Been swimming in Langstone Harbour recently?

[Kelpie]

My father worked for the council waterboard and the subsequent quango which replaced it. Some of the stories he brought home during the transition were quite eye opening.
E.g. private sector management were brought in from the retail sector. They had a mantra that anything that sat on a shelf in stores for six months should be thrown away. So loads of valves, couplings, etc from Victorian era cast iron water mains went in the skip. The kind of thing that would be prohibitively expensive to have made nowadays. Now when a repair has to be made, the cast iron section must be cut out completely and everything done in plastic. A much bigger and more expensive job. And all for what? To clear some shelf space.

Private sector does not automatically mean efficient. There's a happy medium somewhere between a total lack of accountability and a smothering blanket of procedures. But I think the idea that privatising something is so vastly more efficient that it allows profits to be siphoned away is deeply flawed.

 

[lustyd]

We don't have infrastructure issues or housing problems, we have a population issue, and the pension/GDP ponzi scheme is the reason it's being ignored.

 

[Mark-1]

Indeed
Eg On the east side of Chichester for example
Soggy soggy land , drainage rerouting , fields and fields full of new curb appeal housing , all plumbed onto .. the existing drains

Crackers Squared ?

And the new parking controls in Chi this year have created an epidemic of people paving their front gardens for parking. (I'm one of them.)

 

[doris]

We don't have infrastructure issues or housing problems, we have a population issue, and the pension/GDP ponzi scheme is the reason it's being ignored.

I agree about population applying to housing but even with 20 million dead the roads and everything still need replacing, just fewer to pay for it.

 

[lustyd]

Ah but we'd need fewer roads and they'd wear more slowly so...still a population issue.

 

[oldharry]

There's no deckchairs in Langstone... but an awful lot of stools

...your taking the p+ss now!

 

[Stemar]

Back in the nineties the chairman of Southern Water had a Sigma 41 called Sunbeat. I knew him reasonable well and chatted about the whole privatisation issue.

Under public ownership the whole industry was like British Leyland and unbelievably badly managed. Yes I know lots of you will say, 'He would say that', but the experience of public sector management does rather prove the point. Eg DVLA and HMRC plus plenty others at the current time.

[Content removed]

Drainage is just one problem. Motorways, bridges, flyovers, the national grid, broadband etc etc. but we have to have ever increasing standards of living and comfort without paying a true cost.
Just wait until the penny finally drops on the pension demographics.

I do so wish I could prove you wrong, but...

[Content removed to reflect edited quoted content]

we have to have ever increasing standards of living and comfort without paying a true cost.
Sooner or later, and probably sooner rather than later, we're going to end up paying. From a selfish point of view, I probably won't see the excrement /fan interface., but my kids will. If they've decided they don't want to bring children into the world to face it, I really can't blame them.

 

[Blueboatman]

Actually this ‘centralised expenditure, got to state own or greed-drive it’ credo may be getting a bit marginalised by latter day tech .
I think
And things are moving fast .
Just as Elon Musks relatively affordable home battery banks make dependency on an expanded national not an absolute given,
And heat pumps ease demand on gas networks
And -as I outlined above -domestic water arrangements ease the demand for purified mains water and storm surge rated drainage
And the past 18months of enforced ramped up home deliveries and home working arrangements have reduced the ‘given’ of a car or two on the drive or the street for every household ..

.. then one might argue that the population is actually taking a degree of responsibility and expectation away from an overburdened state-run-but-inefficient or a devised-for-profit
Infrastructure based network ..
And choice is good, healthy , right ??
Time will, as ever, tell
But encouraging self help is probably a whole lot healthier than fatalism or extrapolating a future as a derivative of what has gone wrong up to now !

 

[dom]

But encouraging self help is probably a whole lot healthier than fatalism or extrapolating a future as a derivative of what has gone wrong up to now !

Totally agree!

 

[Forum Admin Team]

Thread closed for review.

Some content has been edited.

 

[FinesseChris]

Parliament only got to grips with building an effective , sealed , London sewer system ( Bazelgette et al ) when the great summer stench of the Thames made the Houses of Parliament untenable
Go figure
THATS how things get moved up the agenda ?

So who has got the courage to load a slurry tanker full of er sewage onto a lighter, tow it under Westminster Bridge at high water, and open the taps..... Choose a warm day.

 

[dom]

So who has got the courage to load a slurry tanker full of er sewage onto a lighter, tow it under Westminster Bridge at high water, and open the taps..... Choose a warm day.

Lol!
Just write your will first in case the anti-terrorist units there don’t immediately recognise it’s a political protest!

 

[Blueboatman]

So who has got the courage to load a slurry tanker full of er sewage onto a lighter, tow it under Westminster Bridge at high water, and open the taps..... Choose a warm day.

Who has courage ?
Recklessness perhaps

eco driven youngsters come to mind for a start
Remember those boat in the road protests ??

 

[Blueboatman]

Dear Mods
Delighted to see this thread reopened after review, for intelligent contribution , it is a subject very close to our nautical interest after all
Hooray ??

 

[RivalRedwing]

So who has got the courage to load a slurry tanker full of er sewage onto a lighter, tow it under Westminster Bridge at high water, and open the taps..... Choose a warm day.

with a transfer hose to a fireboat pump might be a way to attract the attention of those on the terrace bar

 

[RivalRedwing]

Meanwhile, in Essex:
Manningtree wild swimmers stage River Stour sewage protest

 

[penfold]

Every county in the West has unbelievably huge infrastructure issues at the moment and the population/electorate does not want to admit to them.

It's not the electorate's job to manage or plan infrastructure.

...your taking the p+ss now!

Are we just going through the motions?

 

[wombat88]

This all came up on 'Have I got news for you' last night. Consensus was that it is cheaper for the water companies to pay the fines and keep paying the fines than to improve their infrastructure. I can imagine it is so.

However my dentist tells me that all Southern Water's directors should be tried and sentenced to prison in a cell with a bucket.

 

[penfold]

The dutch have similar problems to deal with; certainly in urban areas they have constructed very large surge chambers to take the water which arrives suddenly, then once the deluge abates they are pumped out. In our case this would be via the treatment plants. Given perverse or vague regulatory targets commerce will do what it is obliged to do legally, which is make money for shareholders; what laws have SW's directors broken?

 

[ianat182]

I suggest that part of the planning permission and funding of the considerable infrastructures i.e. sewage/adequate proper drainage- even if separate from existing- should be borne by those developers that want to build 1000's of new houses without any consideration for this by the Local Planners being given . No doubt it sounds simplistic but surely they too are making millions
from these developments. The development of the Welborne area is a case in point .

ianat182