Life is better bathing with a friend

Remember the days before the water industry was privatised? On those rare occasions when Britain had a baking hot summer, the water companies called for restraint. Hosepipe bans would be ordered, standpipes set up and advice issued to take a bath with a friend. We all did our bit in the spirit of Dunkirk. Remember 1976?

Suddenly all that has changed. The sense of civic duty has gone. No longer do we think of ourselves as citizens with a stake in this natural resource. We're consumers. We want value for money but we feel short-changed. When we are asked to save water, many of us think: "Stuff 'em. I'm paying for it, so I'm going to use it. Saving water is not my problem."

It's a metaphor for Britain in 1995. This is a country in which belief and confidence in individual rights is growing. And that has had great positive benefits. We have grown less tolerant of inefficiency, injustice, frustrating bureaucracy and poor service. But something has been lost in the process: a sense of collective responsibility. As we have become more hardheaded and unyielding, Britain has seen the disappearance of old feelings that if we all pull together (rather than in different directions) then everyone could be better off. Relations have been reduced from a social contract to a monetary one, a more mercenary form of association.

It is a depressing picture, at odds with talk of communitarianism. And so a major challenge is posed. How can the new healthy assertiveness be fostered, while restoring something of the old sense of public spirit?

The water story demonstrates the dangers. Trustworthy, if rather moribund, civil servants were once at the helm of the industry. Their practices were outdated. Underinvestment was chronic. They were managing steady decline. The industry had only itself to blame for the revolution imposed upon it. It was crying out for reform and for pressure from articulate consumers prepared to inundate poor managers with complaints. But at least this regime was in principle devoted to the public interest and citizens responded to its requests in that vein.

Now, there has been a culture change. When privatisation took place five years ago, much was promised in terms of improving supplies with a huge programme of capital spending. But people have seen the old bosses effortlessly turning themselves into tycoons, enriching themselves with generous share options and inflated salaries. They talk the language of markets and competition but their new-found affluence comes courtesy of a natural monopoly. Water rates have risen well ahead of inflation while the service seems not much better. As the National Rivers Authority reported yesterday, too little has been spent repairing leaky pipes: the plumbing is still awful.

So when these new masters of water, troubled by drought, revert to the seemingly archaic language of public service and duty, we cannot take them seriously. Their opportunism just creates anger. We cannot stay silent. After all, Britons enter the debate as experts. The water issue is an offshoot of the country's chief obsession: the vagaries of the weather. We all have an opinion on what has gone wrong.

We should care a great deal about declining feelings of civic responsibility, as evidenced by the water debacle. A collective spirit still underpins much that is good in Britain. It has sustained a National Health Service which the country feels immensely proud of and in which people are prepared to wait their turn. The most life-threatening illnesses are given priority and everyone, even the poorest, has equal access to healthcare. If the NHS was sold off, and a private payment system was introduced, this ethos would change. There would be benefits, perhaps, in terms of efficiency and consumer satisfaction. But who would be prepared to make sacrifices for the less well-off if hospitals were chiefly interested in making profits for their private shareholders?

Likewise, state education maintains a sense of public service to all, even the most difficult, least gifted pupils. This is in danger. Increasingly schools seek to cherry-pick the brightest pupils and turn away the troublesome ones. There is more competition which should improve standards. But the sense of responsibility that individual schools feel towards the wider polity is under threat.

So how should the privatised utilities and other more commercially orientated institutions set about preserving a sense of civic duty? They could learn a great deal from industries which have always been in private hands. These companies have long known that customers warm to more than their product: they want to feel that a company is serving a wider public good. So, for example, all the great corporations spend millions of pounds each year on philanthropy. A company such as the burger giant McDonald's is at pains to be cast as helping "the community". All this contributes to diminishing the "us and them" relationship between business and the consumer.

By contrast the recently privatised utilities are newcomers to the art of presenting themselves as a public service. In the past, the fact that they were nationalised seemed proof enough of that ethos. Being publicly owned protected them from serious challenge. But in the harsher privatised world they are measured by different standards and values. Their traditionally cavalier approach to customers is no longer acceptable.

If the newly privatised utilities do not change their tune, we will all be worse off. Every man for himself does not always produce the optimum solution. Anarchic consumer behaviour will mean that our rivers empty for the sake of keeping lawns green. Our bus system will move still more slowly if car drivers, unsympathetic with profit-making privatised fleets, refuse to give way to them. And if there is a general decline in a sense of civic duty, the effect will be felt widely among those who rely upon public support: from the police to the voluntary sector.

This drought should focus the minds of everyone. A nation of consumers will not suffice: we must also be a nation of citizens.