A friend who knows about water companies (he does municipal finance for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) emailed me to say something must be wrong in my Wednesday item about London’s water losses. I linked to a BBC report which said that London was losing 1 billion litres of water a year because of leaks.
My friend reckoned that’s pretty good. A city the size of London probably consumes around 1 billion litres a day, he wrote.
Sure enough, I went to the original source and found out that both the BBC and my reliance on it was wrong. The London Assembly reckons that London loses 1 billion litres a day thanks to leaks.
Simon Jenkins discovers blogs and gets a lot wrong in The Times. Harry’s Place has the full deconstruction.
I have to say my heart sank recently when The Guardian announced Jenkins was going to join it as a columnist. Surely they could have hired someone with energy and new ideas, not someone who ran out of steam a long time ago (he’s been a columnist on The Times for a decade).