Rebuild The Capacity To Coordinate

Yet more Blairites’ remorse from The Guardian:

The future of electric cars arrived this week in China. The world’s biggest car seller, BYD, unveiled a new battery giving its latest electric models more than 600 miles of range. Remarkably, the Chinese motor-maker said 250 miles of range could be injected into its new batteries in just five minutes. If true, the last remaining advantages of petrol cars – long range and quick refuelling – are beginning to disappear.

But such technology requires megawatt charging points. A single charger can draw as much power as a small town in Britain. BYD’s system relies on chargers delivering around 1.5 megawatts of electricity – more than four times the fastest chargers in the UK. China is moving fast, planning thousands of megawatt charging stations within two years.

Britain, by contrast, would struggle to support such a network today. Without upgrades to substations and local networks, the system could not handle the power spikes created by ultra-fast EV charging. This country’s electricity responsibilities are split across many bodies and firms. Improvements are slow and difficult, especially compared with China’s state-directed grid investment. The Chinese model resembles in some ways Britain’s postwar electricity system.

Under the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), as the economic historian Arthur Downing points out, generation, transmission and system operation were integrated within a single organisation that planned the network. Large power stations were linked by a national grid and run as one system, delivering decades of efficiency gains and falling electricity prices.

Electricity abundance in Britain did not emerge because the state withdrew. It emerged because the state created institutions capable of coordinating a complex industry. Britain built its first national electricity grid in seven years. Today some transmission projects take double that just to get planning approval and grid connection. Building the infrastructure for the low-carbon transition requires institutional capacity – not simply deregulation.

Seen by Margaret Thatcher as a relic, the CEGB was broken up and privatised in 1989. Labour warned that prices would rise. They did. The “privatisation premium”, according to an analysis by the Common Wealth thinktank, sees almost a quarter of the average household energy bill – roughly £450 – flow today into corporate profits. Other essential services are similarly hit. Nearly 30% of a water bill in the English privatised system goes to shareholder returns and paying debt. By contrast, publicly owned Scottish Water spends 10% of revenue on borrowing costs.

These costs are not primarily the price of pipes, power stations or grids. They reflect financing and ownership. Public utilities borrowed close to the government rate. Private firms must also reward shareholders – raising the cost of capital that lands up in household bills. Over 30 to 40 years, the cost difference adds up to billions.

Privatisation fragmented Britain’s electricity system, replacing integrated planning with firms, regulators and markets. Yet infrastructure networks depend on knowledge built over decades by engineers in laboratories and operators. When those institutions disappear, much of that capability disappears with them. Britain now faces a choice: rebuild the capacity to coordinate the grid – or watch technologies like BYD’s arrive elsewhere.

While the far from Blairite Rod Liddle writes:

Nothing is real until it’s been fictionalised on TV, preferably with Toby Jones in a starring role. Appalling injustices occur and we read about them — but are somehow incapable of assimilating them until they have been anointed by the producers, rendered into amenable portions, daubed with a little glitz and humour and then piped directly into our skulls via the idiot box in the corner. So it was with ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office — a scandal which had been well known for the best part of a decade but only took on a resonance once it had been made into a docudrama, with Toby Jones’s character ruined and threatened and bullied and then at last triumphant.

I’m not sure why we are roused to indignation only when the subject, whatever it is, has received the imprimatur of light-emitting diodes. A feeling of impotence? That we have no agency in this stuff we read about every day, or see reported, baldly, as “news”? That getting oneself worked up is futile? And then suddenly the issue is transformed for us, as Toby Jones stands with a beaming smile on that lunar everyman’s face, and the thing becomes real, because it has been fictionalised.

You may hope that Channel 4’s excellent docudrama Dirty Business can rouse the same sort of public furore as Mr Bates vs the Post Office, even though Toby Jones isn’t in it. The scandal, after all, is far graver — “almost so awful that people think you’re exaggerating”, as the real-life subject of the films, a retired detective called Ash Smith, told me. Smith and his friend Peter Hammond, a professor of computational biology, had been puzzled by why their local river — the Windrush, in the Cotswolds — was perennially filthy and devoid of fish.

What they discovered, using techniques from their professional lives (yes, only in the Cotswolds!) and the help of an anonymous whistleblower, astonished them: sewage dump followed by sewage dump followed by sewage dump: all the live-long hours. Day in, day out, excrement was pumped straight into this rather fey, bijou little chalk stream.

But of course it didn’t stop there. For the Windrush, read just about every river in the UK. And what Smith and Hammond met, as their investigations progressed, was another wall of noisome effluent from the water companies and even the quasi-government body whose job it is to protect us from the water companies, the Environment Agency: obfuscation, dissembling, denials, obstruction and, they believe, downright lying. A whole industry exploiting one of our natural resources, its statutory responsibilities replaced by venality and deceit. On a national scale. For decades, since the hugely ill-advised privatisation.

Now, I dare say you knew most of this anyway, or could have guessed — and yet like me you still cleave to the view, resignedly, that nothing really can be done. This is simply how it is. Rapacious companies maximising their profits, like the Australian Macquarie group, which owned the basket case Thames Water. It’s simply a function of capitalism.

Smith and Hammond beg to differ and through their campaigning group Wasp have urged criminal prosecutions against all of them, all the companies which have failed to invest in infrastructure and have dumped sewage in our waterways with the kind of louche abandon with which a dog defecates in the street. The rationale is simple. The companies are making money from what look like criminal activities. All of the water companies have a statutory requirement to see that sewage is not dumped illegally into our waterways. But some of them seem to dump sewage rather than pay for the infrastructure to be improved, thus saving themselves millions of pounds. They are making money from this behaviour. QED.

This seems fair enough to me. All the more so when you examine the wages of the chief executives and the grotesque transgressions which took place on their watch and notice that there is no correlation between the two. Does the following not nip at your sinuses, get your goat?

Let’s start with South West Water. Chief executive: Susan Davy, paid £803,000 in 2024-25. Number of monitored sewage dumps in our rivers in 2024, 56,173, lasting a total 544,439 hours. Yay, way to go, Susie. But perhaps Susie is envious of the outgoing Severn Water boss, Liz Garfield who trousered a magnificent £3.268 million in 2024-25, having presided over 62,085 sewage dumps in 2024. Hell, maybe there is a correlation regarding pay and environmental catastrophe. Yorkshire Water? Its boss is Nicola Shaw, who got by on a meagre £689,000 in 2024-25 whose company was responsible for 68,164 sewage dumps in 2024 alone. Is she paid ten quid a dump? What’s the deal there? I could go on and on, down through the list of them. But I’d rather we just sent round the rozzers. Maybe not as many as were sent to arrest the man formerly known as Prince Andrew. One or two would probably do the job.

You know it’s a scandal, and so do I. We know this asset-stripping management of our natural resources has to stop. You’ve seen the film and the thing has been made real. So, how about we prosecute — and then renationalise?