Bramley, a picturesque village in Surrey, is an unfortunate example of a modern disease plaguing Britain: the disappearance of responsibility.
What started as a mysterious stench in the basement of a café has turned into a full-blown ecological and bureaucratic disaster, with gasoline seeping into the earth and local authorities shrugging their shoulders. A petrol station once owned by the Co-op and now run by Asda has been leaking fuel for years, causing significant damage to the environment, residents and their livelihoods. But the most disturbing part of the saga? Nobody wants to take responsibility.
To outsiders, the story of Bramley’s misery reads like a Kafkaesque nightmare. A broken pipe under the Asda forecourt leaked fuel into the village’s water system, contaminating supplies, killing fish and requiring pipes to be replaced. Since May, 600 households can no longer safely drink their tap water. Thames Water is doing what it can, but residents are left with a village scarred by constant roadworks and disrupted businesses, with their homes now potentially sitting on a toxic petrol slick. Their concerns about property values seem to be falling on deaf ears.
Asda, the current owner of the petrol station, has done a masterful job of distancing itself and labeling the problem as ‘historic’. The supermarket chain is now majority owned by private equity giant TDR Capital, a fact that only reinforces the sense of faceless corporate negligence. Meanwhile, Surrey County Council hands responsibility to Waverley Borough Council, which claims it has no power to intervene. The Environment Agency remains silent, citing an ongoing investigation, while the UK Health Security Agency claims its role is “advisory rather than regulatory”.
Asda’s chairman Lord Rose, who was this week revealed to be taking over from Mohsin Issa, told a residents’ meeting in the village that there would be ‘no quick fix’.
For the residents of Bramley, this constellation of agencies, councils and companies theoretically exists to protect them. But when their small village was plunged into crisis, everyone pointed fingers elsewhere, leaving the villagers confronted with an unnerving reality: When something goes wrong, no one is willing to take responsibility. It’s not just a local problem either; it is emblematic of a much wider problem in Britain today.
This shift away from responsibility is something Dan Davies explores in his book The irresponsibility machinethat paints a bleak picture of how large systems are structured to avoid accountability. Bramley’s Kafkaesque dance of passing the buck is a perfect example of what Davies calls an ‘accountability sink’ – a place where decision-making is so fragmented that no one is ever blamed when something goes wrong. Bramley has unwittingly become a symbol of this modern malaise, in which vast bureaucracies and corporations have lost the ability, if not the will, to respond to human problems with anything other than indifference.
The Bramley saga is not just a strange occurrence; it is the result of a long-developing trend toward non-accountability. It’s a mentality that began in the early days of corporate structures, when limited liability allowed investors to reap the rewards of risk without bearing the full consequences of failure. Davies explains that this made sense when the risk was spread across individual shareholders, such as a widow investing her savings in a railway company. However, in today’s world, it is the private equity giants and multinational corporations that benefit from this protection, shielded from blame if something goes wrong.
So what happens when the system becomes so unwieldy that the feedback loop between action and consequence breaks down completely? For the residents of Bramley, this means finding themselves in a maze of agencies and authorities who seem to have no real interest in solving the problem. Companies like Asda, backed by private equity, are keen to claim that the issue predates their ownership, leaving villagers frustrated and feeling abandoned. It’s a passing-the-package game, with no winner, only losers.
Davies suggests that systems built to manage the complexity of the modern world often break the direct link between decision-making and responsibility. As organizations grow and processes become more industrialized, the people within them lose their sense of agency. It’s not that no one cares, it’s that they operate within a framework designed to prevent anyone from caring. This is what Davies compares to a ‘decerebrate cat’ – a system that can function in a technical sense, but without the ability to respond meaningfully to real-world problems.
For the people of Bramley, this cold, sober system is all too real. They face the frustration of speaking to low-level officials who simply do not have the power or authority to take decisive action. In many ways, the problem goes beyond the specifics of the gasoline leak: it speaks to a much larger crisis in our institutions and businesses, where the pursuit of efficiency and profit has made human-scale problems invisible.
What is especially devastating is the realization that this could have been avoided if someone, somewhere, had cared enough to take action sooner. In a simpler time, a leak would have been fixed, an apology made and compensation offered. But now it seems impossible to even determine who owns the problem. The residents are left in a void, where corporate interests, local governments and national agencies all act as if the matter is someone else’s to solve.
The truth is that the system is designed to fail them. The rise of private equity, the breakdown of regulatory responsibility and the erosion of local government power all contribute to a culture where it is easy to avoid responsibility. And unless something changes, Bramley’s experience won’t be unique. Other towns and cities across the country may soon become entangled in similar networks of indifference and passivity.
Bramley’s fate is a warning. It shows what happens when accountability slips through the cracks, when systems are designed to protect organizations rather than the people they serve. If we don’t address these liability issues, the question won’t be whether another village will suffer, but how quickly it will.
Richard Alvin
Richard Alvin is a serial entrepreneur, former adviser to the UK government on small business and an Honorary Teaching Fellow on Business at Lancaster University. Winner of the London Chamber of Commerce Business Person of the year and Freeman of the City of London for services to business and charities. Richard is also Group MD of Capital Business Media and SME business research firm Trends Research, regarded as one of the leading experts in the SME sector in Britain and an active angel investor and advisor to start-up companies. Richard is also the host of Save Our Business, the US-based business advice television show.