WITH its record of over-the-top charges and rocketing profits, leaking pipes and "fat cat" bosses paying themselves obscene salaries, the privatised water industry has been long overdue for a shake-up.

But, however welcome are the government's proposals to force competition on the water companies and so cut their profits and bills, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the move owes more to its search for an election issue than any serious attempt to smash their monopolies.

For, shrewd as it may be for the government to home in on the water firms' unpopularity with promises of reform, the fact is that little can be done quickly or cheaply to physically break up these businesses into new entities healthily competing with each other to the consumers' benefit.

Unlike the gas and electricity utilities, there is no national "grid" for water over which the "product" of rival companies can flow to the customer.

And though such a system would be of great strategic benefit nationally in times of drought like last summer's, the cost of creating it would be so enormous that consumers would probably face years of even dearer water before the benefits of the resultant competition began to trickle through to them.

Today Environment Minister John Gummer suggests the laying of pipelines linking reservoirs between different regions so that some water firms might undercut each other. But even that partial solution has a big question-mark of cost casting doubt over it.

Indeed, it has probably been awareness of the daunting scale of the logistics involved in breaking up their monopolies that has encouraged the water companies to act as they have - with such blithe disregard for their customers' interests and with such greed and self-interest on their part.

But if this attitude has now bounced back on them with the government considering a shake-up of the industry - vague, flawed and politically-motivated though it seems - then it is the least they deserve.

However, it does prove the lesson that consumers have learned from the bitter experience of being held to ransom by them. These private regional monopolies should never have been set up in the first place.

That was all that was bound to ensue from privatisation, given the industry's nature and infrastructure.

But, worse, added to the blind ideology of the government was its active participation in the process - pouring vast sums of taxpayers' money into wiping out the old water authorities' debts and giving the new water companies legal consent to increase water charges by way beyond the rate of inflation, year after year.

Now, then, comes a coded apology in the form of a crackdown on the companies' greed that looks to be more like election propaganda than an actual get-tough policy.

But, if the government at last owns up to getting it wrong but cannot mend the mess inside the hallowed free market system, why then buck the solution of handing the industry back to its former owners, the public?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.