Privatising water was always cuckoo. People can't shop around for a different provider, it's an essential service everyone needs access to, and the profit motive directly clashes with the incentive to prioritise investment in infrastructure.
Kind of the sine qua non of UK privatisation failure over the last 40 years, even more so than railways. Taxes paid by taxpayers rebranded as product fees paid by customers, with revenues skimmed off and paid out to shareholders instead of reinvested into critical infrastructure. As much as staid old nationalised industries needed shaking out of their bureaucratic stupour, replacing one bureaucracy with another was always an ideological choice instead of one based on empirical evidence of new management structures necessarily working more efficiently or anything like that.
Feels like the whole country is crumbling, and so much of it comes down to the prioritisation of (perceived or actual) short-term benefits over longer-term ones - a lot of repair bills are all coming due at once. Labour had their version with PPI, and austerity was never anything more than trying to pay off an overdraft with a credit card. See also the "pause" to HS2 for another classic example of how this stuff just keeps happening.
