Seems like Yorkshire Water has given up on customer service - David Behrens

It’s those involuntary reflex actions that knock you sideways when the water goes off: reaching for the kettle, trying to flush the loo or wash your hands when you pick something nasty off the floor. It took me nearly 24 hours to get used to it.

The water that should have been coming out of our taps earlier this week was instead gushing from not one but two burst mains and flooding the main street of a village 15 miles away. A whole swathe of the East Riding, teeming as it was with holidaymakers at its busiest time of the year, ran dry. Shops and businesses had to close; two surgeries cancelled their appointments.

More water was wasted than a whole summer of hosepipe bans could have saved.

Let’s not get carried away: we have a soft life and going without water for a day isn’t the worst thing that could happen. It’s hot and dry here at the moment but it’s not Africa.

That must have been Yorkshire Water’s way of looking at it, too, because it seemed to me they were doing as little as they possibly could to tell anyone what had gone wrong and how long it was going to take to put it right.

This is a company the information age has passed by. Customers were reporting waits of more than half an hour to get through on the phone, the links on the website didn’t work and the firm’s ‘social media channels’ contained only a line at a time of cut-and-pasted platitudes. Those who requested more details were asked to supply their addresses and phone numbers, as if they were being spied on or the information they wanted was somehow privileged and not for general consumption.

It wasn’t as if the problem was unexpected: the Edwardian water mains in these parts are forever bursting. At one point, someone counted six such incidents in a year in Hull alone. The pipes in your home would go the same way if you didn’t service them for 95 years.

Look, the underground network can’t be fixed in a day – but a day is plenty for someone who knows what they’re doing to flush out the communications blockage, and it would cost little or nothing. So why doesn’t Yorkshire Water do it?

I think it’s because they’ve given up. They never gave a tinker’s cuss in the first place about customer service and now that the customers are revolting, they’ve hunkered down and tuned us all out.

While the world around them is complaining about sewage in the sea, leaky pipes and third-rate executives earning more than Lionel Messi, they’re sitting around with their fingers in their ears, chanting ‘la la la, can’t hear you’.

We’re not dealing with an isolated oversight: on the same day the East Riding ran dry the company was supplying bacteria-infested drinking water to Buckden in the Dales and presiding over traffic chaos caused by roadworks in Ilkley – and neither was reported on those social media channels of theirs, even though the Dales scare is the subject of a public health warning to boil water before drinking it.

You can’t entirely blame the staff for this complacency; it’s hard to feel motivated when those above you are so transparently taking the proverbial, trousering huge and unwarranted bonuses for presiding over a failing company that everyone hates.

But the two ranks are equally guilty of being selective with the facts. Just as the CEO Nicola Shaw felt it unnecessary to originally disclose her £1.3m in backdoor bonuses, her staff treated the requirement to boil water in Buckden as just another inconvenient truth not to broadcast unless compelled.

That sort of behaviour is so common today that we have a new word for it: gaslighting, the process of being manipulated into doubting what you know to be true. It’s not uniquely a corporate phenomenon but as corporations go, Yorkshire Water is on regulo nine.

Its dirtiest secret, in league with the other water companies, was the extent to which it has been polluting England’s lakes and rivers – every one of which has now been revealed to contain chemicals and sewage. Yorkshire Water is one of the worst offenders: its failure to maintain the infrastructure has turned what should have been its greatest asset into its biggest liability.

That’s why the mayors of West and South Yorkshire declared last week that people were sick to death of being gaslit over the dearth of clean water and that it was time to hold Yorkshire Water to account.

But that is easier said than done, for it is not in the mayors’ remit. Consequently Yorkshire Water scarcely pays them lip service.