Hero Of The Week - Luxmy Gopal Uses Clever Approach To Get Thames Water To Answer Questions!
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- čas přidán 9. 07. 2024
- BBC journalist, Luxmy Gopal, found a great way to stop Thames Water from ignoring BBC London requests for an interview.
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#herooftheweek
#water
#thameswater
Credit: BBC London
We’ve had Thatcherism since 1979 which serves the interests of the wealthy. The problem with Thatcherism is that you eventually run out of assets like Thames Water to sell to investors so that they can rip off British consumers. 1. Reduce inequality by taxing the asset wealth of the rich. 2. Stop selling British assets and British companies to foreign control.
There are no more family jewels and silver, all companies have been sold. And you need to include selling off all council houses and not building replacements social housing.
we've had eugenics since 1890
Yeah exactly- now since 79 we have had 32 years of Tory ideology and BS. And 13 years old blair which was pretty much a dilute version. Now there is nothing left. They sold everything for quick cash and transfer of wealth to their mates.
Its like we all lived in a big house, in 79 they started selling our silver, furniture, TV etc and re rented them back. Eventually there was nothing left- now the roof is sold, the walls and the foundation and none of it is being maintained but we paying more and more rent each year!
Country is a joke and its totally hollowed out.
It is impossible to under estimate the effect that women had on our lives evan 35years after she was kicked out of downing street
One of the reasons Thatcher could convince the public was by encouraging more people on to the property ladder, and one way she did that was by flogging off council houses for cheap - and of course never replacing them. This made people feel that, as property owners, they were part of the club that the Tories were favouring. It is kind of sad to think of it, but give people who do not have much just a little bit and then tell them other poor people want to take it from them, and you can get them to support rich people's interests enthusiastically.
THAMES WATER DO NOT WANT TO BE ARRESTED FOR THEIR CRIMES !!!!
They haven’t committed crimes. Everything they have done has been made legal by our current government.
i don't think many criminals want to be arrested in fairness
Ofwat knew about, and allowed them to run the company in this way. They are complicit.
@@L-iv6lx Its only since 2021. People voted to end regulations. Apparently, they know what they voted for.
Water Crimes?
They won't answer questions because they can't without incriminating themselves
Why stop there? They should publish the bonuses paid to each of the board members and the dividends paid to the major shareholders.
That is public information, you can view it in the annual reports.
@@Adamfandango Yeah but it should be on the news
It was published yesterday. £196m paid to shareholders, highest paid director got a £500k bonus.
@@katrinabryce The information may be available if you go looking for it, but I'll guarantee that the vast majority of English consumers won't have looked.
@@orraman5427 Journalists did, hence all the media reports about it.
The BBC have some very professional and capable journalists as well as a few poor ones who wear kid gloves when interviewing politicians. Luxmy Gopal and Victoria Derbyshire don't tinker round the edges, they dig deep. Well done.
Proper Journalism Good Job Luxmy ❤
A Richly deserved Award ❤
Bravo Luxmy ❤❤
In October 2021 Tory MPs voted to ditch EU clean waters law, allowing raw sewage to be discharged into the country’s waterways.
In March it was revealed that England’s privatised water firms released raw sewage for a total of 3.6m hours in 2023, more than double the scale from the year before. Thames Water: 72 billion litres of sewage pumped into Thames in two years.
Water firms’ profits in England and Wales almost double since 2019. Severn Trent boss paid £3.2m, including a £584,000 bonus, meanwhile firm dumped 260m litres of sewage into River Trent.
It’s a Brexit Bonus.
They get other people to appear in the media as its the other people who gets the scrutiny and not the water/train company themselves. They get to avoid being accountable.
Seems to be a feature of privatised monopolies
Thanks very much Max. Bravo to this lady 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏. Yes hero of the week 🎉
Best Hero of the Week to date ❤😎
They’re too busy paying out dividends and bonuses. 😡. This approach should be extended by showing the faces of the senior management.
Exactly Max they don't have answers for their catastrophic actions
Superb professionalism!...
Crooks.
Great Clip thanks for sharing Max ❤
Outstanding ❤👏👏👏
Thanks Mandy ❤️
Their chief executive awards himself £195,000 bonus on top of his £1,500,000 base pay this week. I guess they're too busy celebrating themselves to appear.
