Yorkshire Water dumps sewage while customers pay more - Andy Brown

Nor will they find it easy to forgive the decision to do very similar damage to the Calder where there were 4,045 different releases of untreated sewage. Or the 2,099 releases into the Ouse.

The weather in Britain varies and different parts of the country experience more extreme conditions than others. But Yorkshire is on the drier side of the Pennines so there is little excuse for its water company having three of the top ten most sewage polluted rivers in the country.

When the water utilities were privatised we were told that it was an unavoidable measure because it was the only way to get investment into the industry that would properly modernise the network and it would give us an efficient reliable service freed up for them bureaucratic inefficiencies of the public service.

That privatisation took place in 1989. That means that organisations like Yorkshire Water have had over 30 years to fix the system. They don’t seem to be moving with quite the degree of efficiency that was promised.

When it comes to chalking up profits and paying out bonuses to Executives they are doing rather better. In 2022 profits were up to £242.3 million. They paid out £3 million in bonuses to Executives.

Revenue increased by £17.4 million to £1,118 million largely because of what the company called “allowed inflationary price increases and changes in consumption”.

That is an interesting turn of phrase. Those of us who have no choice other than to pay our bill to this monopoly supplier might interpret it slightly differently. They put their prices up by enough to increase profits at a time when many of us were suffering from serious pressures on our standard of living.

Those customers might like to know that the government is at least taking some action to put an end to routine releases of sewage into rivers that our children paddle in and our anglers would like to see running clear and clean.

They might be less pleased to know that the action was to vote down a bill that would have placed a legal duty on water companies to make improvements to their sewerage systems and demonstrate progressive reductions in the harm caused by discharges of untreated sewage.

The list of MPs who voted against that included a number of Yorkshire MPs who represent constituencies where the sewage is being released into rivers. Such as Julian Smith who is supposed to look after residents living alongside the freshly polluted Aire.

To give the government its due it did pass new targets. They weakened the rules we inherited from the EU and set a goal of reducing phosphates in rivers by 80 per cent by 2038.

Thirty years of private monopolies running these services hasn’t helped the country to sort out its water systems it has simply given a financial incentive to go for the cheaper option of dumping sewage into the rivers their customers live close to. Those companies will now be given another 25 years to see if they can sort out the mess that has resulted.

I have never been someone who believed in wholesale nationalisation. I think that when it comes to decisions about private or public ownership Deng Xiaoping, the former Chinese leader, had it right. It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice. Sometimes the private sector works well and sometimes the public sector does. It all depends on the circumstances.

It isn’t immediately obvious that putting a service that will always be a monopoly into private hands has been a success. Instead of getting marked improvements in efficiencies all I have noticed as a customer has been a steady increase in my hefty bills.

If this colour of cat isn’t catching mice then perhaps the time has come to try a different shade of mouser and face the reality that there can never be efficient competition in the supply of water. It needs to be treated as a public service that is in public ownership where the profits are used to improve the service instead of to pay hefty bonuses for letting down the community.

Most of the readers of this column will have no choice other than to pay their bill to Yorkshire Water. I’ve been dutifully doing so on time for 28 years.

We are entitled to ask some very sharp questions about what exactly we are getting back for our enforced loyalty. Because right now it seems that the service includes dumping some very unpleasant things into our neighbourhoods. Thanks to our government and the local MPs who prop it up that shameful practice is planned to continue for another 25 years.

- Andy Brown is a Craven District councillor for the Green Party.