Monday 17 April 2023: Attitude to Affinity Water
On a scale of 0 to 10, how satisfied/dissatisfied am I with Affinity Water?
2
Why?
First, I feel politically deeply challenged by what ought to be a public utility instead in the hands of commercial interests. Affinity Water is a commercial company owned by an insurance and asset management company, an investment company and a fund management company. It would strain credibility to suggest that the primary focus of these three companies is not money. The privatisation of public water was 'sold' to the public primarily on the basis that the new water utility companies would raise large amounts of money for major infrastructure projects. The major infrastructure projects never happened, and the large sums of money borrowed were distributed to shareholders instead. Now, thirty years later, the water companies have been instructed to do something about the appalling state of the water infrastructure in the UK, and to pay for this the water companies want to increase water charges. This was not how we were told it was going to be.
Two analogies occur to me. The first, simple, is being asked how satisfied or dissatisfied I feel about a person who picked my pocket. The second, more complex, is returning home to find that my house has been sold by someone who had no legal right to sell my house, having stolen my title deeds, and pocketed the value of the house that had been legally mine. The new owners permit me to continue living in the house, but they have taken out a massive loan against the value of the house. I am most dissatisfied with the person who stole the title deeds to my house, but I am also dissatisfied with the person who now owns the house that was stolen. (N.B. This scam really does happen.)
Third, Affinity Water is not serious about reducing customer wastage of water. The UK is rushing headlong into a future of severe water stress, and customer water use reduction targets are pitiful. I cannot help but imagine that when the business model is to make a profit by selling water to customers, the last thing that you want the customer to do is to use less water. Affinity Water has not put all of its customers (who can be) on water meters. I have a water meter, but I want a smart meter so that I do not have to traipse out to the road every day. The principal mechanism that will allow customers to reduce water use is to see and understand precisely how much water they are using on a daily or even an hourly basis, and to charge them less for using less water.
However, fourth, Affinity Water does reliably supply me with clean water. However, so did the water board before it was privatised.
Fifth, Affinity Water has good drought plans (which I have read). I also like the fact that Affinity Water is now in discussion with other water companies regarding the very long overdue movement of water around the UK. However, this is the sort of thing that would not have been a novel development before the privatisation of water.
E-mails encouraging me to take ever shorter showers (the ideal being, it would seem, not to shower at all), to test the pans of the several (three) toilets in my house to find out if any suffers from invisible water leakage from the cistern, and to buy remarkably expensively (but discounted and therefore representing a bargain) water butts with kits to collect water from roof gutter downpipes. (I require the water from a full water butt every day in order to water my vegetable garden alone, and double that in order to irrigate the fruit trees in my orchard. However, as we are no longer in receipt of summer rainfall, once a water butt has been emptied, and of which I already have several, it can be months before it is refilled.)
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