And I wonder how many employees are having to claim UC? If a company, especially a large one like a water company, can "afford" to pay ridiculous salaries like that to the chief execs and then "top it up" with a "bonus" equivalent to the salaries of at least 5 (probably more like 8) AND pay out healthy dividends to shareholders.......... They have no excuse to be paying employees so poorly.
There has to be a way to ensure companies stop using employees to "boost" dividends and bonuses......
Our new Government really need to get on top of this problem quickly. Didn't Thames Water just give themselves another £155 million pay packet just the other day despite saying we need to give them more money because because they spent the £Billions we have given them to improve the infrastructure on having a nicer life for themselves instead. This is another one of the reasons the Tories took such a battering. Surely Labour can improve on the record of Therese Coffey!?
£196m.
The new government has been in place less than a week. It's a little unreasonable to expect them to get on top of this so quickly and a dividend payment like that takes longer than a week to arrange...
Ofwat and DEFRA and separate entities and need to work together. Ofwat, like Ofcom, is a toothless wonder with it's hands in its pockets and fingers in it's ears. It has been systematically under resources and poorly managed. No government can swoop in and undo 15 years of mismanagement in a few days.
_Touché Luxmy Gopal and the Beeb._
Time for the BBC to find its post-Tory Mojo
She will be sacked next week asking to many questions
Too
I worked for Anglian Water for 5 years, the level of the pollution was known way before it became a scandal.
We had an all company email back around 2018, it had the approved talking point we had to tell customers which was (I'm paraphrasing, it was a while ago) -
We very rarely have runoff in to rivers from combined sewers, it only happens during extreme storms, what gets in the rivers is rain water, and not sewerage.
Also, another huge thing they are keeping under wraps is the amount of lead piping in the UK.
If anyone is living in an old building, especially next to major roads, I'd urge you to ask your water company to lead test your water.
Water comms pipes are very widespread, and not being replaced proactively, only if the customer asks for it.
@Riselio92
When you worked for Anglian Water was a Mrs Barclay one of its top executives? She happens to be the wife of Stephen Barclay, until very recently the Tory head of DEFRA . Mrs Barclay allows raw sewage to be discharged into our rivers and waterways while Mr Barclay led the (former) government's vote in the Commons to continue to allow her company, and all the other water companies; to continue to do so.
Not so much as a conflict of interests, more a combination of interests.
That must explain Brexit (the lead pipes that is).
Brilliant!
THATCHERS LEGACY EXPOSED AGAIN
Best BBC Newsreader and Anchor
Superb
👏
Starmer and OFWAT need to prevent the water companies from bunging customers' cash to offshore dividend holders. Thames, for example is supposed to have upgraded specific pieces of water infrastructure from 2011 _and have literally done nothing!_ They (like some populist politicians) blame a host of reasons: inflation, covid etc.etc. (which didn't stop them paying dividends) and now want to increase bills by 59% (and this is not the worst of them). In the long run, I suggest they get nationalised - without compensation. Much like when Egypt took over the Red Sea canal. Some fuss for a while but it all died down eventually.
They should tell the banks to bankrupt them . Then buy them at a price that pays off the bank loans.
That’s how Fenway took over Liverpool. The banks were happy with 300m..
Selling off water has to be one of the most idiotic things a country could do itself. TW do not care about name and shame.
Ms Gopal does the national news as well. That was certainly a good move.
An inquiry is needed immediately.
Well done.
It should be compulsory purchased for a quid.
Fantastic
Customers are completely irrelevant to Thames Water - they have a monopoly, given to them by our government. There's only one consideration, and that's their shareholders.
This is refreshing to see and I hope it's sign of change.
The basics of journalism is to hold the feet of the powerful to the fire and expose the truth (wherever it leads to). With the 'access journalism' techniques being practiced over the last 2-3 decades, real journalism has been on the decline.
Also journalists used to come from a mix bag of secondary school & collage, uni and privately educated background. Now the majority are privately schooled and from wealthy families which effects their political stance, skews their view and understanding of daily life for the general public in this country.
Thames Water don't want to be held to account.
