Any other business: Drought, what drought? It’s still raining money in water company boardrooms

‘Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote/ The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,’ wrote Geoffrey Chaucer, long before scientists realised that wind turbines cause climate change by raising night air temperatures. If Chaucer’s General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales gave us pungent insights into late 14th-century English life, then its modern equivalent is surely the 2011 annual report of Anglian Water, whose operatives are currently busy replacing all those hosepipe-ban warning posters that have been washed away by torrential rain.

I note, for example, that on turnover of £1.1 billion of which £266 million came through as net profit — a monopolistic money machine, if ever I saw one — the company boasts of spending ‘an additional £4 million on preventing and detecting burst mains’ last winter, while investing £267 million by 2015 on increased protection for ‘plants, animals and habitats’. At least there’s no mention of investing in wind turbines.