Thames Water creditors confronted with alternative plan to dreadful bailout

Today, campaigners from We Own It and Surfers Against Sewage doorstepped the creditors pushing a £3 billion bailout deal of Thames Water that could cost households £250 a year.

Together, we presented the popular alternative: government control through special administration and a change of ownership.

Stopping the Thames Water bailout deal doesn’t just matter for local water bill payers. It could set a dangerous precedent for the whole country.

Time is running out to stop the latest disastrous attempt to rescue Thatcher’s privatisation experiment.

The UK’s largest privatised utility, Thames Water, is effectively insolvent. It cannot pay its debts and its shareholders have walked away claiming the firm is “uninvestable.”

What should happen next is simple: it should fall into administration (specifically “special” administration) and then pass into public hands. We’ve set out how that would work in our blog HERE.

But the big banks and hedge funds who own its debts know they’ll be forced to take losses if that happens. They don’t want to lose a buck, even if it meant lower bills and cleaner rivers.

So they’re using an obscure piece of legislation to try to prevent any chance that the firm falls into public ownership. It’s called a “restructuring plan” and would see:

Creditors loan an additional £3 billion to the firm at effectively a 20% return.

• The equivalent of £250 from every household, every year, to pay it off.
• The creditors pushing the deal take control of seats on the company board, while the workers and users are left with no direct control over the business.
• A two-year extension to other debt repayments to stave off nationalisation and prioritise payments to the powerful creditors behind the deal over more “junior” creditors.
• The creditors behind the deal put themselves first in the queue for money from the firm if it has further restructuring or goes bust.

No private utility has ever done this before. If successful, it could set a trend for failed private firms to make the public bail them out, instead of being nationalised for free.

We’re asking everyone, no matter where they live in the country, to support our campaign to stop this bailout by signing our petition to bring Thames into public hands HERE.

The deal has to be signed off through a High Court process. Campaigners across the country are mobilising to stop it:

1. We protested outside the “convening hearing” that started the process off in December.
2. We doorstepped the creditors today as they voted through their plans in London.
3. Campaigners have won the unprecedented victory of being allowed to address the High Court’s decision-making hearing in early February.

YOU can help make the case to the Judge at the final hearing on February 3rd. We’re hosting a protest outside the hearing.

• At 11am, we will gather at the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand;
• At 11.15am, we will match to the Rolls Building where the hearing will be taking place.

Please let us know if you can join by registering on Eventbrite. Getting an accurate figure of how many people will turn up helps us get more press coverage lined up.