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When Britain’s water and sewage industry was privatised in 1989, the promise was that private investment would result in a massive expansion of the infrastructure to overcome some of the problems with droughts and leakage that had emerged in the 1970s. The real reason for privatisation – based on the actual outcome – was to fuel the Thatcher government’s addiction to hawking public assets to fund tax cuts and corporate welfare kickbacks to their wealthy supporters. Most obviously, Britain has never had a water grid to allow surplus water in the mountainous, Atlantic-facing west to be pumped to the drought-prone and over-populated southeast. Nor was government in the 1980s prepared to even consider such a network. And the private regional water companies after 1989 had no interest in funding such a large infrastructure project. Indeed, even in the wet – and often flood prone – west, there has been no investment in new reservoirs to capture some of that water, despite a growing risk of drought even in those regions in hot and dry summers such as 2020 and 2025.
It turned out that, even as the privatisation bill was passing through parliament, Britain’s last reservoir was being constructed. The Carsington dam in the Peak district was completed in 1992. But subsequent proposals for new infrastructure have fallen foul of political opposition and restrictive planning regulations, together with the increased cost of construction in a country that has largely forgotten how to build infrastructure.
This is not to suggest that no infrastructure improvements occurred after privatisation. In a monopolistic quasi-market system, even private companies are subject to a degree of state oversight. And regulators had to justify their existence by insisting on a minimum improvement of Britain’s Victorian era water pipes and sewage processing systems. Moreover, European legislation insisted that Britain end its practice of dumping raw sewage into rivers and inshore waters. Much of this improvement though, was funded by a raft of borrowing which has been rolled-over but never repaid ever since. And almost all of the money people paid for their water was doled out as dividends to shareholders. With the result that as the now floundering water companies face liquidation, one way or another, the state will have to step in (even the neoliberals are not so insane as to leave London without water) leaving a beleaguered public to pick up the tab.
Not that water is unique. Privatised rail companies, we were promised, would fund entirely new railway lines as well as reopening stations and redoubling lines that had been victims of the Beeching cuts in the early-1960s. It didn’t really happen… at least, not without massive public funding – mostly for the cheapest form of investment in opening new stations on existing lines. And even where the state has provided funding – most notoriously for HS2 – the UK’s lack of skilled engineers and competent project managers resulted in costs spiralling out of control and projects being axed or curtailed. The proposed electrification of the rail network’s Western Region, for example, now ends at Bristol Parkway and Cardiff – the entire of southwest England and west Wales remaining dependent upon diesel, despite the claimed aim of decarbonising transport.
Similarly, while windfarms are being constructed faster than the grid operator can connect them, baseload and balancing power has fallen to dangerous levels as a result of under investment. The last conventional (combined cycle gas turbine) Carrington power station was completed ten years ago. Since then, the UK has lost 10 coal power stations, three nuclear, and one oil plant. Only five nuclear reactors – the only low carbon source of baseload – are still operating in the UK (two at Heysham 2, two at Totnes, and one at Sizewell B) with another four (two each at Hartlepool and Heysham 1) currently closed for maintenance. A bigger – 3.2GW – and eye-wateringly expensive plant is being constructed at Hinkley C, with a similar plant having just been given the go-ahead at Sizewell C, although these are unlikely to deliver power until sometime in the 2030s. Indeed, there are serious doubts about whether the new nuclear plants can be completed before much of the remaining nuclear fleet has to be retired.
To mid-wit climate activists this doesn’t matter because plenty of “clean” wind turbines and solar panels are being deployed. But to anyone who would quite like for their electrical appliances not to be fried (and perhaps their homes burned down) or would like the wider grid infrastructure not to be destroyed, having a grid that can deliver long-range electricity at a steady frequency, maintaining the inertia that only hydro, fossil fuel and nuclear plants can provide is essential even to today’s level of demand. As we witnessed in Iberia in May, and in the UK in 2019, things get dangerous when there is not enough inertia to go around. And proposed demand is about to skyrocket as the state opens the door to energy-intense AI datacentres even as it coerces millions of households into installing electric heat pumps and millions of drivers into electric cars – the latter leaving the UK with a 60GW deficit.
These high-level failures of privatisation fall into the category I referred to as “Royal Ribbon” issues… Insofar as politicians want to be seen spending public money, they prefer to fund projects that will allow them to stand alongside the King when he cuts the ribbon to formally open the new infrastructure – one reason, perhaps, why the Cameron-Clegg government refused to back new nuclear power stations that would not be completed until long after the public had booted them out of office… something that happened too late to prevent them inflicting dangerous austerity while laying the groundwork for Brexit.
