My Lords, it would be inappropriate for the Government to comment in detail on a company’s commercial regulations. Ofwat notes that the company has now moved to the next stage in its equity raise process, and it continues to engage with the company to ensure the delivery of the financial and operational turnaround that both customers and the environment deserve. Any investors will be expected to show that Thames Water will meet its statutory and regulatory obligations.
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her Answer. Let us look at the facts. Thames Water was put on the road to ruin by private equity. Now its shareholders have designated KKR, another private equity group, as their preferred bidder. KKR’s business model is profiteering, high leverage, low investment, asset stripping and high cash extraction. That will inevitably multiply Thames’s problems. The Water Industry Act 1991 gives the Secretary of State powers to vary the licensing conditions. We need to know precisely what the Government will demand from the new owners of a company that already has 187 criminal convictions.
Regarding the company choosing KKR as its preferred bidder in the ongoing equity raise process, clearly Thames Water is a commercial entity engaged in a public equity raise, and it would therefore be completely inappropriate for the Government to comment on that. However, I note that the company had a number of potential bidders to choose from, which indicates that a market-led solution to the financial resilience of the company is a possibility.
My Lords, does the Minister agree that the Government must protect future bill payers from past mismanagement and a debt that should clearly sit with the vulture funds and bond holders who have in effect asset-stripped Thames Water, leaving it without proper investment and vulnerable to repeated environmental hazards and therefore in strong danger of being in breach of its own statutory duties? Surely the only way to protect those bill payers is by putting it into special administration.
As I am sure the noble Baroness is aware, a special administration order is the mechanism to ensure that the company continues to operate and customers continue to receive their water and wastewater services. However, the bar for entering special administration is understandably high; the law states that it can be initiated only if the company becomes insolvent, can no longer fulfil its statutory duties or seriously breaches an enforcement order, and Thames Water does not fit those criteria, despite all its other problems. All I can say to the noble Baroness is that we are currently monitoring the situation closely.
My Lords, 90% of England’s water and sewerage services are owned by foreign investors. Can the Minister explain why the Government are so happy for that to happen but not happy to allow us to buy our own vital resources back? It seems madness to allow our vital infrastructure to be owned by foreign states.
Obviously, water privatisation happened quite a long time ago now, which was when different foreign states came in and invested in our water system. I am sure the noble Baroness is very aware of the work going on through the Cunliffe review at the moment in order to try to get our water companies into a better state. The Government are very keen that we sort out the problem with Thames Water, but that is Ofwat’s and the company’s responsibility at present and we are just watching to ensure that Thames Water does not fail, because we cannot afford to have water companies failing.
My Lords, can the Minister, in light of the depressing state of British Steel, inform the House whether shareholders from any particular geographies would be excluded from investing in or controlling our water industry?
My Lords, I wonder whether the Minister saw the very shocking two-part documentary series on BBC Two about Thames Water, which was made in conjunction with the Open University. If she has seen it, does she agree that the dire position we face on sewage spills is at least to some extent down to severe regulatory failure, the regulator’s focus on the price charged for water and the apparent complete failure to insist on the massive investment needed to upgrade our water and sewerage infrastructure?
I did watch the programmes. I think the straightforward answer to this is that that is why we have Sir Jon Cunliffe carrying out the review, which will look very carefully at the way the water industry has been regulated. One of the things that came across from that programme was the argument that it had been carrying out what Ofwat had asked it to do, which was keep prices low, and because of that there was not sufficient investment. We can look at that in more detail and I am sure that different water companies have interpreted rules from Ofwat in different ways. But the important thing is that we now look very carefully at regulation to make sure that in future it is fit for purpose and we do not end up in situations like we are in at the moment.
My Lords, the Minister has reminded us that privatisation of the water industry was quite some time ago. I wonder whether she could dig into the archives to check exactly how much was received by the Exchequer at the time of privatisation and, by way of comparison, find a figure for the total amount of profits made by these companies since privatisation.