the Dales. “Public anger exploded,” recalled Sir Ian Byatt, the first head of the Office of Water Services, or Ofwat, the regulatory body created at privatisation in 1989, in his account of his career. The saga also underlined the rotten state of the water infrastructure, the reason given for privatisation in the first place.
The UK was regarded as the “dirty man of Europe” on account of polluti.