Listen to a grieving mother and have no doubts: water privatisation has been a lethal scandal

## Summary
Julie Maughan, previously Preen – her daughter Heather died in 1999 after contracting E coli on a beach in Devon during a family holiday. Photograph: Ellie Smith/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Julie Maughan, previously Preen – her daughter Heather died in 1999 after contracting E coli on a beach in Devon during a family holiday. A system that took our water, our housing, our energy networks, our care homes, our childcare – the things people cannot do without – and handed them to those whose obligation was never to us. Photograph: Rob Baker Ashton/Channel 4 For more than three decades, our water industry has operated on a model that allows private companies to extract profit from a basic necessity while the public carries the risk.

## Article Content
Julie Maughan, previously Preen – her daughter Heather died in 1999 after contracting E coli on a beach in Devon during a family holiday.
Photograph: Ellie Smith/The Guardian
View image in fullscreen
Julie Maughan, previously Preen – her daughter Heather died in 1999 after contracting E coli on a beach in Devon during a family holiday.
Photograph: Ellie Smith/The Guardian
Listen to a grieving mother and have no doubts: water privatisation has been a lethal scandal
Clive Lewis
Progressives must wage a battle against a rotten capitalist system that milks our resources – and destroys lives. Let the fightback start with water
In more than a decade as an MP, I have attended hundreds of meetings in parliament. Most pass. Some linger. Few stay with you. But a recent event was very different.
We hosted the actors, the real-life people they portrayed and the production team behind the
Channel 4 docudrama Dirty Business
. It tells the story of campaigners and families who have spent years fighting not just privatised water companies, but a system that was meant to protect them – and has too often failed.
At its centre is a mother, Julie Maughan,
whose story
is one of the most difficult of the series. Some years ago, her eight-year-old daughter, Heather Preen, died after exposure to polluted water. It’s the kind of thing that you read about from a distance and struggle to take in. You register it, and move on.
But there’s no distance when you are sitting a few feet away from Julie in a quiet committee room that suddenly feels very small. Or when you hear her sobbing as the room watches the TV clip of her daughter dying; her voice breaking as she speaks of the impact this unspeakable tragedy had on her and her family. It’s something I will not forget.
View image in fullscreen
Family photos of Heather Preen.
Photograph: Ellie Smith/The Guardian
There was no performance, no grandstanding, no playing to the audience. Just grief, dignity and a quiet determination that no other family should go through what they had. At the end of the meeting, she came over to thank me for the work we have been doing to bring water back into public ownership. That moment cut through everything. Because statistics can be argued with. Stories like this cannot.
And so, in that instant, this stopped being about policy or process. It became something simpler: what kind of country allows this to happen? And what kind of country decides it will not allow it to happen again? These two questions define the scale of what this
Labour
government faces – and the standard by which a sceptical, exhausted electorate will judge it. People who have watched a political system promise and fail, promise and fail, until the promising itself becomes the insult.
It’s why I brought my
private member’s bill
on water ownership and why I have kept at it. Because the water industry doesn’t just expose a series of failures within one sector. It exposes something far larger and more damaging: the logic of a system that has run its course. A system that took our water, our housing, our energy networks, our care homes, our childcare – the things people cannot do without – and handed them to those whose obligation was never to us. That extracted profit from necessity. That made the most vulnerable corners of our lives into the most lucrative. That called this “efficiency” and told us the alternative was unthinkable. But it was never unthinkable. It was simply inconvenient – to those amassing vast fortunes at our collective expense.
View image in fullscreen
David Thewlis as Ash in the Channel 4 docudrama Dirty Business.
Photograph: Rob Baker Ashton/Channel 4
For more than three decades, our water industry has operated on a model that allows private companies to extract profit from a basic necessity while the public carries the risk. Bills rise. Investment falls short. Pollution becomes routine. Regulators are co-opted into collusion. This is what campaigners have called the “
privatisation premium
”: the extra cost households pay not to run the service, but to sustain a system built around debt and shareholder returns. A transfer of wealth from public to private, designed into the system itself.
Water is simply the clearest example. And that is why it matters. Because if we cannot get something as fundamental as water right, what does that say about the rest of our economy?
We have lived through austerity, the disruption of Brexit, the shock of Covid. And now, as conflict in Iran drives a new
energy price surge
through the global economy, millions of households face another wave of pressure on their living standards – one that will not be abstract. It will show up in bills. In services that no longer function. In a growing, justified fury that the system is not on their side.
This is the moment that should concentrate every progressive mind in government and beyond. Because what is coming is not just an economic shock. It is a political test. Incumbent centre-left parties ac

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## Expert Analysis

### Merits
- People who have watched a political system promise and fail, promise and fail, until the promising itself becomes the insult.

### Areas for Consideration
- At its centre is a mother, Julie Maughan, whose story is one of the most difficult of the series.
- Photograph: Rob Baker Ashton/Channel 4 For more than three decades, our water industry has operated on a model that allows private companies to extract profit from a basic necessity while the public carries the risk.
- It is a structural problem that demands a structural answer.

### Implications
- Or when you hear her sobbing as the room watches the TV clip of her daughter dying; her voice breaking as she speaks of the impact this unspeakable tragedy had on her and her family.
- It’s something I will not forget.
- Just grief, dignity and a quiet determination that no other family should go through what they had.
- And so, in that instant, this stopped being about policy or process.

### Expert Commentary
This article covers water, system, julie topics. Notable strengths include discussion of water. Areas of concern are also raised. Readability: Flesch-Kincaid grade 0.0. Word count: 1357.