It takes a considerable amount of effort from the very well remunerated PR people of the UK’s nine largest water companies to pull this kind of thing together.
Water UK want you to know they’re sorry. They’re sorry, specifically, for pumping the seas and the rivers full of human shit. No one told them it was wrong. They really didn’t think you’d mind. But now that such a fuss has been made – now there are giant algal blooms invading, say, Lake Windermere – they realise that maybe they shouldn’t have done it.
When the TV news began to feature interviews with exasperated parents on holiday in Devon, having a picnic on the beach and trying to stop their toddlers from running into the sea right next to a sign warning them it’s just been flooded with raw sewage, it was then that they realised something was maybe going wrong.
Actually, no. It wasn’t even then. Yesterday’s big mea culpa was a lot more than a mea culpa. The “We’re sorry, we’re sorry, we’re so so sorry” part also came with a promise to “invest £10bn” in reducing sewage overflows. And, slightly further down, it came with a promise to raise your bills to pay for it.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der May 19, 2023-Ausgabe von The Independent.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der May 19, 2023-Ausgabe von The Independent.
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