[sandbags]

It's a fair point that nationalised water industries can also be poorly run. But I'm not sure what the argument is that means the amount of money that privatised UK water companies have paid in dividends vs. invested in maintaining and expanding infrastructure isn't a significant part of the UK's problems.

However, as a further point. If national priorities change then a nationalised water industry can respond (relatively) quickly. But what can be done with a bunch of potentially foreign owned profit-seeking companies?

[qcnguy]

Paying dividends is good. It's how you attract the capital for investment without having to raise it via sale of government bonds or money printing.

The problem here is financial illiteracy - the alternative to paying dividends isn't that the same money all gets spent on the water network. Large scale investment is rarely funded from general revenues as it'd require spending years accumulating a huge cash pile that sits around doing nothing, and governments see such piles as pigs to slaughter. So the alternative is that the government borrows the money and then has to pay interest on it. From your perspective the UK "wastes" 8% of its spending on interest payments, and it's rising rapidly, but of course if it didn't pay interest then nobody would lend it money and all funds would have to either come from taxes or via inflation.

[KoolKat23]

Government bonds are considered lower risk and the interest rate is lower, i.e they will attract the same money for less. Private shareholders are more expensive.

This also doesn't consider "debt recapitalisation" where these private companies draw down new debt on promise of future cash inflows from consumers and then suck out dividend cash "de-risking" their holding in the company. The government can bail it out or the can close it then, it's not their problem as they received the cash upfront.