TOM UTLEY: Mrs U has a self-imposed hosepipe ban. But I don't know why she bothers when Thames Water wastes more than half a BILLION litres every day

When it comes to conserving water, my darling wife is a veritable eco-fanatic. She can't bear to see a single drop go to waste.
To take one example: the hot tap over our kitchen sink runs cold for about 30 seconds before the warm water reaches it from the tank in the airing cupboard upstairs. But rather than let the water run down the drain until it warms up, as many of us would (I must plead guilty there), she collects every last teaspoonful in a jug.
She then pours this into a bucket, which she keeps on the floor by the sink. As the bucket fills up in the course of the day, she takes it outside to water her beloved garden, which has been having a hard time of it lately (though the unusually long dry spell appears at last to have come to a sopping wet end).
As for the reeled hosepipe I bought for her years ago, perish the thought that she would ever use it! Out of the goodness of her heart, she labours under a permanent, self-imposed hosepipe ban.
All very virtuous, no doubt. But (don't tell her I said this) I reckon it's also completely futile – as she ought to have learned from something she experienced only last Sunday.
Having gone through that jug-bucket rigmarole in the morning, she set off for church in the car, only to find herself stuck in a traffic jam just around the corner from our house.
For the umpteenth time, Thames Water was digging up the road, at the very same junction where the company seems to have dug it up every few months since we moved to our South London suburb in the late 1980s.
Temporary traffic lights were in operation, yet again, and water from a burst main was gushing in torrents down the road, as it has so often in the past.
I can't say exactly how much was going to waste, but it was certainly enough to fill Mrs U's jug in the kitchen many millions of times over.
What I do know is that the latest figures I can find say water companies in England and Wales lost more than one trillion litres through leaks in 2023. Meanwhile, Thames Water was named and shamed as the worst offender, having contributed 570,400,000 litres per day to that shameful total.
To be fair, Thames is by far the biggest water firm in the country. It is also true that it inherited a great deal of crumbling Victorian and Edwardian infrastructure at the time of privatisation in 1989. It was only to be expected, therefore, that it would top the table for leaks.
But there my sympathy runs dry and cold fury takes its place. For under a series of rapacious foreign owners and private equity firms, out to make a fast buck, Thames Water has made such a disgraceful hash of serving its customers that it has achieved what many of us might have thought impossible: along with other privatised water companies nationwide, it has succeeded in becoming more unpopular even than the banks, whose greed brought the country to the brink of ruin during the credit crunch.
When there's too much rain, they pump revolting raw sewage into our precious rivers.
When there's too little, they simply preach to their customers about the need to save water, imposing hosepipe bans (of the non-voluntary variety). Meanwhile, our bills go up and up.
I note, incidentally, that this year's race to become the first company in the country to impose a hosepipe ban was won this week by Youlgreave Waterworks, which serves a mere 500 households in Derbyshire.
But at least Youlgreave can argue that it's served by a single natural spring, which tends to dry up in sunny weather, as does the back-up supply from a disused mine.
There's no such excuse for Thames, with its multiple reservoirs, which would have plenty of water to go around if only it didn't allow so much of it to leak away.
So greedily has the firm behaved, indeed, that for decades it has poured into the pockets of its executives and shareholders the millions that should have been spent on preventing those leaks, keeping bills down and our rivers clean.
In the process, it has accumulated staggering debts, variously estimated at between £15 billion and £20 billion, while picking up the odd fine and penalty from Ofwat, the regulator – the most recent being a record £123 million for pollution and paying excess dividends. But nothing seems to make a blind bit of difference to its conduct.
With that mountain of debt hanging over the company, it's no wonder that potential rescuers have looked at the books and decided that it's not for them. On Tuesday, indeed, the American private equity firm KKR became the latest to pull out, abandoning its plans to inject £4 billion into Thames to keep it afloat.
It's said that after ten weeks of due diligence, including several visits to wastewater treatment works, the firm found that the state of some of the Thames assets was worse than it had initially imagined.
It was also nervous about the political risks associated with any deal, such as the possibility that the public's anger would lead to a stricter approach from Ofwat and the Government, with massive fines wiping out any potential financial gain.
Quoted in The Guardian, a ministry spokesman says: 'The Government makes no apology for tackling the poor behaviour we have seen in the past, where too many people were rewarded for failure. But we welcome investors who want to work with us to rebuild this vital sector and clean up our rivers, lakes and seas.'
Well good luck with that. After the depredations brought about by its owners, Thames Water looks to my untrained eye like a most unattractive prospect for any private buyer.
God knows, I'm no fan of nationalisation. Indeed, among its many egregious sins, I count the fact that Thames has given capitalism a bad name among the firm's most grievous.
But from where I'm sitting, ignorant as I am of high finance, I see little alternative to forcing the company into administration, which is after all a temporary form of takeover by state appointees.
If so, it's true that many of its creditors – some of whom bought Thames debt at a discount in the hope of making easy profits – are likely to get their fingers seriously burnt. But I can't see Thames Water customers shedding too many tears for them.
Whatever happens next, I dare say Mrs U will carry on saving every last drop of water she can.
But with all those billions of gallons draining away, don't the few pints she saves look as pathetic as the Government's ruinous efforts to reduce our paltry emissions of CO2, while China and India belch ever more billions of tons into the atmosphere?

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