It has been a heavy day, so this is a short blog to make clear what happened today at the High Court.
Mr Justice Leech handed down a decision that will allow the proposed Thames Water restructuring plan that will result in just under £1billion of customers' bills being spent on lawyers' fees, advisors and interest payments to creditors- in about 6 months.
Basically a massive waste of the money paid in by customers hit by big bill rises, simply to keep a gravy train for shareholders, creditors and senior executives running with our cash.
All this is happening simply because, when the financial shambles became obvious, the government failed to place Thames Water into Special Administration; a process designed to stop this lunacy happening.
The only people to raise a voice for the public as Ofwat and government shirked their responsibilities, were the WASP team, when we wrote to the court to ask to give evidence in December, and our MP, Charlie Maynard who represented us and worked with a legal team representing us all FOR FREE!
Huge thank you to the Barrister team, led by William Day and the Marriott Harrison instructing solicitors team led by Brett Israel.
Thames Water will spend over £200M of our money on its legal fees - a bitter irony that we are forced fund our own exploitation.
However, this game is not over. We are in extra time, a goal down, but our legal team has secured the right to appeal the decision.
It will happen fast and we will explain more in the coming days.
Thanks everyone for support, and especially those who joined us and froze with us outside court today.
We can all say that the uk is buggered
This is an iniquitous result. Shame on Thames Water, Ofwat and in particularly HMG. Thank you for ploughing on with this, what you have achieved to date is remarkable and we are all behind you.
Well done and thanks to everyone - lets not give up - we WILL get our water back!
I think we should be careful about blaming this on privatisation. No point in picking unnecessary political fights (and some of us are old enough to remember how bad nationalisation could be!). Privatisation might have worked if the governments involved had enforced the legislation in place - that , for example, they could only flush sewage into the seas and rivers after exceptional rainfall. Even now the government could step in and insist that the dividends that the water companies have paid since their first warning or fine, are clawed back under the HMRC ‘Illegal dividends’ clause (https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/company-taxation-manual/ctm15205). As OFWAT water authority licences state that ‘The dividends declared or paid will not impair the ability of the company to fin…
Thank you again for your amazing efforts