A Meter On The Common Wealth

Paul Knaggs writes:

There is a sentence buried in the schedule of an obscure 1971 statute that deserves to be read aloud in every school in England. It repealed the Charter of the Forest of 1217, the document that had told the Crown, in plain and binding terms, that the forests, the rivers and the common land of this island belonged to the people who lived on it. The charter had survived on the statute book for seven hundred and fifty four years, longer than any other law in English history. It survived the Tudors. It survived the Civil War. It survived two world wars. It did not survive Edward Heath’s government, which struck it down in the summer of 1971, eighteen years before Margaret Thatcher put England’s water up for sale.

That is not a coincidence worth glossing over. It is the hinge on which this whole story turns. The Charter of the Forest was sealed alongside Magna Carta in the reign of a child king, and where Magna Carta protected the barons, the Forest Charter protected everyone else: the freeman’s right to graze his animals on common land, to gather fuel from the woods, to draw his subsistence from ground that answered to no lord. It even reached, in its modest way, toward women’s rights: its provisions coincided with a widow’s recognised right to a means of subsistence and to refuse a forced remarriage, a small but real advance in an age when a woman’s person was routinely treated as property to be disposed of.

Parliament’s own historians note that the deep green of the Commons benches, the colour the Chamber has kept since at least the seventeenth century, echoes the colour of pasture and village green: the colour, in other words, of the common man, set against the red of the Lords and the Crown. The building itself still carries the memory of what was won in 1217, even after the law that won it was quietly buried.

Because buried it was. When Heath’s government abolished what remained of the charter, it did so as a piece of statute law tidying, a Law Commission recommendation to strip out defunct royal prerogatives over wild creatures and forest law. Nobody stood at the despatch box and announced the end of the commoner’s right to the land. But intent is not the same as consequence, and the consequence is there in the historical record for anyone to read: the last legal echo of the idea that England’s natural wealth belonged collectively to its people was struck from the statute book in the same decade that a different idea, that everything held in common was really just an asset waiting to be sold, began its long march through British politics.

The economist Guy Standing, in the lecture that gives this argument its clearest modern shape, counts five kinds of common wealth: the natural commons of land, air and water, the social commons of housing and health, the civil commons of courts and rights, the cultural commons of art and memory, and the knowledge commons of science and ideas. Since 1980, he argues, all five have been enclosed, sold off, or simply starved by neglect. The rain that once fell on land held in trust for everyone now falls on assets held in trust for shareholders. His book, Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth, is more than worth the read.

This is not new. It is the oldest fight in English history, and it follows a shape the economic historian Karl Polanyi described eighty years ago in his book The Great Transformation. Polanyi watched market logic tear land, labour and money out of the social relationships that had once bound them and turn each into a commodity to be bought, sold and speculated upon: a process he called disembedding. He also noticed something else, that disembedding never goes unanswered forever. Sooner or later, society pushes back and tries to reclaim what was taken. Every generation refights the same battle because every generation’s elites try the same trick again, dressed in the fashion of their age. In the thirteenth century, it was royal forests. In the twentieth it was the assets of the welfare state. Today, it is the water in your taps and the rain falling on a Highland mountainside, and the question is whether this generation intends to push back or simply watch.

Here is what the taking looks like when you put a number on it. Since Thatcher’s government privatised the water industry in 1989, the population of England and Wales has grown by more than ten million people, and not one major reservoir has been completed in England since Carsington opened in Derbyshire in 1992. The companies that inherited a debt-free public asset have since loaded it with roughly £60 billion of borrowing while paying out some £78 billion in dividends, much of it to owners who have never set foot in the towns whose water they now own.

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They did not simply fail to build. They sold what previous generations had already built for them. A GMB union investigation published in 2022 found that water companies in England and Wales had sold off at least 35 former reservoirs since 2017, pocketing at least £26 million between them, while opening exactly two new facilities in the same period: a storm tank in Preston and a contact tank in Oswestry. Andy Prendergast, the union’s national officer, made the point that matters most to anyone who has watched a river turn brown after heavy rain: these reservoirs were built with public money, and losing their spare capacity means less room to store sewage before it is dumped.

Now watch the same trick being played again, dressed up this time as the solution. Thames Water, which has not completed a reservoir since the 1970s, is nominally the company behind the largest reservoir scheme proposed in Britain in half a century: a site near Abingdon in Oxfordshire, rebranded this year from the clinical acronym SESRO to the more marketable White Horse Reservoir. But Thames Water is not actually building it. Under the regulator’s own framework, a separate Infrastructure Provider will be brought in to finance and construct the scheme, while Thames Water keeps only the day-to-day running of it once it opens.

The estimated cost has already trebled during design, from an initial £2.2 billion to a range of £5.5 to £7.5 billion, and in January this year the company issued a £5.7 billion tender for a main works contractor, close to the top of that revised range. Running costs on top of the build, Thames Water’s own figures show, will add a further £1.9 billion over the reservoir’s first sixty five years, all of it recovered from customers of Thames Water, Affinity Water and Southern Water through their bills, with completion not expected before 2040. A failed company hands the job to a fresh financier, and the public pays the debt for a reservoir it will never own, for the better part of a lifetime, before a single fresh idea has been proven to work any better than the one it replaced.

