Channel 4’s Dirty Business is a clarion call to nationalise the water industry | Water

There’s a moment in Channel 4 drama Dirty Business where Julie Maughan holds the body of her dead child and lets out an anguished cry. It’s as brutal as it is convincing.

Her daughter Heather, aged eight, had just died in hospital, two weeks after playing in the sea on Dawlish Warren beach in Devon, where she contracted E.coli O157, a bug originating from raw sewage. She became ill, suffering from diarrhea and bleeding. Transferred to Bristol Children’s Hospital, her parents agreed to turn off her life support machine after she suffered kidney failure and brain damage.

The cause of his infection was not identified and a jury ultimately returned a verdict of misadventure. At his inquest, the coroner made calls for action to tackle sewage pollution on England’s beaches.

It’s a shocking scene from the drama broadcast on Monday, which expertly guides the viewer through what its writer and director, Joe Bullman, believes is the biggest corporate scandal in British history.

The shock was compounded by Heather’s death in 1999, ten years after Margaret Thatcher privatized the water sector, promising increased investment, greater efficiency, lower consumer bills and better service.

Yet today, 27 years after Heather’s death, as the Guardian revealed, the privatized water industry is owned by a mix of private hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds and pension funds. Sewage pollution is at record levels, businesses are drowning in debts of £60 billion, built up in part to pay shareholder dividends of £78 billion, and infrastructure is left to rot.

In the late 90s, when Heather died, Surfers Against Sewage was fighting to clean up Britain’s seas, which water companies were polluting with hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage a day in what was called ‘pump and dump’.

Surfers, who frequently paddled in gas masks through feces, condoms and sanitary products, made T-shirts reading “sick of being sick” and adopted combative tactics to take on the water industry.

Improvements were gradually made with the adoption of the European Urban Wastewater Directive, which introduced comprehensive treatment of wastewater around the coasts of England and Wales.

Rivers, however, were not part of the cleanup. Raw sewage has continued to flow into once-crystalline chalk streams, mighty tidal rivers and local waterways in the decades since the EU directive came into force.

When the Guardian began exposing the shocking state of England’s rivers as a result of sewage pollution, the response from the regulator, the Environment Agency, was: “Well, no one swims in the rivers.” »

Not to mention the deliberate disregard for wildlife and habitats in and around our rivers, the apathy was astonishing.

Just like in the 90s, it took local campaigners and campaigners who saw clear evidence that water companies were treating rivers like open sewers to force the EA, the water industry regulator, Ofwat, and politicians, to take note of the evidence they were uncovering.

Two of these activists – Peter Hammond, a retired professor of computational biology, and Ash Smith, a retired police detective – carry the Dirty Business narrative.

Faced with an alarming decline in fish numbers in their local river, the Windrush in Witney, Oxfordshire, the pair embark on some detective work.

This leads them into the dark depths of Thames Water’s decades-long failure to invest in its treatment plants, pipes and pumping stations. It takes them into the heart of Westminster with evidence that illegal sewage discharges were at least 10 times higher than the regulator thought, and to the High Court where they are fighting for the public to have a say over the future of troubled Thames Water.

Today, they are still fighting.

With Thames Water on the brink of financial collapse, Hammond and Smith are pushing, alongside other campaigners, for the company to be placed into special administration, a form of temporary public control.

But Labor government ministers have so far refused to take this step. Instead, their vision for water in a draft white paper prefers to rely – as previous governments have done – on private equity and foreign investors to get Thames and other businesses out of the mess they find themselves in.

Desperate not to scare off the private sector, ministers are seriously considering allowing companies such as Thames – which was fined £104m for sewage dumping last year – to be exempt from future fines for polluting our seas and rivers, citing the need to give stability to investors.

One definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. But for Heather’s mother, Hammond, Smith and the other tenacious activists the Guardian has worked with who are not mentioned in the drama, the madness must stop.

“It’s our water industry, we pay the bills,” said Chris Hinds, the founder of Surfers Against Sewage, who supported Julie 27 years ago. “The pursuit of profit on our water must stop. It must become public property again.”