Anne (Anne Thormey - primary proponent arguing we should pay for water)

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547 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 14 Jul

Anne (Anne Thormey - primary proponent arguing we should pay for water)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Liveline · "We don't seem to want to pay for necessary things" · 14 Jul 2026 podcast

They paid themselves a 20% increase for the CEOs last year as well.

And then on top of that, their upgrade hasn't been any better than ours in all of that time.

So we won't get the upgrades we're looking for.

But what did happen was that one of the water companies went away and instead of actually paying for the kind of basic service maintenance that they do have to do, instead of paying for it out of the actual profit, the money they're collecting from English people, which is a lot of money by the way, the bills are high there,

What they did was they actually put that they used debt.

So they loaded the companies with so much debt that Thames Water nearly fell over.

And the government had to intervene to make new rules limiting the amount of debt that companies are allowed to load water companies.

And the reason that they were able to get that much lending from the banks, if you like, is because they are a water company and because people can't say no to this.

Nothing that you can't say no to.

should ever be privatised.

And the other thing is, we need to look to the future.

So the English thing has been a debacle.

Someone mentioned France.

I don't know if somebody wasn't up to date, but Paris recently had to actually bring back their service into public hands because there was nobody doing maintenance, people were taking profits off the system, nobody was putting the money back into the... Companies who are private are not... Their remit is not to do maintenance for the good of the people.

Can I just make one more point there?

So there was that, but in other countries where they've gotten charges and have pledged privatisation and such, what's happened is that there's a guy in the States at the moment being sued for collecting rainwater, and people in Bolivia, when they did it, the companies who were making profits were allowed to influence local legislation, and they got legislation put in which you can't collect rainwater, you could be arrested.

That happened in Bolivia, and water prices were unlimited there, and that was an extreme case, right?

But those are the sorts of dangers you're looking at now.

We're already paying for it.

Irish Water has done a good job, apparently, according to people on, which I appreciate.

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