Over the years the UK’s energy and water companies have been privatised and sold off.
We now appear to be in a situation where a high percentage of our energy and water supplies are owned by foreign investors.
How common is this state of affairs outside the UK e.g. in the US or mainland Europe?
It depends on how far through you want to drill. These days, capital is international.
For example, two of Britains “big six” energy suppliers are owned by German companies. Those companies are German in the sense of being incorporated and headquartered in Germany, but they are publicly-quoted companies which in turn are owned by shareholders. Both companies have shares listed not only on German stock exchanges but on US stock exchanges, and both German and US exchanges are open to investors from all over the world, so their shareholders would come from a wide variety of countries. The bulk of those shareholders are themselves institutions which, in turn, may have a wide variety of owners or stakeholders from many countries.
Another two of the big six are owned by British parents, but the same holds good; the British parents are publicly-quoted companies, owned directly or through institutions by a wide variety of shareholders and stakeholders from many countries.
So it’s an oversimplification, in most cases, to identify British energy companies as either British owned or not British owned. The immediate parent companies may be headquartered in or outside the UK, but in terms of who the ultimate owners are, where the profits ultimately flow, where the control ultimately resides, that tells you less than you might expect.
We can make an exception for the British energy company EDF Energy, which is a subsidiary of Électricité de France S.A. which, although a publicly listed company like all the others mentioned, has 85% of its shares held by the government of France. That is owned and controlled in France, and by the French government.
Is this a typical state of affairs in countries apart from the UK? Yes, very. In general either utilities of this kind are state-owned, or they are publicly quoted and therefore owned, directly and indirectly, by a wide variety of investors from all over the world. There may still be some countries which have privatised utilities, but which also have investment markets that are closed to foreigners, but that’s not very trendy these days.
Why does it matter? It’s not as if they can outsource the water supply to Bangladesh. We can already choose between competing suppliers for power, gas, communications etc. Soon we will be able to choose a water supplier.
Actually, sometimes it does matter, when you get things such as installations designed by someone who doesn’t understand the local physical or social geography at all and approved by someone else who didn’t realize what they were approving. I’ve seen that way too many times, and one situation in which you get that risk is when all designs are handled by the mothership.
The average rain amounts are similar for London and Seville. The rain patterns, and therefore the things one can do with rainwater, are extremely different (Seville rains are mini-monsoons).
Plus, it tends to avoid hills.