Johann Hari: The real reason there are more rats than ever

The rats are getting closer. A year ago, you were never more than 18 metres away from a rat. Today, the figure is 14 metres and falling. The whiskery inhabitants of the original Room 101 are enjoying their best years in Britain since the 1851 Public Health Act first began to industrially beat them back - and unless we change our policies fast, they will get closer still.

Britain has been the battlefield for a protracted war between humans and rats for millennia. Some centuries they seem close to winning, and some centuries we push back their armies to the point of destruction. In the 1660s they gave us the Black Death, and in the 1950s we gave them coagulants - poisons that thin the rat's blood so its internal organs haemorrhage away. For most of the 20th century, we fought them to a standstill, their numbers holding steady while ours rose fast.

But in the past decade - cue the Dam busters theme - the rats have had a breakthrough. Last week, the National Pest Technicians' Association issued its annual report, pointing there is now one rat for every British person - an increase of 39 per cent in the past seven years. This isn't just a gross-out moment. It has consequences. Rats can kill humans in 35 different ways. By gnawing through electrical cables, they cause a quarter of all urban fires. Some doctors fear that we are getting close to a public health hazard.

So what happened to let the rats charge onto the beaches and mount the cliffs in this mini-Dunkirk? The right-wing press has tried, bizarrely, to blame environmentalists. "The mania for recycling has caused a plague of vermin!" shrieked one on its front page, in a story claiming the rats are feasting on the nation's compost heaps. There's a few problems with this. The rat surge began 10 years ago, before the "mania" for preventing catastrophic global warming went mainstream, and the report lists composting as the seventh on its list of concerns. The report's real menace - unmentioned by the right-wing press - is water privatisation.

A year ago, I spent a week hanging out with London's rat-catchers for a story. I trudged around the gardens, dumps and sewers of London with the ultimate Reservoir Dogs, carrying their bags of lush turquoise poison and gradually understanding the roots of this scandal.

Until water privatisation, London's councils fended back the rat armies through a simple procedure called sewer-baiting. "We would lift up the manhole covers and lower a load of poison down," says Gary Sheppard, a rat-catcher for Westminster Council. "It would always be eaten, so we knew it was needed."

But then in 1988 the Tories sold off the water monopoly to Thames Water, a corporation accountable to private shareholders rather than to us. They didn't see why they should spend money on killing rats when they could pocket it as profit, and the practice stopped.

This happened across Britain. The report warns that now "only lip service [is paid] to the very serious matter of sewer baiting ... [This] refusal time after time to undertake or financially support pro-active treatments is steadily causing serious concern because of its knock-on effect against the public's health."

Westminster Council was so appalled by the drastic rise in the rat population that resulted they begged Thames Water to act. But last year, in the week the corporation announced a 31 per cent rise in profits, Sheppard told me: "They just don't call us back or turn up to our meetings. They deny there's a problem. One guy even said rats don't like water so why would they be in the sewers?" Eventually the council had to start sewer baiting themselves, with public money, even though they insist it is not their job. They saw a drastic drop-off in rat numbers by nearly two-thirds. "But most water companies and local councils aren't doing it," Sheppard warned, with a worried shake of the head.

The explosion of rats across Britain is another bleak parable about the folly of market fundamentalism. Rather than seeing markets as a useful tool, the Tories saw them as the One Shining Truth, the solution to all problems. This led them into a startling corporate giveaway. They simply transferred money from the tax-payer - you and me - to wealthy share-holders by paying off £5bn of water company debt, selling off the system at 22 per cent of its market rate, and even exempting the new private monopolies from paying profits taxes. Money that was once spent killing rats was simply handed to corporate shareholders.

Even on its own terms, this was crazy. For all their talk of markets, the Tories had failed to understand why markets work, and the regulations left the responsibilities of the water companies dangerously vague. It's not private ownership in itself that makes markets efficient - it's competition. There is no competition in water. Nobody is going to build a second set of taps in your home, giving you a choice of providers.

Privatising a natural monopoly simply licenses fleecing of the customer for private profit. The water barons have increased their pay by 200 per cent since privatisation, whacked up prices by more than 50 per cent - and slowed to a trickle all the vital public interest procedures such as sewer-baiting and infrastructure repairs.

It is a market fundamentalist article of faith that by pursuing their private interest, corporations automatically enhance the public good. It's time to smother this fantasy in rat poison and lower it into the sewers.

j.hari@indpendent.co.uk

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