Water Meters

Water is as necessary to life as air.There can only be one justification for rationing and that is to provide equal amounts of an inadequate supply.Rationing by price can never be justified because it would afford unlimited supply to those that can pay and in theory none for those who cannot. Such a situation of total deprivation could never be allowed to happen and certainly not at the discretion of a commercial company.

Water companies attempt to justify their call for meters by claiming a need to conserve supply implying shortage. In the UK the inadequacy is of storage capacity and a lack of the means to move water from one area to another. We have an electricity grid and a gas grid but no water grid.

Electricityis generated where it is economical to do so and carried by wire to where it is needed. Gas is imported from under the north sea or in ships and piped to where it is used.Water falls from the sky abundantly in some areas and less so in others. There is no adequate means of moving it from one site to the other.

No commercial company is at base solicitous for anything but profit. Customers are a means to that end including for water companies.If they can bring it about that households have their supply metered it will be possible better to control their cash flow and hence their profit in the future.

There is one disturbing element at present only marginally evident. That is population growth.
In normal circumstances that would occur as part of a natural balance in which water supply would be one factor.I refer to deliberate stimulation of growth by immigration without regard to any consideration but increase in numbers.That could induce many shortages including shortage of temper. It could indeed produce numbers for which the water supply is inadequate. Natural increase in a fertile population will be more than enough of a problem.

The way to control that situation is not to ration water but to restrict entrants.

Could it not be that the whole idea of water as a commodity is wrong just as air as a commodity would be.Is it not possible that the delivery of water becomes secondary to the delivery of profit to shareholders?