Thames Water has willingly documented its dysfunctionality
What were Thames Water bosses thinking when they decided to allow a film crew to track them as the company went down the toilet?
That’s surely the question that BBC viewers are asking after watching Thames Water: Inside The Crisis.
The company is best known for flushing millions of tonnes of raw sewage into the rivers it is supposed to protect, and for wasting billions of litres of drinking water every year through pipe leaks.
And, of course, it is an infamous example of how privatisation made shareholders rich while destroying public utilities.
But somehow Thames Water’s directors thought the two‑part documentary might be a “good bit of PR”. Maybe it could show them in a different, more positive light.
Early on, the fly-on-the-wall-style documentary introduces us to chief executive Chris Weston and his “head of comms” Caroline Murdoch.
Rarely have I seen people in real life who mirror the exaggerated characters in the satirical dramas The Thick Of It and W1A. But the jolly and ruddy-faced Weston—straight out of the army and into the boardroom—is a classic of the genre.
As the company’s debt and environmental crises grow, he broadcasts to all the firm’s employees telling them to “ignore the noise” and carry on the fight. It’s a speech he probably imagines himself making to British troops waiting for rescue in Dunkirk in 1940.
Weston’s schtick is essentially, “I’m new here, so don’t blame me for what happened in the past. In fact, don’t even ask me about the past.” Meanwhile Murdoch, who thought the documentary might endear Weston to the public, is talking plainly to the camera.
“No one comes to work to put shit in rivers,” she says, but offers no explanation as to why senior management are doing just that.
Thames was responsible for almost 300,000 hours of raw sewage pouring into our waterways last year alone. And, while the boardroom is a cringe-fest that you sometimes have to watch through your fingers, the opposite is true of the story down at the sewage works.
In Mogden, known as “The Beast”, what is left of the Thames workforce is battling against the tide.
The 1930s-built site is the third largest centre for treating wastewater in Britain, serving around 2.1 million people and covering 140 acres of outer south London. But years of cuts, lack of investment, and an overworked plant means The Beast is on its knees.
It is unable to cope with even a couple of consecutive weeks of rain before spilling its guts into the River Thames. Yet the only people to come out of the documentary well are the workers there.
They talk knowledgeably about how forward planning and investment could have prevented disaster. And they recount how round after round of cuts dwindled their numbers down to just a few.
“They were allowed to do what they did, so they did it,” says one, referring to the years of shareholders demanding higher dividends instead of investment.
When Weston broadcasts the “good news” that the banks have extended Thames’s “credit runway”, the sewage plant workers know it’s all shit.
Everyone knows that adding another £3 billion to the debt pile, via an emergency loan at rates that would make a credit card boss blush, is not the solution. And soon the talk is about how thirty years ago, when the most experienced of them started, Mogden was a dirty job but one they had some pride in.
One worker explains that he felt valued, even if “poo is not everyone’s cup of tea”.
Today, they say, they dare not even wear their Thames Water-embossed fleeces off the premises out of fear that the angry public will accost them.
That’s a travesty. If there are any heroes in this documentary, its surely them.
- Thames Water: Inside The Crisis is available on BBC iPlayer
