A. Reader is back again with another informative post. This particular contributor sends me much useful information. I always appreciate the person’s work. The latest piece follows the separator.

The question is, “How catastrophic can privatization of a public service make things?” Consult British media for details.

Before her death, Margaret Thatcher decided to privatize the UK’s water and sewage system. In rushed various “investors, who then became…

A/ Exceptionally rich and exceptionally unwilling to maintain system standards.

B/ Incredibly indifferent to competence.

C/ Incredibly greedy and heedless of the damage they caused..

What could only make matters worse? A regulator, OFWAT, is reluctant to regulate too intrusively. They became busy issuing trivial fines. The fines were sufficiently tiny that they could be considered a license to do more of the same. 

This was further enhanced by six prime ministers who preoccupied themselves with avoiding the issue.

I mention this because there’s a Canadian chap who witnessed all this deregulatory and privatization mania yet returned to Ottawa determined to gut those pesky environmental regulations Big Business didn’t like.

So it’s not like our PM has no conception of how badly under-regulated companies can behave.

Here’s a sample:

Southern Water fined £7m after illegally dumping sewage off Kent coast

The company, described by the judge as having a “record of criminality” that was “an exceptionally serious aggravating factor,” pleaded guilty to 13 offences at Medway Magistrates Court last April over sewage discharges at Margate and Broadstairs wastewater pumping stations between 2019 and 2021.

Nine counts related to the incidents of untreated sewage dumped off the Kent coast, while three counts were over the failure to notify authorities of the discharges as soon as practicable and within 24 hours of a warning. This is a condition of the environmental permit.

A final conviction was for failing to have a standby pump at Margate’s station between 27 July 2019 and 4 October 2020, in breach of the permit.

The sentencing, at Canterbury Crown Court, took place on Thursday and Friday, with Mr. Justice Johnson imposing a total fine of £7,127,083.

The company was fined £90m for nearly 7,000 incidents across Hampshire, Kent, and Sussex in a case brought by the Environment Agency in 2021.

Yorkshire Water fined over £700,000 for repeated sewage releases

Company admits three pollution events that killed fish and insects in Pools Brook country park near Chesterfield

A water company has been fined more than £700,000 for repeatedly releasing sewage into a stream.

Yorkshire Water was issued with the penalty after pleading guilty to three offences of sewage pollution in Pools Brook Country Park near Chesterfield.

The three events killed fish and insects and polluted the stream for more than half a mile.

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Where does this go off the rails entirely?

With Mr. Starmer at the helm, various town councils approved an amazing number of huge new data centres. What the townsfolk didn’t analyze beforehand was whether or not Britain had enough local water to supply the data centres and supply the local population with drinking water.

Of course, desalinating ocean water on a scale common in the Middle East could solve the problem—but…

Plant in Beckton has run only five times and has been beset by multiple problems since it was built

London’s desalination plant has cost more than half a billion pounds since 2010 and has run only five times, delivering 7.2bn litres of drinking water, roughly seven days of London’s typical daily demand. Now Thames Water is planning a new £500m project to tackle drought in the capital.

The Thames Gateway desalination plant at Beckton, built for £270m and now largely mothballed, has racked up an estimated £200m in debt interest, about £45m in idle upkeep and about £3m in operating costs, according to Thames Water figures. That puts the lifetime bill at about £518m, or about 7p for every litre the plant has ever produced, which is 28 times more than customers usually pay for their water.

Thames Water now plans to build a new drought-resilience scheme on the Thames for an estimated cost of between £359m and £535m, which will be paid for by customers.

The Teddington Direct River Abstraction (TDRA) scheme would remove water from the river at Teddington, pump it to the Lee Valley reservoirs in north London, and replace it with treated effluent from Mogden sewage works in west London.

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Not enough water for UK’s datacentre plans, trade body says

Industry says government’s failure to address cooling demands means AI growth plans are ‘fatally flawed.’

The UK will not have enough water for future datacentres, the water industry has said in stark criticism of the government’s AI growth plans.

Datacentres rely on large amounts of water to manage the heat generated by densely packed servers. Cooling towers, chillers, and humidification systems make direct use of this water, with large volumes also consumed indirectly through high electrical power needs.

Water UK, the trade body that represents water companies in Britain and Northern Ireland, said in a publicly available written briefing to MPs that the government’s water forecasts were “fatally flawed” and “explicitly exclude” datacentres.

It wrote that the government “makes not a single mention of water” in its policy for delivering AI growth zones, its AI for science strategy, or its AI opportunities action plan.

It added that the Environment Agency’s most recent national framework for water resources, published in June 2025, also failed to include an estimate of the water demands of datacentres.

“There appears to be an assumption that the country will always have enough water for its economic needs,” the briefing said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

In May, a House of Lords report said England faced a 5bn litre a day shortfall for public water supplies by 2055.

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Of course none of this could possibly happen here in Canada, and never in BC. Right?