Rising water bills - well done to Feargal Sharkey, Surfers Against Sewage

The Times suggests that water bills are going to have to rise, substantially:

Water companies are drawing up plans to increase household bills by up to 40 per cent to pay for the cost of tackling the sewage crisis and the consequences of climate change.

In a move that has alarmed ministers, England’s privatised utilities said that they needed the extra money to meet strict pollution targets.

We’d just like to say well done here, well done to Feargal Sharkey and Surfers Against Sewage. They, and others (Hello! to Mr. Monbiot), have been shouting that the rivers and oceans should be cleaner than they are. Well, maybe they should be.

But every benefit comes at a cost. It is not possible to have two entirely separate water drainage systems, one for sewage and the other for storm run off, without there being some expense associated with having two separate water drainage systems. That expense seems to be 40% on water bills.

No, there is no way out of this - there’re only us chickens here to pay those bills. It doesn’t matter whether it’s government or capitalists who fund the upgrades. Either the capitalists do and they make a return, the government does and it does, or government does then charges us the cost in our tax bills. The cost of that upgrade to the system is a few hundred pounds a year, forever, on every household bill for water, whether it appears directly on the water bill or not.

It’s even possible to suggest that perhaps we don’t in fact want to clean up the rivers. Sure there’s a joy in wild swimming in the river at Hebden Bridge. But perhaps 25 million households will baulk at each paying £250 a year for that to be possible - Hebdenites might need to use a swimming pool instead.

We could even call into evidence that standard economic observation, the difference between expressed and revealed preferences. Plenty of people will say they’d like cleaner rivers. But if they’ll not pay for it then they don’t really mean it, do they?

And again, we do insist that this is nothing, at all, to do with who owns, operates or funds the water system. If Britain wants cleaner rivers then Britain will have to pay for cleaner rivers.

The rises are due to be announced next year and could result in annual bills increasing from an average of about £450 to £680,

Hey, maybe people do want to pay this much. We do tend to doubt it though.

The larger point here being that there’s an optimal amount of pollution and it isn’t none. What that optimum is depends upon how much it costs to not have it as compared to how much people are willing to pay to not have it. That’s just how reality works. Sorry about that but there it is. Stuff costs money so, how much are you willing to pay to get what you say you want?