Thames Water has been fined £20.3 million pounds for discharging over a billion litres of sewage directly into the River Thames in 2013 and 2014.

That’s around £50 a litre if my maths is correct. After marvelling that any organisation of the size and responsibility of Thames Water could ever have allowed that to happen for five minutes let alone two years, I started to wonder who is really paying and where does the money go?

What happened was horrendous and it defies belief that such a preposterously vast amount of untreated excrement, nappies and condoms could be dumped into a river that barely a few decades ago was the subject of great excitement when the historical contamination levels had been reduced to the extent that fishes were to be seen under the bridges of London.

Clearly that has changed now and something had to be done. But it’s like the regular fining of NHS Trusts that are so strapped for cash that they frequently fail to make governmental targets for waiting lists and Accident and Emergency waiting times.

Their failure to do so is less surprising than that some genius somewhere considered that the best way to deal with that failure was to take £600 million in fines out of an already stretched budget.

At least NHS England has now implicitly acknowledged that in deciding this year ‘to suspend penalties and instead allocate an extra £1.8bn to incentivise hospital performance improvement’. Bravo!

So the £20.3 million penalty imposed on Thames Water will have a beneficial effect on that company’s ability to provide us with good clean water, will it?

If anyone believes that the shareholders alone will bear the financial cost, they spent too long bathing in the Thames a couple of years ago and the product has entered their brains. The consumer will pay. Water rates will rise. And the other question is what happens to the £20 million?

Will it be used to help clean up the damage and compensate the thousands of people who suffered, the anglers and fishermen put out of business, the farmers whose livestock were poisoned, the young people using the river for sport and recreation who were made ill?

Answers on a postcard please.