Comment by braza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by braza | Hacker News Reader

> People across England are already banned from using hosepipes, with more restrictions probable over coming months. > So how on earth did famously rainswept England, notorious the world over for being green and wet with our national symbol pretty much a furled umbrella, come to this? > The UK is one of the rainier places in Europe. Some areas are wetter than others > Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1tn litres of water through leaky pipes each year. The industry has said that about 20% of all treated water is lost to leaks. The water firms have pledged to halve leakages by 2050. > Meanwhile, the annual pipe replacement rate is 0.05% a year across all water companies

An honest request for enlightenment:There's the structural problem. There are the structural aspects of a potential solution. There's some mapping around the problem. Given that, why does the England government not provide a definitive solution?

As a former 3rd world resident, one thing that I noticed in Europe is that several basic problems do not have the right incentives or willingness to be solved, even if there are the "raw materials" in place, like capital, human talent, a need, and so on.

I know that some can think like the "Why Didn't I Think of That?" meme template [1], but I have been in worse places where you have several headwinds like corruption, lack of capital, etc.; I see that in England and in continental Europe you can see a lot of those "basic problems" happening and piling up. I wonder if those issues will be solved gradually or if those societies will need to have their “burning platform” moment [2].

[1] - https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/139781746/Why-Didnt-I-Thin....

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698044

Five-year election cycle, and the dominant party is very good at controlling the narrative

Selling public infrastructure lets you give tax cuts now, and you'll be long gone before people recognise that they are paying more and getting less. It's much like MBAs making cuts - you can boost the bottom line in the short term and be gone before the blame starts gathering

We have a fptp electoral process, which means there are a lot of safe seats in parliament. In battleground seats, a vote for the third party is effectively a vote for the first. People who want not-the-incumbent cannot choose which party they actually do want. I personally have been disenfranchised all my adult life, MEP votes excluded. (If I could change only one thing, I would abolish fptp.)

Moreover, like most populous Western countries, most of the electorate is not well educated on politics or economics; they get their political news from limited sources, and they don't seek information that challenges their prior beliefs.

These facts combine to reduce electoral accountability.

Having flogged the public infra, renationalisation is tricky. You either buy it back at market value, which means imposing a tax burden and playing into your opponent's electoral strategy, or you seize it and spook capital markets, which also plays into your opponent's electoral strategy.

At least in the UK I think you can at a high level map out some system level reasons why this sort of "public realm" problem doesn't get solved:

* the UK's economic growth has been poor since the 2008 financial crisis, so government resources from taxation have similarly not been growing as much as they used to

* demographics (more elderly people) mean that spending on pensions and healthcare has been steadily growing

* so the spending on every other aspect of government and other public-realm type things has been steadily squeezed: there are no resources for improvements on either the big scale or the small

* plus we have (like the US) a setup where many people and organizations have an effective veto or delaying ability on building things (houses, public infrastructure, etc), which makes fixing public infrastructure problems very expensive and time consuming.

As a water-related example of the last point: there's a proposal for a new reservoir near me which is classified as a "nationally significant infrastructure project". The timeline outlined at https://fensreservoir.co.uk/proposals/process/ started in 2022 with "pre-application consultation" in multiple phases, doesn't even submit the formal planning application until 2027, hopes to get a government decision in 2028, will not start construction until 2030 and might finally get the reservoir up and running by 2036 if nothing is delayed. And this doesn't account for the possibility of legal challenges to it which could add extra delay even if they are dismissed.

> several basic problems do not have the right incentives or willingness to be solved

The corruption issue is still there, it's just much better disguised and kept away from the general public. Random individuals are not expected or generally safe to pay bribes to police in the UK; we imagine that's all there is to it. But at the higher levels all sorts of problems are not solved because there's a financial interest, or simply an establishment personal connection.

The Fujitsu/Post Office scandal was perhaps the worst recent example.

Nothing can be fixed if it's always someone else fault. For a while it was the EUs fault. Then came Brexit. After Brexit, it was somehow also EUs fault, because the EU is mean or something. Also, blame immigrants.

>> Given that, why does the England government not provide a definitive solution?

Every government in the last 20 years has been incompetent when it comes to managing the country. All they know is to make statements to the news about hot-button issues, like Brexit, foreigners, flags, Ukraine, Palestine, trans rights, Lucy Letby, etc. Both the Tories and Labour. They've both been more like teams of social media influencers than governments.

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