Following the ongoing issues with water outages across Godalming, Guildford and surrounding villages, Green councillors and members were disappointed to see Thames Water and both MPs for the area fail to attend a meeting convened by Waverley Borough Council to discuss the outages.
Greens had been calling for an inquiry alongside our WBC coalition partners since the early days of the most recent Thames Water failure. Surrey County Council repeatedly refused to declare a Critical Incident, significantly delaying the response from Thames that - when it came - was confused, uncommunicative, and wholly inadequate.
Cllr Clare Weightman, Deputy Leader of Godalming Town Council, spoke for many local residents with a passionate and highly critical look not just at the latest failures, but also the culture of failure that privatisation and cuts to regulators has caused over the past 30 years.
Residents present agreed with Cllr Steve Williams, who said "an excellent meeting on the water outage this evening organised by Waverley Borough Council - but shameful that Thames Water refused to attend". One Conservative councillor tried to claim WBC had made the meeting 'political' by not holding it at a time when Thames could attend - but as was noted at the meeting, there was plenty of notice given. Could not one of the 7000+ employees make a weekday at 7pm?
As mentioned by another speaker shortly after, another meeting next week in Guildford - which Thames Water and the area's MPs have said they will attend - is being held on a weekday at 5.15pm, and will only hear a pre-selected set of questions and comments. That conveniently means anybody who works a standard day will be unable to attend, let alone have their voice heard...
Greens in Guildford and Waverley will continue to push for a full investigation into exactly what went wrong in November, why it happened, and why the response was so poor. We continue to hear more stories from residents who were abandoned without water even on the Priority Register - leaving elderly and disabled residents reliant on town councillors, who drove round the borough long past midnight throughout the outages dropping water which should have been organised by Thames.
Of course, the ultimate cause of these failures - and countless others, from rampant sewage dumping to asset stripping to shareholder siphoning off billions of pounds while infrastructure crumbles - is privatisation, backed up by a government determined to cut regulations and hamstring regulators to ensure private profits.
Yet it is still ONLY the Green Party who is committed to renationalising our water, to run this vital public service for the public good rather than private profit. Tinkering around the edges is simply not good enough - if water is in private pockets, the priority will always be to increase profits for shareholders, whether that's through dumping sewage, cutting jobs, failing to maintain infrastructure, or piling up dangerous levels of debt.
