This is another example of how the UK economy seems to work - make a quick, fat profit now, don't invest for a sustainable income in the future.

Totally agreed!

Absolutely.
These utilities are public utilities and should never, ever have been privatised.
You can even make a (good) case that the internet is now a utility, simply because it is so vast, used by some many people and is such an integral feature of modern life.
But privatising water!!! I have no doubt when the solids hit, the taxpayer will be called on, once again, to bail out these companies. The old story of privatizing profit. And socializing the debt. and saying the market is a huge success!!
And the whole thing is now a, further, scam, to support the (fake) climate agenda saying that the waste is being produced by global warming instead of the (discredited) market model model of the water companies where money goes in divis and not infrastructure.

Thames Water paid £ 37 million in dividends in 2022 and £ 33 million in 2021 (Sourced from CityAM)

Economist Richard Murphy (viewed on twitter) concludes:-

[list]
[*]Their operating profit margin is a staggeringly-high 35 per cent. From this, we may conclude that there is no reason for Thames Water to be in danger of insolvency.

[*]Every single penny they have made in profit has been paid out to shareholders in dividends. None was reinvested in infrastructure or equipment (borrowing paid for equipment and the infrastructure was ignored). So Tories like those on the BBC’s Politics Live on June 28 were wrong when they said money has been invested in improving infrastructure. We can’t say they were lying because they may have been misinformed, but someone definitely lied to them.

[*]“The public is being fleeced by these companies who are simply treating the fact that the English consumer has had no choice as to who to buy water from as a means to extract profit from them.”

[*]The industry has made investments – £77bn on equipment, the rest on other financial investments. This has been funded mostly by borrowing, with £13bn coming from shareholders. This means the claim (when water was privatised) that private capital would fund water after privatisation was nonsense gibberish; it is being funded by borrowing.

[*]£13bn invested by shareholders, who have received £25bn in dividends, meaning that for every pound they have put into the industry, they have received nearly two pounds in return.

[*]It is clear that the water companies are environmentally insolvent. This means their business structures are not sustainable in terms of reducing pollution and if they are made to put in the necessary money to do so, they will go bankrupt.[/list]

In very simple terms, this means that because they decided to take their massively-overinflated profits for themselves rather than invest them in improving the sewage system, the water companies and their shareholders have created a problem that will cost you and I £260 billion to solve! - Thank you Thatcher!