$50 a month for water isn't bad
Closer to $100, homeboy.
Think of it less as paying for the water and more as paying for the infrastructure that treats it and delivers it to you.
Imo the UK Government should never had privatized the water industry.
Yeah, privatizing utilities can be a problem. On one hand, the private sector has incentives to try to innovate and keep costs down that the government doesn't, since they actually need to turn a profit, but that need to turn a profit very often results in cutting corners and jacking up rates to increase that profit, while consumers simply don't have the option to take their business elsewhere if the service gets too bad because utilities so often have to be a monopoly (you can't have a dozen different sets of water pipes or power lines running to every house). The province I just moved away from has some of the highest rates in North America for power, but there are still frequent outages that the company insists they can't do anything about and they keep getting approved for rate increases, while the CEO keeps taking home multimillion dollar bonuses despite failing to do the job customers are paying him to do (provide reliable power) because his actual job is to maximize value for shareholders.
Yeah, there's a lot of scandals lately about UK water companies dumping raw sewerage into rivers, sea, etc. instead of processing it properly to maximize profits. One has even been found to have money which should have been going to improve/renovate the water system to handle the increased load and instead use them to pay for bonuses for management. Now with that money gone, and being told by the government they must improve the water systems, they want to jack up water rates to force consumers to pay for it. Luckily the rates have been capped to lower than the water companies were asking for.
I think we need to normalize periodically putting utility contracts out to tender. Like obviously we can't have multiple companies running the same utilities at the same time because that's just impractical, but if instead the actual infrastructure were state property and every 1 or 2 or 5 years companies were invited to bid on the job of maintaining it and supplying the utility, that would create incentives to be as efficient as possible, but not leave one company able to hold an entire city's water hostage if they don't get giant bonuses. That would, of course, run into some issues with expansions and infrastructure improvement efforts, since companies aren't going to want to invest in improving the service they provide if they don't have a guarantee that they'll be around long enough to reap the benefits of that investment, but I'm sure something can be worked out with subsidies or residuals or other such things to make it work.