Water way to go...

Today won’t go down as water company Severn Trent’s finest hour, and the £35 million fine that industry regulator Ofwat wants to wallop it with says everything about how serious it viewed the way falsified data led to you and me paying inflated bills.
This isn’t the first time that the water firm that serves this patch has covered itself in something other than glory in the past few days.
Severn Trent is a stock exchange quoted company that has to issue a trading statement ahead of the publication of its audited annual results. This is a kind of early forecast of how it thinks it has done during the year.
Facing a thumping by Ofwat, having a record of failing to curb leakages, and being under constant scrutiny from consumers over prices versus profits, you’d think it would be on best behaviour.
Apparently not. While the people charged with telling the media about the trading statement made sure national business editors were fully briefed, they decided that regional newspapers – in other words, the papers read by Severn Trent’s customers – should be sent nothing.
This wasn’t an attempt at secrecy – such a course of action in today’s online, connected world is futile – but it appears to suggest that the company considered that informing the City, shareholders and City editors was more important than talking to customers on its own turf.
For a company that probably already knew it would have a reputation to repair, that wasn’t clever.
It pales into insignificance alongside the falsification of data. But it does suggest the company is going to have to patch up more than a few pipes to rebuild a sullied image.