Severn Trent Chief Executive Officer Liv Garfield is attempting to get together a task force of utility heads in a bid to stem the growing threat of nationalization of the water industry, the Evening Standard reported.
Garfield sent an email to CEOs of other water utilities asking them to join an “off-the-record roundtable” that could discuss ideas such as re-purposing utilities and utility networks into a new breed of “declared social purpose companies,” the Standard reported.
“Social purpose companies” would be entities that “remain privately owned, who absolutely can (and should) make a profit, but ones that also have a special duty to take a long-term view,” the Evening Standard cites Garfield as saying in her email. Such an idea might be attractive to a potential Labour leadership, she wrote, according to the newspaper.
Read more: Britain Faces a Giant Water Bill, And Nobody Wants to Pay It
Britain’s biggest water supplier, Thames Water, is in talks with officials over contingency plans including a temporary nationalization as concerns grow over its more than £13 billion ($16.5 billion) debt pile, Bloomberg reported earlier this week, citing people familiar with the matter.
The Evening Standard had not received comment from Severn Trent at the time of publication. There was no immediate comment from the company when contacted out-of-hours by phone by Bloomberg News.
