Hi Nick, here is an exert from the email I sent my MP yesterday, I worked for 20yrs in the water industry (5yrs for SES and 15yrs for Thames) from the late 80s to the late noughties. I worked throughout the privatisation period, and was part of many changes and improvements made
"My experience is that the industry has been wholly dishonest since @1995 when all obvious savings were exhausted. The industry plays cat and mouse with the regulator, choosing to pay fines because it is cheaper than providing long term solutions. Risk assessments are carried out on 1 in 5 or 1 in 10yr drought events, so the companies know that they need to plan for these, but they don't. Maintenance procedures and standby capacity has been consistently reduced for cost saving purposes. Companies such as Thames Water report their own figures such as leakage to OFWAT and they are routinely misrepresented. This manipulation was so bad at Thames that we needed to create an entirely different system for calculating London's demand as the official system was rigged to the extent it did not represent the true numbers.
In truth some of the smaller companies such as SES Water are a lot more honest as these were never part of the privatization process as they have always been private companies."
You may also be interested to know that there has always been private water companies in the UK, here is a list of them:
Affinity Water
Bournemouth Water
Bristol Water
Cambridge Water Company
Cholderton and District Water Company
Essex and Suffolk Water
Hartlepool Water
Portsmouth Water
SES Water
South East Water
South Staffordshire Water