00:00Hello, yes, excuse the hood, reporting from a rainy day in the capital today.
00:04Campaigners have announced plans to file statutory nuisance complaints against Thames Water
00:11in an effort to pressure local councils into holding the company legally accountable for sewage pollution.
00:20River Action said documents submitted by Thames Water to the regulator Ofwatt
00:26indicated that work on 93 sewer treatment works and pumping station sites the company had pledged to upgrade remains unfinished.
00:38Now, the organisation said it would lodge complaints with councils in London, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Surrey and Buckinghamshire
00:47urging them to take what it described as decisive action to curb pollution from Thames Water.
00:55Now, a Thames Water spokesperson was reported as saying that the firm had informed regulators in 2023
01:05that it would not be able to complete all the planned upgrades while maintaining that it remained committed to improving the health of the waterways.
01:16The UK's largest water and waste company has recently returned to profit after raising customer bills back in April.
01:24So the question is, how do Londoners feel about Thames Water and about the rise in their water charges?
01:32I think it's going to be difficult for people who are kind of on benefits or people who are just at that sort of level.
01:39I'm disabled and I've got arthritis, so I need quite a lot of baths and things to help me.
01:46So I think it would be quite difficult for me personally, and I suppose, especially already in the cost of living crisis that we're already in,
01:56I think it's going to leave a lot of work class people specifically very devastated.
02:00In terms of can we do anything to stop it? I feel like it's very limited. These companies, we're talking about like multi-billionaires,
02:11and obviously as a society, same as energy bills, I don't feel like we can do much.
02:20That sounds really worrying because bills are already really high, not just water bills, but all the other bills too.
02:27So any increase is a concern, especially as water companies generally have not had a good reputation for properly investing.
02:35So I would be really concerned that my bills are going up, but that that might be benefiting shareholders more than Londoners.
02:44They should just be showing us, whether that's through the news or through their social media platforms,
02:49them trying to do more active things to essentially like show that they're using more sustainable ways to obviously filter their water.
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