Three letters responding to Will Hutton and Andy Haldane's proposal for "public-benefit companies" reveal a striking consensus: England's privatised water model is broken. The disagreement is over what replaces it. Roger Read, former secretary general of Metrex, argues the Hutton-Haldane halfway house — still companies, but with a public-interest constitution — misses the point entirely. Utilities are not businesses. They are essential public services with social and environmental responsibilities that the profit motive structurally cannot meet. His example is sharp: urban rainwater collection for cooling and wildfire control has been normal practice in southern Europe for millennia, but no private company will build that infrastructure because there is no margin in it. Read's alternative is regional governance modelled on pre-devolution Scotland, where regions held coordinated responsibility for water, sewerage, transport, planning, and economic development. He notes the current government is edging toward this through metro mayors and joint working, but without formalising the powers, resources, or portfolio. The implication is clear: England's water crisis is a governance crisis, not a regulatory one. Sally Thompson of Cardiff lands the cleanest punch: England and Chile are the only countries on earth with wholly privatised water industries. The Hutton-Haldane piece, she argues, compares the current mess to cherry-picked failures of postwar nationalisation rather than to the obvious comparator — the publicly owned systems that existed before privatisation and that still function across most of the developed world. Ian Graham of Port Carlisle offers a third path: force all essential-service operators to list on the London Stock Exchange, then legislate maximum yields and permitted borrowing for each sector. This keeps private capital in the system but caps extraction through hard statutory limits. The public, he argues, would invest in such companies just as they currently invest in National Grid. What unites these positions is the diagnosis: the current model extracts value from a captive public, loads debt onto essential infrastructure, and cannot meet its environmental or social obligations. Where they split is on the ownership question. Read wants full public control through regional government. Thompson implies public ownership by international comparison. Graham wants regulated private ownership with statutory extraction caps. The absence in all three letters — and in the original Hutton-Haldane piece — is any reckoning with the transition costs. If English water companies' liabilities exceed their asset values, as Read suggests, then the question of who absorbs those losses during any ownership transition is the real political landmine. Nationalisation at book value means taxpayers inherit the debt. Letting companies fail means creditors take the hit, but also risks service disruption. The "public-benefit company" model Hutton and Haldane propose may be less about optimal governance and more about avoiding that reckoning. The deeper pattern here is familiar across UK infrastructure: privatisation created a one-way extraction valve. Profits flowed to shareholders and debt loaded onto the balance sheet while physical assets degraded. Reversing that flow — under any ownership model — requires someone to pay for three decades of underinvestment. The debate over public vs private is, in part, a debate over who holds that bill.
