Kicking Their Sewage 'Into the Long Grass'?

The scandal of England's privatised Water Companies continues. They were given the 'emergency' option of discharging untreated sewage into rivers and the sea, when heavy rainfall threatened to overwhelm their treatment systems. Water Company profits (they were monopolies) were supposed to be used to upgrade the inherited Victorian systems. For decades, however, companies saved money by discharging untreated material even when there was no rain. The money saved was actually used to boost shareholder dividends and to enrich their CEOs. After much negative publicity, they announced a plan to tackle their 'sewage crisis' by investing £11bn between 2025 and 2030 in upgrades. The plans for this 'urgent' work have now been delayed by '4 months' (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/17/uk-water-industrys-urgent-plan-to-tackle-sewage-pollution-delayed-by-four-months). It's said that "justice delayed, is justice denied". Prognostication, however, seems to be standard political device for dealing with any number of UK scandals (e.g. the use of tainted blood products to treat haemophiliacs, the Windrush controversy sending legal UK residents 'back to the Caribbean' and the jailing of innocent Sub-Post Office folk for theft by claiming that a faulty computing system was infallible).