Baroness Jenny Jones argues for national bills boycott amid surge in visitor numbers to website

Life peer presents powerful arguments for boycott in newspaper article as Boycott Water Bills sees huge upswing in visitor numbers and boycotters

In an article for The Guardian on 2 September Baroness Jones, who is a Green Party Life peer, said she had decided to stop paying the sewage services part of her bill to Thames Water last year as the water company 'makes a profit from pollution'.

'If the government wouldn’t act, I could at least do my part and not pay for this travesty,' she wrote.

It seems she is not alone.

Boycott Water Bills has seen a huge rise in the number of visitors to their website this summer, alongside an uptick in boycotters.

In the face of this government’s failure to deal with the water industry, more and more people like Jenny are taking matters into their own hands and joining the national boycott.

Through another disastrous summer of illegal sewage dumping, outages and hosepipe bans, the water companies have sent thousands towards our website leading to a huge uptick in both visitors and boycotters.

We welcome Jenny and all those who have decided to use their consumer power to fight the disgraceful behaviour of water company bosses.

They can no longer bully us with the threat of court to accept the environmental vandalism of our precious natural resources to fund corporate greed.

In her article for The Guardian, Jenny wrote: 'The case for not paying these outrageous charges is clear. The water companies are not fulfilling their duties and instead they are discharging raw sewage into our waterways and lives. Beyond that, they have brought in hosepipe bans, despite last winter being one of the wettest on record, because they haven’t built enough reservoirs to store water for use in the summer.'

She went on: 'They ask us to use water wisely, and send us advice on how to cut our usage, and to consider dynamic pricing, while at the same time failing to fix the leaks that lose about a fifth of all public supply in England and Wales. My final gripe is that a huge chunk of my bill doesn’t even get spent on fixing these problems; instead it is spent on interest payments for debts that enable Thames Water to pay shareholders billions of pounds.

'Nothing will change until these companies go officially bankrupt and the quickest way of ensuring that happens is if people stop paying their bills. A few decades ago millions of people did exactly that with the poll tax and the government backed down. (I was taken to court over that.) So why not use the same nonpayment tactic to end water privatisation? Even a few million of us delaying the payment of our bills by several months would threaten the viability of these water companies.'

Jones says the real solution is to nationalise the water companies.

'Public opinion is firmly in favour of renationalisation, yet the government keeps trotting out a fictitious number of £100bn as the cost of taking companies over.' she said.

'That figure is bogus because it includes the companies’ debt as part of its value. Many argue that the nationalisation costis actually far lower, possibly even zero.'