The Role of Regulators in Privatizing Water

I don't think the government ever really convinced people of the case for privatizing water, because there's no competition in the water industry you have to take from whatever is the provider. I do think there's a really interesting question about what the regulators regard as in scope and not in scope. The interesting thing about water is that there's a totally different model for water supply in each of the four nations of the UK. So it's quite interesting we do have this sort of almost natural experiment going on of water across the country. It does seem that the model in England is leaving everybody very dissatisfied... We've got a sort of simultaneous corporate collapse and environmental performance collapse," he says.