London swims in myths of exceptionalism and stereotypes about rain, making it easy to forget that it is the 15th most water stressed city in the world.
Water companies swerved fines for releasing gallons of raw sewage straight into rivers and simultaneously awarded their shareholders billions in dividends this year.
The failures of privatisation are written in the bodies of the dead fish floating down rivers and in the glowing screens of smart water meters.
Steve Reed, the new DEFRA Secretary, and his recent plan to reform the water system by attracting yet more private investment left many angry, if not surprised.
Dividends
His speech also brought undercurrents of water injustice to the surface. His pledge to “restore our rivers, lakes and seas to good health” echoed campaigners’ calls to protect “our waters."
Yet language like this puts me on edge. It demands the existence of people to whom the rivers and lakes do not belong. The polycrisis of ecological breakdown, water privatisation, and austerity does not affect everyone equally.
According to Ofwat, a third of households in England and Wales regularly struggle to pay water bills, and this is prior to upcoming bill hikes.
Water poverty is highest in the north of England, Cornwall, and in Wales, partly due to the postcode lottery of tariffs charged by different water companies. Water is publicly owned in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Companies are obligated to offer lower tariffs to those struggling to pay, but they fund these by raising bills for other users. Better that than make a dent in shareholder dividends, CEO bonuses, or even the accounts of corporate water customers.
Swallow
Privatisation is pedalled as a means of conserving precious water by "properly valuing” it as a resource. In practice, it pushes marginalised users into debt.
Research by the River Access campaign shows that the public can legally access only two percent of rivers in England and Wales. This is because land ownership is concentrated in the hands of only a few.
In light of this, it’s not surprising that some perceive campaigns for river health as a concern of the privileged: homeowners with riverbank views and a middle-class penchant for wild swimming. It’s true that there’s something in the water. It is a story of dispossession.
Narratives about “our water” raise the question: which water is not “ours”? The racist, far-right party Reform UK can shed light on this.
Last year, then-leader Richard Tice called for the government to “take back control” of water companies owned by overseas investors. This exceptionalism is difficult to swallow when Britain has a dirty history of exporting water injustice.
Shutoffs
In the 1980s and 1990s, Western institutions required countries to sell off their utilities to secure loans from the International Monetary Fund.
London swims in myths of exceptionalism and stereotypes about rain, making it easy to forget that it is the 15th most water stressed city in the world.
This is exactly what happened in Jakarta, when Thames Water bought up half the rights to control water in the city and went on to charge the highest tariffs in Southeast Asia.
It also happened in Tanzania. After pressure from the World Bank, the capital, Dar es Salaam, leased its water supply to a consortium of British, German, and Tanzanian companies in a deal complete with a six-year tax break.
The British government supplied almost half a million pounds to Adam Smith International, a “free market” lobby group, to do PR for the project, according to a report by The Guardian.
The PR campaign was not enough to drown out the high tariffs, water shutoffs, and poor water supply that followed. Two years later, Der es Salaam’s authorities terminated the contract early and deported the company executives.
Private
The government still funnels public money into buying up water infrastructure overseas. It awarded Adam Smith International £400 million between 2012 and 2017.
Today, the lobby group proudly champions “market-based approaches” to water provision in 17 countries, primarily in southern Africa.
Further, Liz Truss during her short and infamous reign as British prime minister, rebranded international aid as British International Investment (BII) - a publicly owned company.
At the time, NGOs predicted that BII would focus “solely on private-sector investment and profit-making." Their predictions came true. In 2023, BII announced a deal to promote private investment in water infrastructure across Africa.
Another publicly funded scheme, the UK Sustainable Infrastructure Programme, aims to promote private sector partnerships in the Caribbean and South America.
Violence
A midterm evaluation of the project reported the success of its work with Lima’s municipal water company, Sedapal, to create a “robust stakeholder engagement strategy” with the private sector.
In 2019, around the time that Extinction Rebellion "flowed like water" to bring central London to a standstill, a river of protest ran through Lima too.
News sources report people filling the streets, chanting, “Water is a right, not a privilege." They were outraged that the government had announced a decree that could allow private investors to buy up all shares in Sedapal.
The protest was part of a long history of resistance to water privatisation in South America. A few decades earlier, during the Cochabamba water revolt, a mass movement organised blockades, roadblocks, and a general strike against Bechtel, a Californian multinational that had bought the city’s water utility.
The cross-class alliance of students, campesinos, and street vendors fought privatisation in the face of brutal police violence and won.
Destroyed
In this country, glimpses of resistance appear through the screens of water meters. Researchers Loftus, Marsh, and Nash put it this way in a 2016 paper: just as people rebel against being subjected to the abstract world of clock time when they press snooze on an alarm clock, people “being disciplined by the water meter” can find ways to struggle against a financialised water system.
This is exactly what Caroline O’Reilly was doing as she sat in a hole in the road on a summer day in 2013. Southern Water had embarked on a mission of compulsory metering in her neighbourhood, and Arad, an Israeli company, supplied the meters.
People like O’Reilly, mobilised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, refused meters in solidarity with Palestinian calls to boycott Israeli apartheid.
The water in this story is key: Arad also supplies Israel's state-owned water company, Mekorot, which, as protesters pointed out at the time, provides water to the illegal occupation of the West Bank.
Mekorot denies Palestinians access to water, a tactic instrumental in forcing them from their land. Israel has only escalated this violence in its ongoing genocide; its military has systematically destroyed water infrastructure in Gaza and blocked the water supply through Mekorot lines.
Incentives
Each of the half a million Arad meters that did make it into south England’s homes, pinging silent updates on daily water use, serve as reminders that water in this country has never been pure or amoral.
Thames Water plans to install compulsory smart meters universally by 2030, apparently in response to water stress.
London swims in myths of exceptionalism and stereotypes about rain, making it easy to forget that it is the 15th most water stressed city in the world.
Smart meters are advertised as a means of regaining control of personal water use, but they are also another site of injustice.
People without access to wealth or credit cannot benefit from such incentives to save water if, for example, they live with large families or can’t afford water saving technology.
Pungent
Buying the latest water-efficient washing machine costs money. We are not all dispossessed of water in the same way.
When Steve Reed talks about “protecting our rivers, lakes and seas," he taps into a desire for sovereignty.
But, by asking the question “Whose water is our water?” we see that water injustice operates in cycles and flows that extend across borders and along lines of oppression.
Every time you turn on a tap, you meet the water at an instant in its infinite and far-reaching cycle. Similarly, an everyday encounter with a water meter or the pungent scent of a polluted river can offer a glimpse into a broken water system.
This Author
Laurie Hancock is a youth work assistant, researcher and organiser.
