Andy Burnham’s instruction to officials to look at all options for Thames Water and not feel constrained ( Burnham urges officials to come up with more radical options for Thames Water, 19 October ) is welcome, but the options will fail unless they answer the right question.

Thames Water is not ill-regulated. It is extractively regulated. For 30 years the rules have allowed dividends paid from borrowing, debt loaded on to customers and sewage discharged into rivers as the cheaper alternative to investment. The creditors now asking for a further £2.4bn are not an aberration; they are the system working as designed.

Nationalisation changes who owns the shares. It does not change the rules. A publicly owned Thames under the present regime would inherit the same debt and the same incentive to defer repair; within a decade “public control” would mean ill-regulation by another name.

The Cunliffe review’s single water regulator closes one gap.…