The day I challenged the men digging up our road

There's a hole in my bucket dear Liza, dear Liza ... It's the catch-22, the circularity, that makes that age-old folk song strike a chord. To fix the bucket Henry needs straw, to cut the straw he needs an axe, to sharpen the axe he needs a stone, to wet the stone he needs water, and to fetch the water he needs a bucket. Round where I live there's a hole in the road which has much the same convoluted logic. In fact, Thames Water has dug three holes - and in doing so has blockaded Westbourne Grove, one of London's many minor arteries. The company intends to keep it closed until late summer.

You've seen the pattern everywhere across the capital. Half-hidden behind contractors' barricades, shopkeepers wait in hope for customers, pedestrians patiently take detours and motorists seethe. There is, it seems, nothing anyone can do about it.

And this is where Liza and her bucket come in. I asked the sub-contractors why it was going to take so long and they thought it could be done "a bit quicker" but said it would take this long because that's how long the contractors had specified, and the contractors told me that was the time Thames Water had allowed. So I asked Thames Water, who said it would take this long because that's how long the contractors needed, and referred me to Westminster City Council, who said that's how long it would take because that's how long Thames Water asked for.

Digging holes is something the utilities do well - they fence off 20,000 different sets of street works each year in Westminster alone - but eight months to fill them takes the biscuit. Thames Water has timed its incursion nicely, too, to coincide with work on a new pedestrian crossing just around the corner at Royal Oak Tube, so that traffic escaping from the bottleneck piles straight into another caused by Westminster and Transport for London.

What sort of hole does it take to close a high street for eight months? Thames Water wants to run an underground pipe for 500 metres to stop sewage flooding-local shops, an ambition which is very laudable. Of course, I have no doubt that if this was an emergency Thames Water could do it quicker. A century-and-a-half ago, Joseph Bazalgette would have put in several miles of fullscale brick-lined sewers in eight months, and no doubt thrown up a couple of palatial pumping stations, too.

The truth is that no one has a sense of urgency and no one needs to hurry because the system everyone works to is designed for laziness and inefficiency. It really doesn't matter to Thames Water how long it closes Westbourne Grove: it doesn't pay a penny for the privilege. Like polluters who don't compensate for dumping toxic waste, the utility companies have a virtually unassailable right to access their assets under London's thoroughfares. No matter that the streets and pavements belong to you and me, they can throw us off them almost as they please.

The answer, of course, is to charge them for all the dislocation that they cause. If you tot up the loss to local businesses, the delays to traffic, the pollution caused by diversions and the rest if it, Thames Water is wasting a lot of other people's money. London's boroughs have known this for ages and have been lobbying the Government for authority to exercise more control on street works.

Four years ago it looked as though they'd get it. The transport minister, Tony McNulty, trialled the idea in Camden and personally promised Westminster's traffic chief that he would enshrine powers for "lane rental charging" in new legislation then going through the Commons. But McNulty was one of those here today, gone tomorrow ministers, and as soon as his back was turned there were "consultations" and the utilities had the idea blocked.

Their defence was laughable but was enough to bamboozle officials at the Department for Transport: if you charge us for screwing up London, we will simply pass the cost on to our customers, so no one will be better off. I wish I could pull that one: I'm sorry, Mr Taxman, but I see no point in paying tax because I shall simply pass the costs on to my clients. In fact, why should I pay my gas or water bills, since the money will only go in a big circle?

The glory of making people pay for things is that it helps to balance supply and demand. It makes us prioritise. It motivates us to reduce waste. Most companies have internal markets for these reasons, the utility firms included. Westminster Council even charges itself to dig up roads, levying money from highway maintenance budgets to force its staff to close roads as sparingly as possible. But, bizarrely, privatised utilities remain exempt from such laws of economics when sequestering our streets.

Having had the wool pulled over their eyes by the utilities, ministers will now try to pull it over yours. They will tell you they have a wonder called the Traffic Management Act 2004 which, now that it has finally come into force this month, gives councils powers to regulate who digs where and when. However, the new rules are pathetic - a craven retreat from the Camden experiment. Local authorities can issue permits but in a piece of typical Whitehall control-freakery they have to seek permission from ministers first, and are specifically forbidden to make a profit on the licences, which means they still can't charge for the true economic costs of highway dislocation.

Instead they will be able to charge £240 for a permit and a £120 fine for those digging without one. It will be cheaper for the companies to keep digging and pay the fine. In desperation, local authorities are now trying to cajole the utilities into being better citizens, and when National Grid Transco planned to commandeer the busiest junction in Knightsbridge for several months, council officials managed to persuade it - voluntarily - to do it in little more than half the time Transco had said it needed.

What Londoners need is a minister who understands that our streets need defending. Those who would hijack them must be made to pay the proper price. The trouble is that, as with Henry's bucket, once we find a minister with some nous, we will then need civil servants with some balls, who will then need legislative time, by which time we will have a government reshuffle and will have to find a minister with some nous. By then, of course, someone else will be digging up Westbourne Grove.