Roll a one and a six in Monopoly, land on Water Works, buy it and get yourself a nice little earner. That’s what happened for real in 1989, when shares of the newly privatised water and sewerage companies appreciated 40 per cent on their first day. It wasn’t long before smaller shareholders sold out to big investors, who gained actual monopolies over the most precious resource of all. Along with privatisation, a regulatory framework was put in place, supposedly to ensure investment in infrastructure, water quality and a fair price. But while over 50 million people in England and Wales are supplied with water – subject of course to those dreaded hosepipe bans – bills have since risen by 40 per cent. Worse, because of a lack of investment in sewerage treatment, a tenfold increase in spills means only fourteen per cent of our rivers have “good ecological status”. Meanwhile the monopolists are wildly profiting, having paid themselves an estimated £72bn in dividends since 1989, while leaving some companies on the verge of collapse from debt. Back in the fifteenth century, piped water in England and Wales was only available to small numbers of people; it took another three centuries to reach most of the population. And it wasn’t always so centralised: in 1946, no less than a thousand bodies were responsible for water distribution, while 1,400 dealt with sewerage, organised under an Act of Parliament, but operated by local authorities. Water companies and ministers often claim “water quality is better than at any time since the Industrial Revolution.” That’s difficult to prove, and hardly the yardstick: industrialisation saw a massive increase in untreated run-offs. As one CEO recently stated, “it’s easy to forget how bad things were.” While most of us now support renationalisation, it’s not clear this would improve things, either for taxpayers or the environment. What is certain is that while the regulator Ofwat is no toothless tiger, it refuses to use its teeth. Sadly, by opposing a recent Lords’ amendment requiring water companies to report publicly on spills, this government shows it has no plans to change.