drought that never dried

It's no wonder the British have such a strongly developed sense of irony.

A couple of weeks back the water company where I live (and several others in the South and South East) declared a hose pipe ban.  Their reason for doing so was that it has been very dry over the last few years and, indeed, we were officially in drought.

Since then, of course, it has rained every single day.  And I don't mean that as an exaggeration - every day for the last couple of weeks we've had some rain.

Now don't get me wrong - I know this relatively short spell of wet weather (April Showers have really been living up to their name) is not enough to completely negate what have been a reasonably dry few years.  However, it is quite ironic that as soon as a drought is declared and a hose pipe ban goes into effect it starts raining.

Of course there's also the issue of leaks.  The record of the water companies is generally appalling on the leaks front.  Any small saving you personally can make is dwarfed by the amount of water that gets pissed away in leaks every single hour.  Of course there's a cumulative effect of us all saving a bit, but still, even a small amount of Google searching will bring up some eye watering (heh) stats.

But for me the whole thing is much more fundamental than that.

Our water industry is privatised (as, indeed, are most all of our utilities).  Now obviously if it were nationalised we would still also pay for the water, but with it being nationalised, surely these companies are under a different type of obligation to us, because we're now customers.

If you went to a shop and tried to buy some clothes you wouldn't expect them to only sell you half a pair of trousers because you were only allowed a certain amount of cloth.  If they did that you'd go elsewhere.

But to me that's a ridiculous notion for the utilities - it still comes out of the same pipe or down the same wire.  There may be a different person you're paying, but it's still coming from the same place.  To use the shop analogy it'd be like going up to a different sales assistant and now they're going to sell you exactly the same thing, but they're going to charge you a different amount of money, or they're going to put slightly different restrictions on the length of the trousers you're going to buy or when you can wear them.

It's a ridiculous situation.

I've also never had much truck with this notion that private companies are more efficient simply by virtue of needing to turn a profit.  It's a ridiculous and patently untrue notion.

Companies being driven by profit can just as equally lead to fraud, deceit, cost-cutting (as in the worst kind - skimping on safety, for example)