Two industries in need of regulation

I had a water meter installed in my flat a few months ago. I looked at it just now and it said ‘13’. I didn’t know what ‘13’ meant, so I went online to check. Apparently, in a few months, four of us have used 13 cubic metres of water, or 13,000 litres.

The £40 I’ll pay for this seems rather a bargain: £40 is highly preferable to carrying 13,000 litres up two flights of stairs. But in any case I needn’t worry about overpaying, because there’s an organisation called Ofwat which keeps an eye on Southern Water to check that they don’t charge me £1 too much for my 13 cubic metres.

Then there’s my electricity bill; that seems fairly good value too. They write me a letter every month which effectively says, ‘You can either pay us £100 and live in the 21st century or you can not pay us and live in the 19th.’ Call me a gullible old neophile, but I’ve always gone for the 21st–century option myself. I suspect my wife, who is an Anglican clergy-woman, has doubts: she’d like us sitting round a piano singing hymns by candlelight or embroidering the Lord’s Prayer on a sampler but, for me, the fridge, the TV and the Sky package win out every time. In any case I don’t have to worry because there are people called Ofgem who keep an eye on the leccy folk to make sure they don’t charge me £1 too much.

And then there’s my broadband. I now get the fibre-optic kind, which means I effectively have a miniature British Library in my own home. I can watch on-demand arty French films in high definition, or hold live face-to-face conversations with people in Australia for free.