Thames Tideway Tunnel was justified by a model which is so flawed that OFWAT fined Thames Water £86m last year. Based on actual readings of Dissolved Oxygen the Thames would comply now, except that TW have recently started pumping more sewage into the Thames to ‘prove’ that the Tideway Tunnel is necessary.
So reverting to normal operation and reality, the Thames Tideway now complies with the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive and the Water Framework Directive.
So why does the Government not apply to the European Commission to have the infraction judgement set aside, and save itself and TW customers some £4 bn and a lot of local hassle?
Maybe because the bankers would not like losing the opportunity to make a few millions on creating and implementing a very complex and unnecessary financial structure. Forget the 12m Thames Water customers who will pay £80 per year for perhaps 50 years!
.xt151122 TTT modelling spill frequency 22.11.15
I still don’t understand how it’s considered fair that Thames Water “customers” have to pay for this. I don’t live in London, but I just happen to be in the Thames Water area. I have no choice about that. I receive no benefit from this tunnel being constructed. Surely it’s either for Londoners (in which case they should pay) or it’s of national importance and everyone should pay?
I can usually see the merits both of nationalised and privatised utilities. At least I can change my electricity provider if I’m unhappy. But these local water monopolies are a joke. Private companies that their “customers” have absolutely no choice about buying from. Either open them up to competition, or nationalise them!
Not so much that the Canary Island will be causing a hugest tsunami, but that “if” the much bigger Iceland volcano
plus perhaps Yellowstone
blow(s) –
setting off also the chain of volcanoes across north Russia –
what sort of “share” would you just-outside-of-the-Tideway Tunnel have then ?
[There’s a ‘caveat’ excluding such repartee as
“Once we’re all drowning we’re all in this together anyway”].
Otherwise ‘though your ‘micro-economic’ argument is shipshape, sound as a bell, ‘fair-dinkum’
– and I support it !
Tell me, Jonathan, why are the so called competing companies, who are now called privatised, not paying for their own investment? The investment here being public but the profit from that invested being private. What a clever game they have going and we, who foot the bill, just keep paying more and more for less.
Which of course is why these so called ‘companies’ want to take over the NHS. Same game. We want your money but are not offering any kind of genuine service for it. Tax payers must learn that paying dividends to so called private concerns does not save anyone a penny. It simply depletes the service and reduces the funding to a piece its original objective.
What is the UK’s Longest-Term Strategy ?
21st century British governments have forsaken Strategy unifying, and “farmed out” such strategising to the array of Civil Service Chiefs,
whose separate but invariably conflicting Individual-Chief;s Policies quickly came to be expected to serve as Britain’s Overall Strategy;
without even the PM coordinating them and compatibilising usd with the “Rest of the World”.
That appears to be still the Case,
made up ‘though of how many small-c cases ?
– such as the Thames Tideway Tunnel [to focus on just one].
————
Most astronomers surely have the “mind-capacity” to more-or-less “grasp” our interstellar future Dimensions, even in millions of Light-Years ;
so why so abysmally less mind-functionally capable of,
and willing to skill-up into,
the vital longest-term human-and-Earth-lifesupports Needs
Planning Capability,
are our dominating governance chiefs ?
and our bottom-to-top connecting channels democracy controllers and facilitators ?
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