Let Thames Water fail and take into public ownership, says Green Party peer

With Thames Water shareholders failing to put in additional funds to deliver the investment needed to meet environment standards and fix the long term problems of leaks, Baroness Jenny Jones has suggested that the company should be allowed to fail, so that it can be taken into public ownership "on the cheap." 

Baroness Jones said:

"People are already floating the idea of temporary nationalisation, but we should be discussing long term public ownership to deliver a long term investment programme. All politicians of all political parties must question and reject their ideological belief in water privatisation, it has failed. Once free of that ideological straight jacket, then when the water companies say we will go bankrupt, we say, that's fine and we buy them on the cheap."

The water companies had the public money to invest and failed. Shareholders have paid out over fifty six billion pounds to shareholders since privatisation, which is roughly the same amount of money we need to spend in the next decade to fix the broken sewage system. Either they can do what they were paid to do already, or they can go bankrupt and we can buy them."