BBC News - News Front Page
Here's a wild idea:
Cap any shareholder dividends until the safety and environmental targets are met.
Even better, set dividends and C-suite bonuses to zero until the targets are met.
These price rises will just give the companies an excuse to invest and pay out bonuses.
I don't fully disagree, but let's look at Thames Water as a casr study.
Their dividend payout accounted for 6% of total revenue. 5% was loan repayment, and 30% was operational expenditure. 59% was infrastructure investments.
Let's look at the total dividend payout vs the tax they paid. They paid 133 million in business rates but they don't pay corporation tax mostly because of both infrastructure reinvestment and the paying off of loans.
Dividend payouts were 195.8 million. Of that, 27.1 million was payouts to their internal pension contributions, and 37.5m was to Kemble Water Finance Ltd debt services. This means the non-pension and non-debt dividend payout was 131.2m. That results in an effective dividend payout of 3.35% of total revenue.
That's still less than their business rates, which typically go to the local councils where the infrastructure is located, which given the measures of austerity, is quite a nice bump for locals.
I do think that the bypassing of corporate tax by paying off loans to be pretty shady,and I believe in the nationalisation of all services, but at 3.35% effective dividend rate, it's not the most egregious in my opinion.
Even without the dividends, the cost to households would be dramatically rising due to external factors.
Now who owns the land and builsings that Thames water rents for some of their infrastructure, there's a much spicier question...
Ah that's a brilliant reply, thanks for adding some insight.
As always, things are never as straightforward as a soundbite like mine, but I'm still super sceptical that the extra £80odd will mean £80odd per household of improvements and investment.
Fingers crossed.
It probably depends where the cost increase is coming from. I know that the mini-wage spiral we had earlier this year has meant that labour is now more expensive than ever. If that human cost is the driving factor for these price increase, then private or public, that would likely still happen. Imagine if housing was socialized, or at least heavily regulated? Imagine if food was provided not for financial value, but to feed? No more dumping of perfectly fine crops just to prevent the devaluation of prices in the supermarkets to keep the profits flowing.
It always feels like a kick in the teeth while maintaining a life is so absurdly expensive, how can 1 worker produce that much value in order to sustain themselves in the modern world? Corpo-services like thames water are just a symptom. So yeah, like you, I'm crossing my fingers, but they've been crossed for so long already as things only slip further down