In December it was announced that water bills will go up a whopping 36% over the next 5 years. With the cost of living a pressing concern and after years of “raw sewage in our rivers” headlines – and with no indication that our water service will become 36% better – that’s a kick in the teeth. It’s about a 6.3% increase each year, significantly enough above inflation. The absurdity of it all does begin to grind.

But it’s not the water companies themselves that set this sum – they actually wanted considerably more. The regulator, Ofwat approved £16bn less than the water companies themselves had collectively asked for, but will still mean an average increase of £94 on water bills over the next five years.

So goes the dance of pricing in natural monopolies: first, the water companies tell their regulatory body how much they’d like to charge based on the investments they will make in the system, their environmental responsibilities, their sense of an acceptable profit, and how much they want to pay in bonuses. Then, the regulatory body decides on the prices it will actually allow. Every 5 years, this cycle happens.

But the water companies (unlike the people who actually have to pay the bills) can appeal. They can ask the Competition and Markets Authority to step in and let them charge more. And last week, as a Valentine’s Day gift to us all, that is what Thames Water promised to do.

But in addition to the water companies themselves and the regulators, there is another character: investors. They clearly found the price hike greater than expected, with shares in the few water companies still listed on the stock exchange jumping higher after the announcement.

This is all pretty weird. The oft-repeated line about US healthcare – that it stands alone among the economies of the Global North in the sheer absurdity of its healthcare system – is equally as true for the England and its privatised water.

According to the market’s own proponents, in order for a price to be set in a market, it must respond to constant feedback. The canonical example, given by Friedrich Hayek, is pencils. How much should a pencil cost? This is not a matter for a committee to decide. It should, instead, cost as much as the market settles on. And this market is not some central thing, but a distributed function across the breadth of society that takes into account the vast, distributed quality of information. Nothing like this is in place for water.

And, as a second stipulation, for the logic of marketisation to make sense on its own terms, it must be driven by competition. If you’re unhappy with your service, you must be able to change provider to someone either offering something else higher quality or cheaper. That is not how it works in the UK. Each water company is a monopoly in its area. Don’t like the service you’re getting? Tough shit. Or liquid shit. Billions of litres of liquid shit.

A broken system

The state of water companies is a potent symbol of Britain’s decline. In 2023 when people were asked in a poll to describe Britain in a single word, “broken” was the most popular choice. The situation is particularly dire with water, from almost all angles: price hikes, enormous piles of debt combined with eye-watering payouts to shareholders, and sewage in the rivers and seas.

Anger has been growing for the past several years, but no single campaign has managed to substantially change the situation. The issue hasn’t burst the pipes of outrage, which is a phrase people use. In part, this was because of the expectation that a new Labour government would be around the corner.

And the vague noises coming from around the corner didn’t sound totally absurd. The manifesto Labour ran on promised to “put failing water companies under special measures to clean up our water.” Sure. In order to do this, they said they would give regulators new powers to “block the payment of bonuses to executives who pollute our waterways and bring criminal charges against persistent law breakers”. I salute. “We will impose automatic and severe fines for wrongdoing and ensure independent monitoring of every outlet.” I’m doing a giddy little dance.

But what comes after something is around the corner? The thing itself, or “Das Ding an Sich” as German philosopher Immanuel Kant called it, although he probably wasn’t thinking about the Starmer government. And now they’re here, the Labour government has decisively rejected the increasingly loud calls for renationalisation of water, arguably the only move that would decisively solve the problems listed above.

No dice. It would be too pricey, they say. Analysis by the Social Market Foundation claimed the renationalisation would cost £90bn, or about £1,300 for everyone in the UK, taxpayer or not. In 2019 the CBI put the cost even higher at £198 billion, or about £245 billion now, which is enough money to get you nearly a whole NHS for a year. On the other hand, the Moody’s rating agency has suggested a much more modest £14.5bn.

But if that still sounds like a little more than you have available right now, how does £0 sound?

That’s the cost that economist Richard Murphy has suggested would actually fall to the Treasury were water to be renationalised. He points out that when a huge wave of nationalisation happened the first time around, in the aftermath of the Second World War, no cash changed hands. Instead, the previous owners of those companies, which included coal, electricity, railways and heavy industries like steel, were paid in bonds. Why not do the same again?

Surely, the current model is unsustainable. The model of private equity – buy low, sell high, and use rents to bump up the price – is the exact opposite of what is required for infrastructure, where you really do need to invest to improve how the service runs.