Luxmy is a great journalist she moved up here to Yorkshire for Look North from Jersey a few years agoand she did a great job and then split her time between here and London for a bit but frankly as soon as she started doing national news it was only a matter of time before she got there permanently and she announced she was made full time a couple of weeks ago. She has done some great work up here and nationally as a journalist and Im glad the BBC are pushing for accountability I think if the national news on all major news channels did this to all water companies they'd have no choice but to face questions.
Fools and heros by midweek, what times we live in.
Accountability is the this years fall fashion and I'm hoping that everyone will be wearing it!
Great video as always thank you
We’ve been a cash cow
Why don't their executives answer to the public? "Below my pay grade".
Soon to be sacked for asking questions.
Thames Water should just have the ownership stripped for the service and not being accountable. I hope Starmer just ends the contract and fines them heavily.
I liked Count Binface's policy of making the executives take a dip in the Thames. It made much more sense than the policies of the joke candidate standing in his constituency.
The BBC attempting to pull their socks up. Finally.
Hopefully the 'companies' and organisations will now be called out and have to start serving their customers rather than funding their top employees and shareholders lavish lifestyles. Support Labour 👍🏼✌🏼❤️😀
Hell will freeze over before that bunch of thieves volunteer themselves up for scrutiny. They're too busy counting their ill-gotten gains. Shame on them.
In the course of the General Election coverage it was a salutary reminder that England - and I mean specifically England - is alone in the world in being a place where water is a commodity, which is bad enough in itself, but to have representatives wriggling out of accounting for themselves is yet worse. Well, done Luxmy Gopal and BBC London.
Tory exprimeminister said Mrs Thatcher was selling off the family silver. Even fellow Tories didn't approve
Everyone in the previous government and Thames Water,
responsible for all the damage,
should be forced to drink our sh*t.
_Would you like a glass of sweet lemonade?_
Am in debt to Thames Water by over £3.000!
I receive £500 a month to live on,can’t understand how they expect people like me to pay their prices for water??
Brilliant! Get the coacroches out in the open where we can see and hear them! All media outlets should do that in an equally firm and polite way... The Post Office scandal stands to be severely duplicated if we do not...
Thames water a classic example of government privatitization for the benefit of everyone in volved except the service user. So glad Scottish water is publicly owned and the money generated from it is reinvested in it.
BBC dont feel timid from the the conservative government anymore. Might actually pay my tv licence again.
I'm pretty, if my memory serves me right, that Thames Water have been refusing various offers for interviews for more than 15 years. I seem to remember when there were a number of major water leaks in the London Area they refused to be interviewed a number of times as to what they were doing to stop these leaks.
Just the tip of the sewage iceberg.
They are not the only company doing this.
To borrow a phrase: "The trouble with capitalists is they eventually run out of other people's money". We pay our bills for years, then suddenly need to pay even more to "fund investment".
It is not just criminal but evil the fact that these water companies can plead poverty while at the same time paying multi million pound bonuses to the CEOs and shareholders. The new government should stop this and jail the criminals that do it.
the terrifying irony of RTM being advertised by lawrence fox right before this video
The issue here, as has always been when any company goes public is that the priority immediately becomes keeping the shareholders happy with dividend payouts, otherwise 'people won't invest in us'.
And as for CEO bonus payments, this should only be given when said CEO has done something exceptional; 'above and beyond the call of duty' as it were.
This is great to see. I get really annoyed when a company or organisation refuse to appear on a news programme, but they issue a statement which the presenter reads out. They need to stop reading these statements. Either they appear in front of an interviewer who can grill them on their bs or they get called out for being too chicken to appear at all. Let's not do them the favour of reading out their propaganda.
That should be proper contingency needed!
I understand Singapore has very strict corruption laws. Why don't we have the same.
I'm disappointed that Louise Haig hasn't been on the front foot and a) announced that the railways will be nationalised and b) opened talks with ASLEF to conclude the strike that's been going on for over two years. She's no Wes Streeting that's for sure.
I think investors and share holders are biding their time & happily letting Thames Water fail in the hope of a tax payer bailout. Nothing excites these people more than the sweet, sweet smell of public money.
