WHO still gets soaked in a drought?

The water company's customers.

For, according to profit forecasts today, North West Water, which is now merged with Norweb in the giant United Utilities group, is reported to be on song for a 38 per cent increase in profits - up to £377million.

It is a performance based on monopoly and, certainly as far as water charges are concerned, inflation-busting prices that, as the profit levels show, are a rip-off. It is a double-whammy, too, when far too much of that bloated profit is going into shareholders' pockets and not into mending the company's clapped-out mains that are leaking away a third of the region's water supply.

But it is no comfort that the company is walking smack into a windfall tax that a Labour government would slap on them.

For, really, that would only be a tax on the ripped-off consumers who have, without choice, provided these excessive profits by being stung by North West Water's too-big bills.

The water companies should be made to give rebates to their customers - based on what their bills would have been if charges had been pegged to the rate of inflation.

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