Cunliffe’s report on the water industry will make a splash

We live in a deeply polarised, politicised world, where anything from changing rooms to the Motability scheme can be subject to the most extreme invective and propagandised argument. One exception to this is the state of the water industry. This is something that can unite the nation.

- SEAN O'GRADY

We can all now agree - Tim Farron, Nigel Farage, Surfers Against Sewage - that the model introduced when the sector was privatised in 1989 has failed, and that it requires some radical restructuring. Something better needs to be put in place, and it should not make matters even worse by costing the taxpayer billions to bail out the shareholders and bondholders invested in companies such as Thames Water, which has all but gone bust.

Step forward, then, Jon Cunliffe, career civil servant and practical economist, who has produced an excellent report on reforming the industry at minimal cost to the state and maximum cost to those who got us into this mess. This is a fundamental review that should, in truth, have been undertaken decades ago. We should be grateful to environment secretary Steve Reed for commissioning him to do the work, and to Cunliffe himself for completing it so speedily.

Reed yesterday responded to the report with a bold move of his own, announcing plans to abolish water regulator Ofwat in its current form. However, he has not recommended immediate nationalisation of the industry, which has disappointed some, such as the redoubtable Feargal Sharkey, former Undertones frontman turned clean rivers campaigner, who has done more than anyone - sadly, including the politicians – to bring the water companies to account.

Sharkey is so apoplectic about what he sees as the failures of the report - which he views as another missed opportunity - that he has already called for Reed to resign. Meanwhile, the aforementioned Surfers Against Sewage say of Cunliffe’s report, and his 88 recommendations for the government to transform the water industry, that “this is putting lipstick on a pig”. The Labour left, as ever, want water brought back into public ownership immediately.