There are some corporate outrages so big, persistent, pernicious and easily verifiable that any PR strategy to make the company or companies more palatable, unaccompanied by contrition, apology, serious and measurable reform and some form of restitution, is destined to make matter worse.
This is the position water companies in the UK find themselves in, and no shiny lobby group, such as the newly announced Water UK, under the helm of a skilled and authoritative frontwoman like Ruth Kelly, can amount to a hill of beans in the eyes of a furious public and nervous politicians.
Judging from Kelly’s performance on the Today programme this morning (you can listen here from 8.10 for the next 30 days), water companies are in big trouble indeed.
Don’t get me wrong: Kelly was magnificent. Calm, reasonable, passionate in the right places, word-perfect. Had we spent 100 hours rehearsing I could not have improved on her performance.
The problem is not that she is not a skilled PR front woman. The problem is that some things, once they’ve crossed the (arguably high) threshold of public indifference, are simply indefensible and the slicker the PR machine around them, the higher the stench of dishonesty and deceit the public will smell.
The other odour dominating this conversation, let us not forget, is the literal stench of shit. Privatised water companies have been making handsome profits and have remunerated their CEOs grotesquely for years while the infrastructure crumbled beneath them.
Since Brexit, freed from those pesky EU Water Quality standards, the collapse of infrastructure has ‘forced’ the water compaines to regularly pump huge quantities of untreated wastewater into Britain’s rivers and coastline. This decision (what else could they do when they weren’t forced to do the right thing?) affects millions of people’s health and livelihoods (tourism, fisheries, you name it).
Since both Government and opposition are now sniffing, respectively, electoral doom and an avalanche of votes from this issue becoming septic, the consensus amongst water companies' executives has been to reach for PR rather than growing a conscience.
Water UK, said Kelly, is asking for £10bn of taxpayers’ money to kickstart an ambitious programme of infrastructure upgrades to this ‘century-old asset’. She was referring, I think, to Britain’s largely Victorian plumbing, but it was not clear while a century had had to elapse before any action was contemplated.
The fact that other invaluable assets – people’s health, ecological stability, clean beaches – had been blithely squandered to make a buck was neither here nor there. That was, one was left to assume, the cost of other people doing business.
Water company CEOs, Kelly told us, are now seriously concerned about the situation, and want to do the right thing. Some of them are not even making huge profits these days and almost all of them would be prepared to agree to the freezing of environmental bonuses for bosses, added on top of compensation packages already reaching into the millions, if environmental standards don't improve at some unspecified time in the future.
This, by the way, must have been the first time most of Radio 4 listeners would have realised shit-pumping, overpaid corporate bosses currently receive environmental bonuses on top of their pay.
So, the government, in other words taxpayers, would be expected to advance the £10 billion loan which customers would then repay in higher bills for decades to come.
I am a great believer in communication and earned my living from it for 12 years. But words need to be connected to some reality, however hazily. Thoughts and prayers and a bag of public cash are no recipe for generating real change, just a postponing of a public reckoning.
It doesn’t matter how well you say it. How reasonable and authoritative you sound. This is a shit deal for everyone who isn’t the CEO or a shareholder of a water company. The stench, physical and metaphorical, is unbearable.
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