| Topic: | Re:Re:Facts | |
| Posted by: | Phil Andrews | |
| Date/Time: | 16/08/11 19:48:00 |
| Dawn Morally it is certainly their responsibility but Thames Water has always put the interests of its shareholders first, and naturally those interests involve spending as little money as possible and evading their duty of care when they can. Even when some money was spent, to little avail, Thames obtained permission from the regulator OFWAT to raise that money by increasing the charge it makes to its customers. In other words we, the victims, had to pay to remedy the environmental nuisance that Thames had been inflicting upon us! In the event, having raised the money from the customer Thames spent some of it on improvements and then pocketed the rest. Incredibly, this was not unlawful. The council could and should take a much more robust approach but historically has failed to do so. Senior officers at the authority in particular seem hell bent on doing as little as possible to challenge Thames and have preferred to treat campaigning residents as the enemy instead. Previous Labour administrations did not, in my view, do anything like enough to help residents but we are particularly angry with the Tories because we were in coalition with them and, having secured our support for their own policy objectives, they then turned and stabbed us in the back, basically because they were less concerned about upsetting us than they were about losing the goodwill of their chief officers, some of whom spent the last year of the coalition administration agitating like men demented to minimise in practical terms the ICG influence within the administration. This is not about party politics, and your own preference for the Conservatives as a party should not blind you to the betrayal of our local community that took place on this one isolated issue. Their crime was a combination of wilful ignorance on the Mogden issue coupled with self-interest in not wanting to jeopardise their good relationship with chief officers over a matter that in the wider scheme of things did not really concern them very much. The chief officers played them like a violin, even producing a feature in the publicly-funded HM Magazine in which the Conservative case was argued against the ICG's case (remember this was supposed to be a coalition administration). When I asked the then Chief Executive to discipline the officer responsible he wouldn't, and probably couldn't as I suspect he was actually the instigator of the article. As for the Chief Exec himself, he was pretty much untouchable as he had just announced his impending retirement. What had in my view been a very good relationship between the coalition partners hitherto never recovered from this incident and as a consequence Labour may well be running the London Borough of Hounslow for the rest of your life and mine, as an overall Conservative majority is unlikely in Hounslow and no minority group or party is likely to trust them again. The best we can do right now is to maintain a strong, independent presence within the community and try to influence the Labour administration where necessary through calm and friendly persuasion. Fortunately the councillors we have seem quite amenable to this approach. |