Why cheaper water bills may harm your local river!

[Chris Plumb]

I always make a point of reading Brian Clarke's monthly installment in The Times. Here's his current, worrying missive.

 

Why cutting cost of your water bills leaves a high price to pay

By Brian Clarke, Fishing Correspondent

 

 

 

THE decisions that affect angling waters most are taken in places about as far removed from rivers and lakes as can possibly be imagined — and are often taken without angling in mind at all. A classic example is about to emerge from the politically charged process that is setting domestic water bills for 2005 to 2010.

It should set alarm bells ringing and here’s why. Water prices are set in five-year cycles. They reflect all the costs that the water industry needs to meet during the period, including improving the environment. The companies draw up plans after consulting the Environment Agency (EA), English Nature, conservation groups, consumer groups and others.

 

 

 

These plans are reviewed by Ofwat, which has the job of controlling prices in a monopoly industry. Ofwat talks to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which talks to No 10, there is a bit of to-ing and fro-ing and six months before they are due to be introduced — in this case, next spring — domestic water prices for the next five years are announced.

 

Now down to Wiltshire and Wessex Water plc (WW), by way of the little River Till, which runs into the Wylye, itself a tributary of the Avon. These rivers are all prime chalk streams and, notionally, have the highest levels of environmental protection. They are Sites of Special Scientific Interest under UK law and have Special Area of Conservation (SAC) status under European law. One of the key reasons for their status is their ranunculus communities: ranunculus is a fast-water plant that supports a chain of aquatic life and gives chalk streams much of their special character.

 

Both the Till and the Wylye have, over recent years, suffered chronically low flows. An EA study implicated abstraction and, in particular, a pumping station that WW had opened at Chitterne, high on the Salisbury Plain, in 1989. This station, research showed, was sucking up the groundwater on which the Till and the Wylye relied. In the water-pricing round for 2000 to 2004, WW came up with a neat solution.

 

Water would be pumped from close to the Avon’s mouth, upstream to Chitterne, from whence it could be piped to consumers in the usual way. It meant that the river system would have had use of the water, there would be no need to pump at Chitterne and the rivers could be left to flow on their merry way. It could all be achieved for £105 million, which WW was happy to support.

 

All’s well, then? Alas not. In the review process, Ofwat threw the scheme out, so shaving £6 a year from average Wessex region bills of £250 a year. Conservationists were up in arms. After much argy-bargy, a trial scheme was mooted. Under it, WW would buy some water from elsewhere and Chitterne would only be pumped as a last resort. The goal was to reduce the 16 million litres a day allowed, to only two million in practice. The arrangement would run to 2006. We would see how we go.

 

And how did we go? In 2003, the first full year of the scheme, 10 million litres a day were pumped through summer and autumn, the Till dried up almost completely and local anglers, staff from EA and, yes, WW, had to net fish from the river as it shrank around them. They did this not once on the Till but six times, rescuing hundreds of stranded trout.

 

On the Wylye, which had begun the year brimming after heavy winter rains, flows reached record lows by summer and the ranunculus community — one of those key reasons, remember, why these rivers have SAC status — disappeared from miles of it. At the end of December the Wylye was running at only 40 per cent of its normal level.

 

So now, in this new pricing round, is everyone rushing to make amends? They are not. The £105 million scheme has sunk from sight. Instead, WW is proposing to spend only £6 million on abstraction problems across the whole of its region between now and 2010. It says that, under the Habitats Directive, all abstractions need to be reviewed over the next few years and it wants to see what the whole problem is before taking any action on specifics. So the status quo persists.

 

A few days ago Ofwat bolstered WW’s hard line by seeking cuts of £5 billion on measures in the water companies’ national plans that would have improved rivers and wetlands. Michael Meacher, the former Environment Secretary, immediately described the demand as “madness”. Not only angling bodies but the heads of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and of the wildlife trusts publicly gave warning of the continuing impacts of “unsustainable water abstractions and polluting sewage discharges”. Now the news columns are reporting that No 10, anxious to keep water bills down in the face of the council tax storm, would like to see the proposed cuts go even deeper.

 

So, rivers supposed to have the highest levels of environmental protection are in danger of dying. They are rivers where the already-threatened salmon spawn and on which one angler is funding the creation of a gene bank in case the local strain of trout is lost completely. They are rivers in which the prized ranunculus communities are withering. And if this is all happening in rarefied, vigilant, protected Wiltshire, what faits accompli are being decided for rivers elsewhere, deep in the small print of the pricing round? So does that remote, politically charged, five-year grinding of business numbers have anything to do with angling? Does a fish need water?

 

Similar flow problems on my local river (Kennet) have been blamed on extraction at Axford near Marlborough...

 

 

Chris

[Lid]

Thanks for the info Chris. What should we do to try and stop this madness from continuing?