No, actually it's been very profitable.

Uh, how are you defining disaster?

Not for the shareholders and especially not for the boards.

It was standard practice under Thatcher's privatisation program for the ministers responsible for pushing the legislation through would suddenly - and completely unexpectedly - be given jobs on the boards of the newly privatised corporations they'd created.

The economy is not run for the likes of you or me or people who can't pay their inflated bills after 'competition' has had its way with them.

It is quite unusual to see that the world leaders in privatising water around the world have been the two big French utilities, Lyonnaise des Eaux (now Suez) and Compagnie Générale des Eaux (now Veolia via Vivendi). Unexpectedly for France, the water sector has long been privatised and run under long term concession given by local authorities (actually, it used to be by local representatives of the central government, until the decentralisation of the 80s, when this was transferred to local governments, with the result that corruption skyrocketed, as the local guys were much less experienced to negotiate these contracts).

The lesson in that is that you need someone extremely powerful to negotiate with  such private groups (like the highly centralised French State, old style), or you get corruption and higher prices.

On the other hand, water distribution in third world countries is so hopelessly skewed towards the (small) middle class at the expense of the (much larger) poor that privatisation, well managed, could bring real progress for the poor that already pay horrendous prices for water. Of course, the "well managed bit" requires good governance, and competent governments, so, as in other sectors, it's not the best reform to improve services when government doesn't work already.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes