A former water company boss has been handed a £270k bonus despite a parasite outbreak that sickened more than 140 people and caused a public health scandal.
Susan Davy stepped down as chief executive of Pennon, the group that owns South West Water, last year. She received the six-figure sum despite the board initially deciding to withhold the bonus following a public outcry.
South West Water pumped drinking water to thousands of homes in Devon containing cryptosporidium, a microscopic parasite that causes a highly infectious gastrointestinal illness.
The outbreak in May 2024 impa…
I don’t think it’s possible to hold bosses to account by looking at atomised things like “something bad went wrong but they got a bonus.” You need far more information than that.
Were you representative of a typical customer of your water company, or did you get unlucky? How was the water company in the article on leaks over the relevant period - did they improve them or not? What about their prices?
It’s important to realise that, in the UK, we have been fleeced by water companies. Note the perfect tense: have been. They already did it. We’re not being fucked, it happened in the past. The people responsible are in Australia, laughing at us. The infrastructure is now broken, and the money that was supposed to prevent it breaking is being used to buy yachts. The question now is, how are we, the people who have been fucked, going to pay for that, and how are we going to prevent it from happening again? Roughly speaking, we can:
Both are hugely unpopular. What we cannot do is:
That is the fundamental thing, not bonuses. Not paying out bonuses won’t fix the water system. It won’t bring your bills down (not measurably, anyway), or fix leaks, or prevent sewage discharges. Bonuses should be paid out based on sensible targets being delivered, with a suitable way to deter short-term decision making (such as clawbacks). They shouldn’t be at the whim of “something went wrong and the overall system is shit, so fuck 'em”.
I’m not sure if you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years but I’m far from being the only one experiencing this type of service from water (and other monopolies, too). But you recognise that we’ve been “fleeced” so I guess you have some awareness.
We need a political and economic system where people are ACCOUNTABLE. Politicians who lie or carry out policies to enrich themselves or their associates at the detriment of others or businessmen who run utility companies need to face legal and financial redress. Not only should the CEO of Southern Water (for example) lose his bonus but he shoudl be personally fined for the chronic lack of water in parts of Kent in the recent months that have adversely affected people’s lives (to the point of illness and death in the cases of the elderly people without water during an intensely hot 3 days).
We need a return to the types of progressive tax regimes that existed between roughly 1945 and 1970 when the burden of taxation genuinely fell on the shoulders of those who could afford it. Tax the richest and use it to bring utilities back into common ownership. We don’t need CEOs on £3.3 million; we need well-paid engineers and on-the-ground hands-on managers who can run them effectively in our interests. The neoliberal koolaid has been drunk by so many that it’s hard to get most people to realise there are alternatives to targets and incentives and bonuses.
“Something went wrong” with the system they’re ultimately responsible for, the system that they’ve stripped to the bone in search of growth in a saturated naturally monopolistic market.
Loss of bonuses should be the least of their fucking worries. -.-
The headline isn’t “Susan Davy to get bonus in spite of having stripped Southwest Water to the bone and taken on massive debt to pay dividends to shareholders”. She started in 2023, after the water companies were stripped to the bone and went into massive debt for exactly that purpose.
I think you’re mad because someone ought to pay, and so you want this person to pay, whether she was responsible for the thing you’re mad about or not. I’m mad about it too, but that’s not fair.
She willingly took on responsibility for the shitshow, risk/reward. She happens to be holding the bag when the music is stopping, I couldn’t care less how long she personally has been in the role.
It’s not like this class of people works harder than others, so that massive fucking pay packet has to be for something. I assume it’s for the risk of taking on the responsibility.
So you would say let’s just not pay CEOs of failing water companies much until those companies improve? It’s not like the “music is stopping” specifically now - all these companies are in bad situations with many problems going back years. This sounds like a recipe for, as soon as a company develops serious problems, running that company hard into the ground as they can’t find anyone competent to manage it.
If this were about executive pay in general then sure, let’s cap it compared to worker pay. But there is nothing special about the scenario of a company doing badly: if you specifically reduce executive pay for those companies, executives won’t work for them. Who knows, maybe worker committees will work this time.
There’s no evidence that paying CEOs huge sums means you get better leaders. Independent analysts have said for a number of years that the pay of CEOs has fallen out of alignment with the market. There have been recent reports of CEOs receiving bonuses of millions even though the performance of their company has declined under their tenure.
Evidence for what? I don’t think you understand what I’m saying because you seem to be talking about something I already agreed with and asking me for evidence.