To their credit, the defenders of this arrangement do not rely on nonsense. They will tell you, correctly, that environmental and planning law has tightened enormously since the great reservoir building era of the 1960s and 70s, and that any builder, public or private, now faces years of habitats scrutiny that simply did not exist then. They will point to schemes like Coire Glas in Scotland, which come with a cap and floor mechanism limiting the return investors can earn, so that excess profit flows back to consumers rather than into private pockets indefinitely.

Both points are true, and neither survives contact with what is actually happening on the ground. Planning law binds a public builder exactly as it binds a private one; it is an argument about how long permission takes, not about who should own the asset once permission is granted. And the claim that private capital spares the public purse collapses the moment you look at how these projects are financed. White Horse Reservoir is being paid for through customer bills, whichever company’s name sits on the paperwork. The cap and floor mechanism underwriting Coire Glas guarantees its private developer a minimum revenue at public expense before a single turbine turns. The public is already carrying the financing risk in full. The only thing we are not doing is owning what that risk buys.

Britain does not need to imagine the alternative, because it built one once, within living memory, in the harshest conditions the state has ever faced. In 1943, in the middle of a world war, Tom Johnston, the Labour Secretary of State for Scotland in Churchill’s wartime coalition, forced through the creation of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board over the objections of landowners, sporting estates and coal interests who had blocked every private hydro scheme proposed in the Highlands for a decade. Johnston wrote into the founding Act that ordinary consumers came first, and that profits from power sold south would fund the economic and social improvement of the Highlands themselves. When the Board began, fewer than one in a hundred Highland homes outside the main settlements had mains electricity. By 1963, nine in ten did. It is remembered as power from the glens, and it was public, and for the length of a working life, it worked.

Then, in 1990, it was sold. Its assets floated on the stock exchange the following year, merged with an English utility in 1998, and exist today as SSE plc. And here the story closes its loop in a way that ought to make every reader’s stomach turn. SSE is the developer behind Coire Glas, a scheme to pump water five hundred metres up a Highland mountainside and store enough energy to power close to five million homes for a day and a half. A second scheme nearby, Earba, will store even more, and it is being built by Gilkes Energy on the land of the Ardverikie Estate, a private Highland sporting estate. The rain that falls freely on common mountains will be captured behind privately financed dams on private land and sold back to the rest of us at a price the government itself has agreed to guarantee.

The frustrating truth is that the tool to do this differently already exists. Great British Energy was established by Act of Parliament with the explicit legal power to develop, invest in, own, build and operate clean energy projects, in exactly those words. Nothing in law stops it becoming the Hydro Board of this century. One year into its life, its proudest achievements are solar panels fitted to schools and hospitals: worthwhile, and nowhere near the scale its founding legislation allows. Of its £8.3 billion budget, £2.5 billion has already been diverted to a separate nuclear programme with Rolls-Royce, money that will not now be spent building or owning a single reservoir or storage scheme of its own. Set that figure beside the £5.5 to £7.5 billion now earmarked for White Horse Reservoir alone, a single privately financed scheme, and the scale of what has been signed away comes into focus.

There is a straightforward test for whether any politician promising public control of water or energy actually means it, and this publication applied it to Andy Burnham’s devolution proposals not long ago. Does the plan involve the state owning the finished asset, the way Johnston’s Board owned its dams, or does it involve the state guaranteeing someone else’s return while that someone else keeps the deed. The water and energy sector is where the answer is easiest to check, because the guarantees are written into public documents for anyone to read.

There is a case for public investment that goes beyond fairness, and it is worth making plainly, because it happens to be true. A country that builds its own water security and generates its own power, rather than begging a foreign market for both, is a country that can plan with confidence instead of nursing a permanent overdraft. Britain spent the middle of the twentieth century proving that a state which builds for its own people, rather than merely for the shareholders passing through, ends up with both the infrastructure and the self belief that draws in everything else. We chose to stop proving it in 1989. Nothing about geography or economics forces us to keep making that choice now.

The Charter of 1217 said the common wealth of this land belonged to the people who lived on it. In 1826, a young and then unknown Benjamin Disraeli put words in the mouth of a character in his first novel that he would spend the rest of his career trying to live up to: that all power is a trust, that we are accountable for its exercise, that from the people, and for the people, all springs, and all must exist.

It is a promise that government draws its authority from the people and must exercise it for their benefit. Every generation since the moot beneath the oak tree has had to relearn that lesson against people who profit from us forgetting it. This generation’s lesson is written in rainfall over Highland glens and in reservoir basins across the English lowlands, in a feasibility report that proves the ground is ready and a Parliament that has not yet found the will to use it.

A phrase has been circulating since 2016, when the World Economic Forum published an essay by the Danish MP Ida Auken, imagining a city in 2030 where nobody owns a house, a car or an appliance, and calls itself happy about it. Auken has since said it was only a thought experiment, not a prediction and certainly not a plan. But nobody at Davos needed to issue instructions. The work was already underway: the steady transfer of what people once owned together into assets they must rent, finance or buy back from private interests. One reservoir, one hydro dam, one water bill at a time, Britain is being dispossessed without debate and without consent. You will own nothing. They will own what you cannot live without. Try to be happy.

The rain will keep falling whether we act or not. The question is who will own it when it reaches the ground: the people whose country it sustains, or the interests that have learned to put a meter on the common wealth and sell it back to us.