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Thames Water needs to be replaced.
honestly the maths on this is wild. theyre asking for a 33% bill hike on top of what we already pay, and for what? leaking pipes and sewage in the thames. i live near twickenham and the smell some mornings is grim. if everyone in london just stopped paying for a month theyd have no leverage, but getting 16 million people to coordinate is the hard part. the regulator ofwat is basically a rubber stamp too, so dont hold your breath for them to step in.
the problem with a mass boycott is that water companies are legally allowed to cut you off or take you to court for non-payment, and Thames Water would prob go after the loudest people first to scare everyone else back in line. i live in tooting and my mate tried withholding his bill for three months back in 2022, they just sent bailiffs after him and added fees onto his debt. the real leverage is with the big commercial customers like hospitals and factories, but they wont risk the disruption. the whole system is designed so that the only way out is government stepping in or ofwat actually fining them enough to hurt, which we both know wont happen.
Good luck with that. The government would probably bail them out before it got to that point, leaving us all to foot the bill anyway. It's a rigged game.
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What are some innovative ways to anonymously compare rental prices in a city?
SpareRoom's "rooms wanted" ads are underrated for this. people post what they're currently paying alongside what they want next, so you can scrape a rough sense of going rates by postcode without anyone knowing you looked. it skews young and flatshare heavy tho, so not much use if you're after 2-beds in zone 2.
Another one is just the depozit or tenancy deposit scheme data. not public-facing, but your council's housing officer can tell you median rents from deposit registrations if you email them under FOI. takes weeks, but its proper anon and nobody clocks u.
Rightmove and Zoopla only show asking rents, which are often 10 to 15 percent above what a place actually goes for, so they're a poor benchmark. The trick I've used is the ONS Price Index of Private Rents, which breaks things down to borough level and is genuinely anonymous since it's aggregate data, no listing or account needed. For something more granular, the London Renters Union runs a rent reporting tool where you submit what you're paying with your postcode and it maps it against others nearby, though the coverage is patchy outside the inner boroughs.
the openrent "rent check" thing is decent for zones 3-4 where the unions tool barely reaches. also worth checking the london.gov.uk planning portal for new build applications, they list "affordable" and market rent figures per unit in the viability assessments, which is basically the developer telling the council what they expect to charge. bit of a faff to dig through but its public, anonymous & nobody knows ur looking