Which, in its way is the hidden bulk of an iceberg that the absence of new royal ribbon projects is merely the tip of. This is most obvious in the state of Britain’s roads, where it is rare to travel more than 100 yards without having to dodge a pothole. In cost-per-mile terms, it is far cheaper to resurface entire roads. But this requires far more funds than Britain’s local authorities have available. And so, instead, we have the far more expensive – and wholly inadequate – subcontracting to men with buckets of asphalt who spend their days filling only those holes that someone else has painted a yellow line around (apparently those proven to seriously injure at least one cyclist). Adding to the cost of this (mal)practice is the compensation bill to insurance companies which successfully sue local authorities when car wheels, axles and suspensions are torn off by potholes that should have been repaired years ago.
This though, is just the most visible part of a generalised crumbling of infrastructure. Get a physical fault on your phone system, and it takes longer for an engineer to find and fix the fault. Same goes for burst water mains and faulty electricity lines. Ageing bridges have been a growing problem in recent years, as future technologies that were hoped would extend lifespans failed to put in an appearance. Public services more generally – those that couldn’t be flogged-off to the highest bidder – have been left in a state of permanent crisis through staff cuts and a lack of building maintenance.
We witnessed a high profile result of this just prior to the 2017 general election, when the National Health Service was struck by a massive “cyber-attack.” But having blamed (as is customary) the Russians, it turned out that it wasn’t an attack at all. Rather, someone within the NHS had opened one of those spam emails that contains a virus that locks computers and demands a bitcoin ransom to release them. And the reason the virus was able to spread across the NHS was, firstly, because a large part of the system was still running Windows 95 and, secondly, that the government had ceased paying Microsoft for security because it was considered too expensive… maintaining your software, it turns out, is as important as maintaining physical infrastructure.
Nor is this limited to the public sector. The banks, famously, depend on software which is ultimately based on obsolete program languages that few software engineers understand. So that, whenever a bank attempts to update its software (usually at the end of the month when people get paid and when direct debits automatically raid people’s bank accounts) the entire system crashes. Less publicly, the ancient software used to balance Britain’s electricity grid is no longer fit for purpose in an age of intermittent energy. As physicist and energy consultant Kathryn Porter explains:
“The software that underpins the balancing mechanism was written in the 1980s and is subject to frequent outages; had there been such an outage on May 29, the control room staff would have had to revert to manually instructing plants by phone, which is hard to do at a rate of 17 per minute. The grid could easily have collapsed, resulting in blackouts.”
This is, of course, one of the unspoken myths about a tech revolution that was mostly consumer-facing. Yes, the advent of the PC, and later the smartphone, the worldwide web and fibre-optic cabling allowed us to do a lot more for a lot less physical effort. But behind the curtain, we remained dependent upon an interconnected web of 1970s technologies that get patched up with the equivalent of string and sticky paper with increasing regularity. Interconnected, because failure in one rapidly infects its neighbour. Mostly out of sight, but occasionally – as we witnessed at Heathrow airport in March – resulting in a crisis of international proportions. In that case, having been forced to rule out the default Russian cyber-attack, ancient infrastructure was cited as the most likely cause. And it turns out that the transformer that caught fire had been listed for maintenance seven years ago!
One reason why we are at increasing risk from crumbling infrastructure (hardware and software) is that maintenance is not really in anyone’s job description. As a BBC docudrama, If… the lights go out, warned twenty years ago, the system of privatisation was primarily focused on the creation of a quasi-market which it was (wrongly) believed would lower energy prices for consumers. Neither the regulator, the government, nor the private billing companies are responsible for keeping the lights on, while the individual generators only supply that which is profitable – high maintenance infrastructure is most often “mothballed” and cannibalised.
Same goes for water and sewage, where the regulator is focussed on (failing to) keep prices low for consumers, with preventing water leaks and raw sewage discharges passed on to state environment agencies that lack the people and funds to be a serious deterrent. Rail is a little different in that the regulator has inherited a greater safety culture while not having to cap rail fares (government fails to do this instead). However, most of its efforts go into the impossible task of generating and maintaining a quasi-market within a monopoly rail infrastructure, so that safety issues are becoming more common. The public sector is in an even worse state because, aside from legal duties to provide education and some health and social care services, most public services are entirely discretionary… which, in an age of austerity, means neglected.
What all of this adds up to, is a situation in which maintaining and plugging the gaps in critical infrastructure is so low on everyone’s priority list that it is de facto someone else’s job and someone else’s problem. And this is toxic to a system which is geared to react only to major emergencies. Thus, for example, while some action will likely follow the transformer fires which crippled Heathrow airport, the broader grid will limp along using outdated equipment and ever longer maintenance scheduling… and will continue to do so until the next major incident – after which, rinse and repeat until national scale operation is no longer possible.
This slow process of attrition is a far more likely trajectory than the sudden crash that so many “doomer” “black pill” types imagine. Sure, the process will be punctuated by some spectacular incidents. And the state will no doubt respond with greater or lesser effect. But, as the surplus energy available to us slumps, and as the (energy) cost of maintaining the system rises, gradually and remorselessly, things that we grew up to take for granted will be going away, with life becoming ever shorter and more brutal.
As you made it to the end…
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