Corporations listed publicly on the London Stock Exchange are required to comply with the Financial Reporting Council’s Listing Rules, which include specifications for good governance and risk management. 

As Southern Water is not a stock exchange listed company but is privately owned, it cannot be required to comply with such standards. Nevertheless, Southern clearly wants the world to think that it conducts itself as if it were a Listed company. Its website boasts of how it is wholly committed to the substance and all the trappings and trimmings of good governance, just as if it were a Public Limited Company (Plc). 

That is Southern’s attempt at ‘impression management’. What is the reality?