Tone deaf utility bosses get usual reward for failure

A year ago Severn Trent boss Liv Garfield sent her fellow utility bosses a chirpy Friday night email.

In her self-described “sensitive” and “highly confidential” note, she suggested the other bosses – supposedly, remember, in deep competition with each other – gang up to fend off the threat of nationalisation from a new Labour government.

Raw sewage was already leaking everywhere at this point, but Garfield’s focus was plainly on protecting the status quo than cleaning up her own mess.

You can see why. Last month it emerged she was paid £3.18 million for her work for her shareholders. The rest of us? Innocent bystanders in a shower of sludge.

In the past five years, Garfield has pocketed nearly £16 million, an amount that suggests business genius, or caprice. One or the other.

Even her fellow utility bosses were so appalled by her stance that they leaked the email, along with some fairly dirty remarks, to the Evening Standard. We printed it. She was not amused.

That her musings were taken badly even by her peers suggests a level of tone-deafness that belongs in Hollywood, not in British public life. She might do well in Tinseltown, the land of make believe.

Today, Severn Trent reported that “storm overflows remain a area of significant focus for our industry”. It aims to halve spills by 2030, a target which, if it even makes it will likely happen after Garfield has left.

Water bills will go up, of course, to pay for what the water sector was supposed to have been doing anyway.

It doesn’t look like Labour is going to nationalise the water companies, since it is still in bending-over-backwards to be pro-business mode.

It is very hard to see what the rational case is – on any level, financial or otherwise – for not doing just that.

No one outside of the £3 million a year utility CEO class would think it an unfair reward for shoddy performance.