What really goes on inside Thames Water? We’re about to find out
The crisis of Thames Water can feel utterly baffling. How can it be that Europe’s most successful capital city, and Britain’s wealthiest region, struggles to carry out the most basic service: keeping taps flowing and toilets flushing without polluting the rivers and land?
Why is it that an organisation so integral to the health of 16 million people, not just in London but parts of Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Kent and much of the southeast, can be in a position where it has nearly £20 billion of debt and stands on the very brink of bankruptcy?
On Monday, as Thames awaits a key judgment from the Court of Appeal over an emergency £3 billion loan to keep it afloat, the BBC is airing the first of a two-part documentary that endeavours to answer that question.
In an attempt its PR team admit is an effort to “stop people hating us”, Thames let in a film crew for the past year for a fly-on-the-wall view inside the sprawling utility.
Thames Water is waiting for a High Court judgment on its £3 billion bailout, which campaigners say will cost each household £250 a year
VUK VALCIC/ALAMY
But from the executives handling a hostile media to the engineers battling the torrents of sewage overpowering Thames’s broken-down old waterworks, the picture that emerges as the camera rolls is a pretty filthy one.
The tone is light, as the workers struggle to control the effluent with a mixture of Blitz spirit and Ealing comedy. But beneath the dark humour is a devastating view of this exemplar of broken Britain. For surely not since the demise of the penny-pinching, privatised Railtrack after the fatal train crashes of the late Nineties has a national asset been so mistreated.
Chief executive Chris Weston, paid a £195,000 bonus for his first three months in the role, endeavours to put a positive gloss on the company’s repeated fines and missed pollution targets. But its admirable workers — doing the dirty jobs he (and most of us) would never do — offer the documentary-makers more candid appraisals.
Chris Weston, chief executive of Thames Water
BBC
One veteran, surveying the broken and ageing equipment in the plant to which he’s dedicated much of his career, says to the camera: “Over 20 years, it has changed. This place would be spick and span because the people responsible used to take pride in the area. I dunno, they just cut back on everything.”
Chief operating officer Esther Sharples, recently arrived from Transport for London and a straight-shooting star of the show, regularly declares her shock at what she finds, declaring: “Thames has catastrophically underinvested.”
Back in 1989, it all seemed so different. As the newsreels from the time declared in clipped BBC English, this was the richest of the state owned water companies, with minimal debt, producing handsome profits.
A cocksure young Conservative environment minister, Michael (now Lord) Howard, preparing it for privatisation, was asked what potential disadvantages there might be. “I don’t think there will be any disadvantages,” he declares.
The fact is, he says, in national ownership the industry had been “starved of cash for 40 years”. Let private sector cash come in and fund the upgrades it so badly needed.
It did not pan out that way.
The Bathing Belles from Ocean Rebellion wear gas masks to protest against water pollution levels in the Thames at Henley in Oxfordshire
ALAMY
Most critics point the finger for Thames’s decline at the Australian investment bank Macquarie, which loaded up the organisation with debt and paid itself big dividends during its part-ownership from 2006 to 2017.
Oddly, this documentary holds back from explicitly naming culprits.
Instead, as the headlines fill with stories of the company’s potential collapse, baffled workers fearing for their jobs try to figure out what went wrong: “No one really explained how we got into this situation,” says one. “Somebody has been allowed to put the company in jeopardy. They were allowed to do what they did, so they did it.”
Thames Water: Inside the Crisis visits Mogden Sewage Treatment Works in Isleworth, west London
BBC
Instead of blaming the former owners, viewers are left with the impression that the responsibility lies squarely with the regulator, Ofwat, for letting them get away with it.
We see last Christmas how Thames desperately lobbies Ofwat to let it charge households more so it can invest in the new equipment it needs. The company asks for a 53 per cent hike but, with the cameras rolling on the executive team, we watch their head-in-hands reaction as Ofwat grants them only 35 per cent, also insisting on tougher leakage targets. Thames is still appealing against Ofwat’s ruling.
Weston, refusing to blame his predecessors, insists that the problem has always been that the regulator never let them put up bills enough. “I don’t think it is down to the greed of shareholders taking money out. I don’t think it’s about the greed of management. It is a whole lot of things that have contributed to it.”
From what this film shows us, there seem few reasons for hope. Thames has been so starved of investment that it needs an unfathomable amount of cash to put it right.
Last year’s Storm Bert made that clear. In the pouring rain, Thames’s plant at Chipping Norton singularly fails to cope. As brownish-grey water floods over the sides of the works, a grim-faced engineer, water dripping from his visor, says: “We have 320 litres a second going out to the river. Some of that is completely untreated … everything people flush down the toilet. Tampons, whatever you can think of, could be going out into the river right now.”
Storm Bert led to 19 hours of sewage discharge into the Thames where it collected in the village of Datchet, Berkshire
ALAMY
He wants a lorry tanker to come and take some of it away, but there aren’t enough available because another works, shut down months ago due to rust, is completely underwater, sewage surging up through manhole covers.
Ten tankers are rotating through in an attempt to keep raw effluent from flooding across the local area, each at a cost of £2,500 a day.
The lack of slack in the system is frustrating and stressful for the workers. So, when a crucial pump breaks down, there are no spares on site to fix the problem. “It’s a snowball effect and you end up on shit street,” says one.
We see how one young, enthusiastic, newly-arrived plant manager, Josh, gets ground down by the chaos caused by underinvestment. He’s popular with his team of old hands, but none are surprised when he quits — they’ve seen five or six in recent times.
His exit interview makes for painful watching. “The team is doing everything they can but we’re still not good enough,” he says. “We’re firing on as many cylinders as we can muster, but it is still in decline. I’ve needed the cavalry to come in but they’ve just not come over the hill.”
It’s noticeable that none of the top level managers have been in their jobs for long. Nobody seems to stick around.
In the rundown Brixton Water Works, south London, Sharples is shocked by the “paralysis” at Thames, brought about by years of cash shortages.
It was not always like this. Leading us through the Victorian-era building, now a riot of peeling paint and black mould, she points out lavish architectural flourishes from a prouder age.
The centrepiece is a beautiful mosaic of Neptune floating in a conch shell. It is testament, she says, to the diligence of the original water companies of London, but adds: “I don’t think we’ll be building many mosaics into the future.”
Thames Water: Inside the Crisis starts on BBC2 at 9pm on Monday