Water UK

In some areas of business such commitment is warmly welcomed. Your M&S, for example, has a plan – Plan A, a green initiative tricked out for the times "because there is no Plan B".

Even the hardest-line social Darwinist accepts that the selfish gene, pursuing its own 'interest', doesn’t avoid 'social' behaviour. The response of nature to nature can as well be cooperation as individual action. But could working with nature actually encourage cooperation, while giving it less priority leads to going it alone?

Karma Ockenden talks to Water UK Chief Executive Pamela Taylor about a recent visit to Mali as a trustee of WaterAid.

The new water strategy can help hard-pressed customers by building on the achievements of price regulation.

The Commission’s Annual Policy Strategy seeks to address global challenges while continuing to improve the environment for Europe’s citizens and industry.

The tricky issue of value is just below the surface, so to speak, of many water policy debates. Environmentalists tend to think that policy undervalues water given “its importance in sustaining life, the economy and the environment” (1). Consumer groups beg to differ. They point to water affordability as a problem for a worryingly large number of households. Inevitably such judgments depend heavily on your point of view. Water, like reputation, is in some senses beyond value.

Water companies are looking forward to publication of a new national water strategy. This is an opportunity to promote a pathway that involves people and organisations beyond the sector, rather than simply concentrating on traditional economic and environmental goals.

"People are irrational, that's all there is to that! Their heads are full of cotton, hay, and rags! They're nothing but exasperating, irritating, vacillating, calculating, agitating, maddening and infuriating lags!"

For nearly 80 years the rather gentle and worthy Council for the Preservation of Rural England put the case for traditional countryside values and the greenbelt it helped to create.

Everyone who works for a water company in England and Wales has been put on the spot about industry profits. It happens most often (but not exclusively) when companies report financial results and when economic regulator Ofwat publishes its review of financial performance.