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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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I looked into this a bit, and nationalising the water companies is a sticky topic.
When Thatcher privatised them, the idea was the regular Joe would profit grim these companies when they did well, through share holdings. The issue was, the initial share price was much too high for the regular Joe to afford, which gave the opportunity to pension providers to buy much more stock, of said water companies.
Now if you nationalise said water companies, stock price would go to 0 and lots of pensions will get hit as well.
I fully agree that all those companies should be renationalised, I just don't know how it can be done without tanking pensions.
The government would have to take the hit and substitute the shares for bonds of equal or greater value. They should never lose value at least going forward.
Such shares would be a relatively small proportion of a pension company's investment portfolio. This is the water companies' argument and it, ahem, doesn't hold water.