I am proud to sign We Own It‘s pledge supporting the permanent public ownership of Thames Water. 40 years of water privatisation have been an abject failure, draining investment from the system, loading companies with debt and leaving us with sewage-filled waterways.

Shareholders got rich whilst we got rinsed. Despite having the resources to pay £78bn to shareholders since 1990, water companies are now collapsing under the weight of their own failures and are looking to us to bail them out.

Thames Water, which supplies our water, is looking to increase bills by 53% by the end of the decade. Thames is the canary in the coalmine; its financial precarity so dire that the government is now considering taking it into special administration, a form of temporary public ownership.

Restoring it into public ownership only to return it to private hands at a later date would be a missed opportunity. This would mean bailing out a broken model, allowing the extractive cycle of dividends and pollution to continue and then having to deal with the same issue again further down the line.

We need water back in public ownership so we can pump the money we spend on bills back into the system we all rely on, keeping bills down and investing in the infrastructure we need in a time of increasing climate breakdown.