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Amid widespread hosepipe bans, yet another jump in water bills is a particularly bitter pill.

There is no doubt that water companies are not working in the way they should.

Leakage rates are an abomination and there has not been nearly enough investment in other infrastructure such as new reservoirs. Water company directors are trousering huge salaries and bonuses, while the regulator sits idly by.

Something has to change.

Commercial customers have the liberty to choose their water supplier, just as they can their providers of gas and electricity.

So why do residential customers not have the same flexibility and instead find themselves handcuffed to one under-performing water monopoly?

Surely a solution to this never-ending misery of rising bills would be to find a way to open up the residential market, too, helping drive down prices through competition and innovation.

One policy that will absolutely not help is renationalisation – at a projected cost of £140billion – unless the goal is glasses of brown drinking water all round.

Andy Burnham - pictured in Dover earlier this month

Andy Burnham has expressed a vague desire to shake up utility companies as part of his plan to tackle the cost of living.

Rather than looking to the gas and electricity market – which is working tolerably well – the Prime Minister should make an urgent, sensible start with our rapacious, dysfunctional water companies.

Burnham's class war

Kemi Badenoch is right to say in her article for the Daily Mail today that Labour is still the party of the spiteful class warrior.

The Government has vindictively imposed VAT on private school fees and nobbled private enterprise with a host of new taxes and red tape.

Now Mr Burnham wants to foist thousands of illegal immigrants upon towns and villages which are less likely to vote for his party.

The Conservative leader points out this is the same strategy advocated by Reform, which has said it would locate migrant detention centres in Green-voting areas.

Policy driven by malice is never the solution, especially when this particular issue is so divisive, costly and difficult.

Rather than using the consequences of the Channel crisis as a means of punishment, Labour should instead direct its attention to stopping migrants arriving here in the first place.

All the hard-working young people who received their A-level results yesterday are to be warmly congratulated.

There shall be no praise, however, for new Education Secretary Lucy Powell after her absurd remarks last week about how an emphasis on academic learning was 'letting down' disadvantaged pupils.

Contrast her twisted view of the world with results posted by the Michaela Community School where, under 'Britain's strictest head teacher' Katharine Birbalsingh, 70 per cent of pupils obtained A and A* grades despite it serving one of the country's most deprived communities.

Good exam results can be a springboard to an accomplished and productive life, especially for those who come from an underprivileged background.

There are always those for whom other routes will be a better fit, which is why there should be a growing emphasis on technical qualifications in parallel with more traditional academic pursuits.

But talking down knowledge, as Ms Powell seems to have been doing, will serve no good at all.