Politics: opportunities

By Richard North - May 21, 2026

Well, the day came and went, but the Yorkshire Water cowboys (known as M Group Water) didn’t turn up to dig up my road, as threatened.

This may have had something to do with my e-mailing key executives with a notice telling them that an attempted entry would amount to trespass and digging the road up would constitute criminal damage, as the requisite (statutory) notice hadn’t been given..

But, in particular, I had invoked a little-known Common Law provision known as the Right to Abatement, which empowers direct action to mitigate or prevent a Tort (damage or harm), to which effect we (the residents) had blocked the intended work site with our cars (pictured).

I take from this that, with careful preparation and following the right procedures, direct action can work. There is no reason why we should let these unresponsive corporates roll over us. Certainly, if you let them, they will take liberties, ignore the law and destroy your property without a moment’s thought. It is incumbent on us all to stand up for our rights and defend what is ours.

That said, the behaviour of Yorkshire Water typifies that of so many corporate (monopoly, or near monopoly) businesses, with them operating a cynical business model, the like of which I’ve seen before.

It is common in contracted works systems, where contractors have to bid such a low price to get the award that the actual works can only be carried out at a loss if they meet the contract specifications.

Thus, having bid for contracts they know they cannot fulfil to specification, they deliberately cut corners in order to turn a profit. The client, knowing full well that the contract cannot be delivered at the price, goes along with it, benefitting from the lower prices which enables it to maximise its own profit.

But, to make this work, the whole operation has to be deliberately structured, from top to bottom, so as to build-in a culture of plausible deniability, so that executives and managers can pretend that the operation is functioning effectively and act shocked when failures come to light.

The way this is achieved it to fragment the operation into multiple sections or departments, ensuring that none of them know what the others are doing, and that no one person has an overall knowledge of how the operation is actually functioning.

Distant from the upper management and administration, actual customer-facing works are sub-contracted through multiple layers, from the prime contractor to multiple sub-contractors.

At that bottom end, where the work is actually done, the specifications and standards are set in writing, but compliance is assumed, without there being any supervision or enforcement by the client.

By this means, the contractors (and especially the sub-contractors) can get away with shoddy work. If they were forced to work to contract, no-one would take the jobs as they would go bankrupt doing them.

The most cynical part of this set-up, though, is the complaints system – the last bit of the jigsaw. It is deliberately made so laborious, difficult to navigate, unresponsive and unrewarding, that most people who experience the shoddy work at the sharp end, either don’t bother complaining or, having encountered the hurdles, give up in disgust.

Only the persistent few see it through to the bitter end, whence the client will either attempt to buy off the complainant with a derisory offer of compensation, or bury them in a labyrinthine appeals process (often with the complicity of the regulator), which ensures that profit margins are not challenged.

The system is sustained by call-centre type complaint handling, staffed by low-level personnel (often contracted out), who have no operational knowledge, no access to managerial information and who are trained (briefly) to work to a pre-determined script, their job being to soak up the anger from callers and to dead-bat the complaints. Lying is a central part of the toolkit.

When, as occasionally happens, one of the complaints escapes into the wild and causes a public furore, this is where the plausible deniability will come in. The senior executives will say – quite genuinely – that they had no knowledge of whatever issue it is that emerges, having structured the system to make sure that they don’t know.

Faced with details of such matters, they will throw their hands up in horror, which is pure theatre, making meaningless apologies, offering inquiries and promising that “lessons will be learned”.

But the ultimate effect of this carefully-devised complaints system is that very few people complain, and of those, even fewer get through to the stage where they have to be recorded as representing a system failure, which allows the executive class to pretend that their operation is working properly for its customers.

Essentially, this is corporate vandalism, structured and deliberate, devised to cheat the customers and deprive them of their rights – all to maximise the bottom line, a stance that is repeated endlessly, as others have also reported.

I am by no means alone in my experiences, and when one frustrated complainant was belatedly offered help, he remarked “You’ve looked into and you did nothing about it. We sorted it out at our own expense because your staff repeatedly lied in a way that suggests you have organisational issues”.

Indeed they have, but what has surprised me (not shocked – I am unshockable) is the sheer complexity and scale of the systems and agencies involved which one must navigate to make a complaint stick. I am running a text file, currently standing at nearly 40 closely-typed pages with case notes, on steps and procedures I must follow.

I have to say that even I find this complexity challenging and it is unsurprising that even the people within the system barely – if at all – understand how it works.

One part of that system, oddly enough, is the local authority which, through its highways department has certain supervisory powers over works carried out by statutory undertakers and can even impose penalties or require remedial work in some cases.

With that in mind, I have already contacted the local authority and today I am to meet one of our newly-elected Reform councillors (one of three in the ward), to see if he can help. It will be a learning curve for both of us, but could be a useful experience.

This could also have interesting political ramifications. As I remarked earlier, in pre-election opinion polling, “potholes” emerged as one of the main issues of public concern. Much of that, in this locality, is tied up with unmade, unadopted roads, about which previous administrations have done nothing.

Over the weeks after the election, when Reform emerged as the largest party with 29 (now reduced to 28) seats – in a 90-strong council, displacing Labour and rendering the council to “no overall control” status.

Reform is thus in the difficult position of having to seek a working coalition and I did remark at the time that, if anyone wanted a foretaste of how the Reform experiment could go horribly wrong, they could do no better than watch the unfolding drama in Bradford to see how it developed.

There was speculation that the Tories, with their 18 seats, could make up a ruling coalition with Reform, although that idea was quickly scotched by Tory leader Rebecca Poulsen.

As it turns out, by an arcane procedural device, Reform has been able to elect the council leader, but only by dint of all the other parties abstaining from the vote. The party also holds the key cabinet positions.

When it came to electing the chairs for the key council committees, though, the Tories joined up with all the other parties (not just the Greens, as was claimed) to elect their own people, freezing out Reform.

This, as a de facto coalition, is more or less in line with my thinking earlier. I suggested that, rather than align with Reform after a general election, if Reform came out as the largest party but without a majority, the Tories would align with the other parties to form a National Government, excluding Reform from office.

We are not quite seeing that scenario in Bradford, but something close to it. What will then matter is how individual councillors perform. There are plenty of opportunities for them to shine.