Just like the postoffice it never happened corruption is here to stay with nobody responsible especially the shareholders we might have an inquiry one day but not today or tomorrow maybe never
Luxmy Gopal is a top journalist. .who makes others look lazy.
The water companies have large amounts of debt because it is a financial instrument in order to avoid tax, it's not real debt, it's money they paid to themselves, the companies should be re-nationalised and a told to repay their debt from their own coffers. When nationalised there was no debt.
Oh I'd love to see them do something like "We couldn't get a direct Thames Water representative, so we just found Tim off the street to answer questions on their behalf" And then Tim gives the most garbage but actually true answers to all the questions
I’m surprised this is coming from the BBC
Thames Water's cash reserve, which doesn't affect their shareholders, is due to 'run' out in 10 months time. Should TW's new slogan be 'Turning Water into Whine'?
It was probably not Luxmy Gopal who decided this but merely the programmer. I doubt announcers do much more than announce.
They should do something similar to the ice sculpture instead of boris like they did with the channel 4 debate. But this time have a turd, in the interview chair.
Hope they don't sack her
Privatised companies have continually failed to live up to Thatcher's promise that they could bring more investment to their services. (Who did they ever think was going to do this investing?) Then subsequently the images of the raw sewage being pumped into rivers and the sea have also highlighted the utter catastrophe that is Brexit. Slow hand clap, guys!
Thames Water would never have been able to get away with sh*t like this when Roger Cook was about. Maybe.
As ever, like banks, it “can’t be allowed to fail’ so taxpayers money will be used to rebuild & repair. Once fattened again it will be resold by a future Tory government. A “no risk” investment for shareholders, secured & underwritten by taxpayers.
The reason the UK is in a mess is because your governments have sold the silverware. Private companies make profits (and they always insist on increasing profits year on year) by squeezing salaries and cutting corners. The divergence between salary increases (zero for many years) and the insistence of annual rises in profits has led to those companies offshoring money and paying out dividends at the expense of salary increases and reinvestment. Taxpayers are effectively supporting the private sector, and those rich enough to afford shares. The balance is completely off kilter, and it needs addressing urgently.
Also increase the coverage and muckraking until they come on or lose their contract.
TW took out loans and passed them on to shareholders as dividends.
Thames Water are typical of todays big organisations, they think they are so big that they can ignore the basis of 'customer service'
She should have interviewed a glass of dirty water instead
With a turd in it
trouble with this approach as admirable as it is, is that thames water dont give a shit, they have captive customers who cant go anywhere else for their water.unlike energy companys where you can switch providers. labour should hit them with big windfall taxes and make it law for water companys to invest a percentage of profits into upkeep.
They just will say to busy and don't see the news 😂 they are out in EU
How can they announce a 157m profit in the same year as they go 1.3bn further into debt ? Can I do that? Borrow A Billion & announce a Billion profit ?
This is why vital services should not be run by private companies . They should be run by publicly accountable bodies and not for share holders and over paid executives paying themselves bonuses or letting board members rubber stamp them . They are effectively private monopolies not serving the publics interest . If Labour doesn't do something to address these issues they will lose all support ; this particular issue was a big factor in destroying the Tory vote . The Tories have failed on this and unfair lease and rents and so many other things that have ruined peoples lives .
oh the panic around the country from these corrupts. love that they switched it to jailtime instead of fines, finally some accountability, ..and arrests.😂 tim nice but dims packing suitcases and running to their mg's 😂
They should ask Murdoch to account for his contribution to the mess we are in!
haha brilliant!
They could empty chair them or get someone like Joe Lycett to speak on their behalf.
Fergal Sharkey possibly, that would be fun
Wait, wait, you can’t expect them to keep doing that every time someone fails to appear.
They already name & shame by telling us who refused multiple invites…
Luxmy has been great for a long time.
Bring it back into public ownership! Wasn't that not one of Starmer's many broken pledges when running for leader, to renationalise public services like water, electric and transport?
So.... have they sent anyone on yet?
Hopefully she doesn't go the same way as Sangita Myska did for holding people to account.
This is the blueprint to use for the future
They won't sail their yachts back from the Cayman Islands just to answer questions on a TV programme, too busy counting their money.
Fine the companies not by giving money but by giving shares/stock to government
👏