Instead of renationalisation, Thames Water is receiving a £3bn loan. Millions of pounds of that loan will go to executive bonuses – instead of bringing down people’s astronomical bills.

Thames Water is already around £19bn in debt. When it was privatised, the utility was debt free. Capital funds who took private ownership of the company racked up the debt to pay out huge shareholder dividends.

Thames Water’s “most precious resource”? Its senior management team, according to its boss

For Thames Water, debt particularly went up under Macquarie, an Australian infrastructure bank known as ‘vampire kangaroo’. Once Macquarie took over in 2007, company debt increased from £3.2bn to £10.7bn when it was sold in 2017. At the same time, 80% of its assets became funded by borrowing and the company paid out billions in dividends. What were once public assets owned by the people are being used as cash cow play things by the rich.

Bear that in mind when Thames Water chair Adrian Montague tells parliament:

We have a bonus scheme to protect our most precious resource, which is the senior management team

No the most ‘precious resource’ is the water itself, which we are now renting back from the transnational capitalist class rather than owning ourselves. Thames Water oversaw sewage spills into the River Thames quadrupling in 2023.

Across the water companies, bosses received £9.1 million in bonuses for the year 2023/24. Chief executive of Thames Water Chris Weston receives a total pay package of about £2.3 million per year. The included incoming bonuses from the emergency loan are set to be 50% of base pay.

Outrageous

Aside from avoiding high executive pay, bonuses and dividends, another benefit of public ownership is cheaper borrowing. Government bonds have about half the interest rate that Thames Water is paying in the new £3bn loan. Then there’s Quantitative Easing, where new money can simply be created in order to fund infrastructure, rather than renting capital from the private sector.

Public ownership of water is a no-brainer. It’s a success story across the rest of Europe.

Featured image via the Canary

By James Wright

This post was originally published on Canary.