It’s what academic Kate Bayliss describes as financialisation: rather than trade or commodity production being the source of profits, they increasingly come through financial channels. And they flow to companies that have become dominated by the belief that their central holy task is shareholder value maximisation. That is, before those shareholders move onto the next company from which to extract some money.

These shareholders are, increasingly, vast asset ownership companies such as Blackrock or State Street or Vanguard. They’re mostly (although not always) passive investors who don’t make a lot of decisions but do pretty much own everything. In lots of cases in the asset ownership economy, control and ownership have come apart. This scrambles some of the classical left coordinates of political action. Your struggle is not with those people you work for, or even with the state, but with those people who own (but do not necessarily control) the infrastructure you depend on – infrastructure you can no more withdraw from than you can protest air pollution by refusing to breathe.

Our protests are too wet

We have not yet reckoned fully with how to change such a vast, distant, and abstract system as this in the current era of asset ownership capitalism. But while the terrain of struggle is complex, the strategy of protesters has been uninspiring. Protests so far have made no noticeable difference. And so here we are: rumblings of nationalisation have come to nothing, grumblings in the national press have turned to yesterday’s tiresome complaint. Labour in power has even refused to do what the Truss government, under enormous pressure, agreed to and offer widespread support for bills.

If that fact appears to you like a suddenly remembered dream, you are surely not alone. Yes, in 2022, the Truss government agreed to subsidise energy bills. They did not do so willingly. They were pushed, not least by the enormous success of a campaign called very simply “Don’t Pay”. It promised mass non-payment if something was not done, and urgently, to keep energy bills down. It backed this threat up with a big ticker on its website: counting up to a million sign-ups of people who would agree to stop payments that they often couldn’t afford anyway. Energy company E.ON complained to the government that the campaign was an “existential” threat, and so the Truss government was forced to act.

But there were wider conditions for this moment of surprising largesse. The COVID pandemic had had transformative effects on the public: it created an awareness that the state could actually act to sustain the economy. It made it temporarily possible to understand that models other than the slow abandonment of public services were possible. This is what an activist with Don’t Pay called the pandemic’s effect of “injecting ‘consciousness’ into the system”.

But it is now 2025 and the pandemic feels strangely distant, even as many of its scars remain. The intuitive sense – produced by furlough and support payments, that the state is actually capable of acting – is waning. It is the intention of the Labour government to crush it entirely.

Is there a successor to Don’t Pay on the horizon that could resuscitate this dim memory of possibility? The Take Back Water campaign, launched last year, would certainly like us to think so. It is advocating now for non-payment of water bills, a tactic it describes as designed “to disrupt finances of already vulnerable water companies and undermine investor confidence, while lowering the risk for participants.”

This kind of non-payment campaign has precedent. Famously, thousands refused to pay the Poll Tax, a national campaign that resulted in 20 million people being summoned to court for non-payment and the collapse of the tax. And everyone loves the Poll Tax Riots.

According to More in Common, non-payment remains popular: “47% of the general public think that refusing to pay their bills is an acceptable form of protest against water companies for the sewage crisis.” And unlike with energy bills, the Take Back Water campaign points out, it is illegal for companies to cut off customers’ water services.

An historic opportunity?

Another campaign – the Don’t Pay for Dirty Water campaign, an off-shoot of XR – is pushing not just for nationalisation but also for broader changes. The way we use water more widely, they argue, is frankly bonkers in the era of climate change.

They point out that far beyond just repairing infrastructure as it is, we could have a whole new way of relating to water: grey water systems should be built into new houses so that we’re not literally constantly flushing pristine drinking water down the loo. Housing standards should be improved to make them save water by default.

Don’t Pay for Dirty Water’s suggestions encouraged me to zoom out. As environmentalists first and foremost, they are thinking about the long arc here. This long-term thinking throws up an example from history.

As London industrialised, it radically shifted how it approached water. In 1858, an event known as the Great Stink prompted the commissioning of civil engineer Sir Joseph Bazelgette to build a sewage network to alleviate the problem at a cost of £300million in today’s money, which is still in use today. We are living through our Slightly Lesser Stink.

The Thames itself was once declared “biologically dead”. For almost 70km of the river running through the capital, not a single fish was recorded in the 1950s.

But then it sprung back to life through the powers of regulation, London’s deindustrialisation and technical innovations like the “Thames bubbler”, which oxygenates the water so it can sustain fish. It is now one of the cleanest rivers running through a city in the world. Sometimes, there are seahorses. There’s no reason why the water service that bears its name shouldn’t undergo a similar revival.

We once radically changed how we related to water. We could do so again.