I work at a municipal water and sewer utility in Turkey (planning and design of drinking water and wastewater networks), so leakage is my day job, and London vs Tokyo is the comparison that keeps coming up. I pulled the published numbers together:

Thames Water, 2024-25: about 569 million litres a day lost to leaks, 20.8% of the water it puts into the network (Ofwat Water Company Performance Report 2024-25). That's roughly 230 Olympic pools a day of water that was already treated and pumped. It supplies about 10 million people through ~31,000 km of mains and ~2.6 billion litres a day.

It's not just Thames: England and Wales together lose about 2.9 billion litres a day, around 20% of supply.

Tokyo, FY2024: 3.5%, while distributing ~4.2 billion litres a day over 27,585 km of pipe (Tokyo Bureau of Waterworks). It was about 15% in 1982, 10.2% in 1992, under 5% by 2003 and 2.0% in 2012.

How Tokyo did it: 97% of its leak repairs are on the small service pipes from the main into each building, so it has been replacing those with stainless steel since the 1980s, and every new connection since 2005 is stainless. Plus night-time acoustic surveys to catch leaks before they surface. The 1964 "Tokyo desert" water rationing just before the Olympics is a big part of why the city took it so seriously.

Why London is different: for decades the yardstick in England and Wales was the "economic level of leakage": fix leaks only while a repair costs less than the water it saves. With cheap water and very expensive street works, that point comes early. Add London clay that shrinks and swells, and old cast iron mains that crack rather than flex.

To be fair to Thames: leakage is down from about 915 Ml/d in 2004-05 and ~630 in 2022-23 to 569 now. Slow, but real.

The money side: the company had no debt at privatisation in 1989; today it's over £20 billion. Under Macquarie (2006-2017) debt went from about £3.2bn to £10.7bn while about £2.8bn was paid in dividends. Ofwat has allowed average bills in England and Wales to rise ~36% over 2025-2030. Rescue talks with creditors are still going on, with special administration as the fallback.

I made a video out of this (sources in the description): https://youtu.be/DLq814SY-SQ

Disclosure: it's my channel, and the narration is an AI clone of my own voice. Londoners will know the local side far better than I do, so I'm genuinely curious: does the clay/cast iron explanation match what you see with burst mains in your area, and is there anything I've got wrong about Thames? I'll correct it in the pinned comment.

I genuinely think the government needs to start having a serious conversation about overhauling the welfare system, Universal Credit, housing benefit etc, before we get hit with a wave of unemployment that the current system just isn't designed to handle.

The way I see it, the current system is largely built around the idea that if someone loses their job, they get some financial support to keep them going until they find another one. But what happens when there isn't another job to go to?

With the pace AI is developing and companies already looking at reducing their workforce, I worry we could end up overwhelming the welfare system before the government even has time to react.

And where would the money come from? Surely at some point we need to start talking about taxing the companies that will be making enormous profits from replacing human labour with AI. If businesses can operate with a fraction of their current workforce, those profits have to go somewhere, and the people who lose their jobs will still need to survive.

I also don't really buy the argument that AI will create more jobs than it destroys. I know that's what happened with previous technological revolutions, but this feels fundamentally different. We're literally building machines designed to replicate human intelligence, and eventually physical labour through robotics too. AI has already surpassed a large proportion of the population in certain knowledge-based tasks, and it's only getting better.

And before anyone says AI isn't good enough yet, we've been having that same conversation for the last few years. People were laughing at the idea that AI could replace certain jobs not that long ago, and now companies are actively working out how many employees they actually need.

I'm not saying mass unemployment is guaranteed, but surely we should be planning for the possibility rather than assuming everything will work itself out?

Some companies are already moving beyond just experimenting with AI and are starting to see it as a genuine way to reduce labour costs. And once the financial benefits become obvious, what exactly is going to stop everyone else from following?

What concerns me most is the lack of any serious public discussion about what happens if this goes badly. We could be facing a situation where millions of people are capable of working and want to work, but there simply isn't enough work left for them.

I don't have the answers, but I do think these conversations need to happen now, not when unemployment starts spiralling and the welfare system is already under enormous pressure.

Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic, but I feel like we're sleepwalking into something that could fundamentally change how our economy works, and nobody in government seems to be taking the worst-case scenario seriously.

Interested to hear what others think, especially anyone working in industries where AI is already replacing jobs or management who are currently testing these Ai's to see if they can reduce headcount.