Making water a Statutory set of regional monopolies leads to high prices, poor service and shortage of supply. Competition is the best regulator. The competitive bread industry has expanded to meet the demand of 10 m more people living here. Let’s do the same with water. Too many tell me water is a natural monopoly…
Making water a Statutory set of regional monopolies leads to high prices, poor service and shortage of supply. Competition is the best regulator. The competitive bread industry has expanded to meet the demand of 10 m more people living here. Let’s do the same with water.
Too many tell me water is a natural monopoly because you only have one water pipe into a house. Funny that. Most of us have gas heating or cookers. We only have one gas pipe . We can choose from a variety of gas suppliers competing for our business, using that single pipe.
We used to have just one copper cable into our homes to receive a phone service from a poor monopoly supplier. When the monopoly was removed by Parliament some competitors offered to put a better quality higher capacity cable in for us to improve the service. We also started buying phones that worked on wifi.
There can be no downside to lifting water monopolies. In the unlikely event that water is a natural monopoly nothing would happen. In practice as with gas and telecoms lifting the monopoly would give us choice, more supply and lower prices. It could lead to bigger better changes to be discussed another day.
