Unbelievable. Go Feargal Sharkey - a good heart these days is hard to find.
From the article - as I had to log in to read it:
At this year’s Labour conference he delivered a short speech outlining how water companies had dumped sewage for six million hours in the past two years. Since privatisation, he said, the industry paid out £72 billion in shareholder dividends and in the past seven years it found £58 million for salaries and bonuses for its top bosses.
He is scathing about the way environmental groups have failed to grip the issues earlier: “Is the environment lobby to a large extent captured by the system, by the regulators, by the water industry? Damn right they are.”
I see Michael Gove seemed to have berated the corporate greed of water companies back in 2018 according to the article.
“Far too often, there is evidence that water companies have not been acting sufficiently in the public interest,” Gove said. “Some companies have been playing the system for the benefit of wealthy managers and owners, at the expense of consumers and the environment. Some companies have not been as transparent as they should have been.
They have shielded themselves from scrutiny, hidden behind complex financial structures, avoided paying taxes, rewarded the already well off, kept charges higher than they needed to be and allowed leaks, pollution and other failures to persist for far too long.”
