This blew up. And I think it's fair to say it touched a nerve. The comments I've had are mostly split between two answers… either wipe out the shareholders, or nationalise the whole thing. Or both. And the belief is that the problem is then solved. It isn't. Here's why… A quick point before I jump in. This looks like a Thames Water story, but in reality, Thames is just the first to hit the wall where everyone can see it. What follows is about all of it. First, I think we need to be clear on how this whole thing works. Ofwat has no money. All Ofwat does is decide how much the water company is allowed to charge you and exert influence over how the money is spent. So when we talk about investment in the industry, what we're really talking about is the water bills that are paid by you. There's no other pot of money here that can be dipped into other than what the government may provide in subsidies. Every 5 years, Ofwat sets the bills and then the companies propose what they'll do with the money. In the last cycle, the companies were allowed to increase your bills and charge you for replacing 0.4% of the water mains per year, which would mean our national water infrastructure would be fully replaced over 250 years. However, they only managed to replace at a rate of 0.14% per year, which is a full replacement period of 700 years. Or to put it another way, a period that takes us back to a time before the printing press existed. Those figures come from the NAO. So the companies increased your bills to pay for replacement water infrastructure, that they only delivered about a third of. Now, the hard-money, free-market side of me wants to say this is what price-fixing always does. When you set a central cap on what a company can charge, you distort every decision it makes. But that isn't the system we have. We don't have a free market in water, because you can't. Nobody's laying a rival set of pipes to your house, so you're stuck with the one option you have in front of you. What we've built instead is the worst of both worlds… a private monopoly with all the profit motive of a business, sitting behind a price cap which has none of the discipline of competition. So the incentive isn't to serve the customer, because the customer can't leave, they're captive. And it isn't to invest for the long term, because like our electoral cycle, the cap resets every five years. So the incentive is to spend as little as you can get away with on the things nobody can see, and take the difference out now before inflation eats it away. Which is the story here. That's the design of the system. Now this is where it gets serious, and is why this bill is coming your way, one way or another. The NAO says £290bn is needed in investment to improve our water infrastructure by 2050, just to hit the government's targets. That's on top of day to day running costs, which are spiralling. Ofwat estimates another £52bn is needed for reservoirs and major supply projects. The government accepted the £290bn figure in its White Paper back in February, so these figures aren't in any sort of dispute. And this is where the £104bn figure you might have seen quoted comes in. That's the number the industry keeps waving around as proof they're finally investing in the infrastructure that we so badly need replaced. This is the five-year settlement Ofwat signed off in 2024 to start delivering new reservoirs, less leakage, and fewer sewage spills. This is why your bill is rising 36% this decade. You're paying for it, because there is no one else. But when we set it against that £290bn, it's barely a third of what's needed by 2050. So this isn't the whole fix. In fact, it's just a first instalment. And it only exists because your bills went up to cover it. So this is where you'll feel the sting, and it's a nasty one. You've already paid for the pipes once, and you got a third of what you were charged for. Now the investment needed is four times what it was, and you'll be told to be grateful for it when you receive the bill. So back to where we started… wipe out the shareholders, their stake is worthless anyway. Give the bondholders a haircut. Nationalise the whole thing. Do all of it. Now, before anyone tells me ownership is the answer, take a look at Wales. Welsh Water has had no shareholders since 2001. To be precise, it's not nationalised… it's a private not-for-profit, so there are no dividends, no extraction, and nobody creaming anything off the top. It's the exact experiment half my comments are asking for, and it's been running for 25 years. And the result? It was bought with £1.9bn of borrowed money, that debt has been rolling ever since, and researchers at Greenwich University found it still loses 41% of every bill to finance costs… the same as Thames. Welsh customers took the largest single bill rise in the sector last year, and are projected to end up with the highest bills in England and Wales. If you take away the greed, but keep the same structure, you get the same outcome. The reality is... not one of the options proposed in the comments of the original post puts a single pipe in the ground, which is what all this is really about. The massive black hole is still there. It's £290bn deep. And as I'm sure you're beginning to realise, it can only be paid for by you… through your bills, through increased taxation, or worse… through the continued decay and disintegration of our water infrastructure.