About the author

Stanley Root taught English and Maths for seven years at a comprehensive school in the East End of London, before joining Coopers & Lybrand in Manchester where he qualified as a Chartered Accountant. In 1990, after teaching a short course in International Financial Reporting Standards in Leningrad, he moved with C&L to Moscow and worked there for them for the next 23 years.

While in Russia he married Vera, had three beautiful daughters, learnt Russian and became an audit partner working with large Russian manufacturing companies. During that time, he witnessed an ambitious experiment to convert Russia to a market economy through privatisation. State owned apartments and shares in state owned enterprises were sold to ordinary citizens in the hope of developing a property-owning and share-owning democracy. But it led to unintended consequences. Shares were rapidly sold off for a quick profit by ordinary citizens and scooped up by a handful of entrepreneurs. Soon large privatised Russian enterprises were in the hands of a small group of rich and powerful businesspeople.

When Stanley retired in 2013, he and Vera went to live for seven years in one of the most beautiful places in Europe, by the shores of Lake Annecy. While there Stanley discovered that the lake had a history no less remarkable than its beauty. 80 years ago, it was slowly suffocating from sewage pollution, when one local doctor sounded the alarm and launched a decades-long campaign to safeguard the lake. It was, arguably, the first significant, successful, comprehensive, citizen-led environmental campaign in history, well before the establishment of the modern environmental movement or the  recognition of the global threat to water systems posed by eutrophication.  Stanley was inspired to work with SILA, the municipal organization that managed the lake, to write a blog setting out this history for the first time in English.

Four years ago, Stanley and Vera came back to live in Oxford to care for his parents. While there, by chance, he came across another citizen-led local campaign against sewage pollution in the rivers and lakes of England. He could see that public awareness of the environmental issues had been effectively raised by these campaigners, but the financial side of things seemed cloudier. Advocates for the industry pointed to the £ billions they were investing in infrastructure while campaigners complained about the £ billions  paid in dividends. This argument seemed stuck in a loop, while the real questions remained unanswered. Were the £ billions spent on infrastructure sufficient? Were the £ billions paid in dividends excessive?

This website is Stanley’s attempt to answer these questions. The business of managing water supply to the nation is pretty much as complicated as it gets, from an engineering and financial perspective, and the author has nothing but admiration for all those thousands of staff, engineers and financial specialists working honestly at these companies to deliver the best service they can. At the same time something appears to be not quite right. By the late 1980s England and Welsh water authorities were mired in debt and sewage pollution had reached unacceptable levels – perhaps best highlighted by the imminent asphyxiation through eutrophication of Lake Windermere. The solution was to be Privatisation.  And for the last 35 years privatised companies have celebrated  in the pages of their annual reports, their endless achievements, which have in turn been endorsed by both the economic and environmental regulators.

And yet, after 35 years of uninterrupted progress, the industry appears once again mired in debt and sewage pollution has reached unacceptable levels. How can this be?  When it comes to understanding the financial history that has led to this, there is an enormous asymmetry of information. The water companies, their accountants, consultants, advisors, and bankers have all the financial information on their side while campaigners have far less to go on. Just as when the tobacco industry, with all the scientific and medical knowledge on their side, challenged campaigners to prove that smoking was damaging to health.

The author has no simple solution for the future management of the water industry. He hopes, however, that opening the financial history of the industry to public scrutiny, and the wiser insights of those better placed to understand it, can lead to learning  lessons of the past. While this work is still very much in progress, the first lesson appears to be that the promises of privatisation have proved false, despite their constant repetition in public debate, even today, as though self-evident truths. He hopes that better understanding may lead to the industry being placed on a firmer foundation for the future. One that works not for the short-term interests of a handful of powerful, remote institutions, but for the long-term interests of the millions of its customers who depend on it for their daily supply of water, and upon whom it depends, in the long term, for its daily supply of cash.