---

Water Management: S&T Report

My Lords, my first obligation this afternoon is to declare an interest. I am a farmer in north Essex. I have an abstraction licence which I use to fill a reservoir which holds 12 million gallons of water. I have no rivers on the farm. In a normal summer, no water leaves my farm. My average annual rainfall is a shade over 18 inches. When I built that reservoir more than 40 years ago, it took just over three weeks to fill it in an area where, anywhere else in the world, the rainfall would make it semi-desert. This somewhat colours my views on the problems. I am immensely grateful to my noble friend for introducing this report, and to the committee for all its work. It has highlighted issues, raising the scale of topicality and significance over the past few years. One difficulty which we must all face and deal with today is that there is and always will be a conflict between good water management and the environment. I seriously suggest that we also need to bear in mind that the United Kingdom environment in its widest sense is certainly not natural, and has not been for many centuries. It has been created by man, and we must recognise that. I am afraid that we must be able to go on adapting the environment as necessary, to deal both with the changing circumstances of the nation and a particular aspect which very much affects us in the south east: population growth. Of course, population growth does not affect only the south east. When I was a boy the populationof this country was about 45 million and now it is60 million: 30 per cent higher. You cannot service people without producing the resources they require. That puts greater pressure on the natural environment, a risk we must face. To mention an unmentionable subject, the population issue is not just one of a United Kingdom context, but a global context. It will have to climb rapidly up the ladder of topicality. To go back to global warming, there will be no solution to that problem unless we manage to get our global population numbers under control. That has all sorts of political and religious connotations, which are not appropriate here. It is, however, appropriate to remind ourselves of that background. The corollary of having no population policy is that we have an obligation to make the resources available if it can be done. It can be done. The difficulty we have had for a number of years is whether there is sufficient intention to overcome the difficulties I have outlined in this conflict between the environmental interest and the resource implications of growing population numbers. I highlight that from a slightly different perspective, because it is not exclusively our problem. We have heard about the European water directive, and we have European conservation directives. To bring the water and global warming issues together, part of the global warming issues, from a UK perspective, could be solved by getting hold of much more green electricity. We could get a large chunk of that from the Severn estuary, which has such environmental protection from Brussels that it would very difficult to get a barrage across it. At some point, we and other countries will find ourselves asking the Brussels Commission whether its priority is to bring global warming under control or to ““preserve the environment””—particularly knowing that if we unleash rising sea levels on these coastal areas, they, in turn, will destroy the existing environment as we know it. That is another dilemma we must face. I found an issue in the report slightly odd. The Consumer Council for Water made a comment tothe effect that water customers were paying for the demand created by society. I found myself saying, ““Hang on, what is the difference between water customers and society?””. We are society. I do not know anybody who does not use water, so I did not understand that rather strange comment. One cannot help but feel that that sort of attitude pressures people. I am not sure whether there is any evidence that society, as is apparently predicted, is concerned about the costs of water and prefers the low prices of today to the possible high cost of ensuring supplies for the future. Yet it is clear that there is a concern in the committee’s report that the water regulators have been driven by a priority for the current low prices at the expense of future water security. I was not sure whether this was regulatory, societal or government prejudice; I suspect it was the latter. That is all very well but, at some point, we will have to be much more positive about the need to serve society. The next question is whether we manage our water well. Reading the Government’s response to the report, as far as I can make out, all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds; it was very complacent indeed. It makes clear the depth, complexity and length of the consultation process required to do anything in water management. This must be tackled with great urgency. I am aware that the Government are looking at the planning process in other fields, but they must also consider it in this context. One must seriously ask whether a 20-year process to take you from the conception to the construction of a major water facility is reasonable. I cannot help wondering, slightly cynically, whether we shall have a 20-year consultation on how we must improve the planning system, because that is also highly controversial. The answer to the question of whether we manage our water well in this country has to be, ““No, we don’t””. We use only about 10 per cent of the precipitation that we receive. There are lands in other parts of the world that use a vastly higher percentage of their available water. Unlike everybody who wishes to knock Thames Water, I wish to pay it one important compliment. I acknowledge that it has all sorts of deficiencies, but it must have about the best water cleaning process in the world because the water we use in London is recycled five times between Teddington weir and Beckton. The reports on Essex and Australia mention the yuck factor, which means that when water is recycled, it is necessary to put it back in the river to make it acceptable to the people who consume it. I have not heard anybody in London complain about the yuck factor of drinking recycled water. I suspect that that may well be because the vast majority of people do not know it is being done, which is a serious compliment to the system that makes it possible. It also makes me wonder how many of the obstacles that we have to put in the way of progress through this immensely complex and sophisticated consultation process are, in effect, purely psychological barriers. I feel that the Government in particular and we politicians in general need to be much more robust about the need to promote essential infrastructure that will make life worth living for our successors. I was delighted to get to the final pages of the report for one reason; it reported on a visit to my region. There is a ray of sunshine; some really serious work is being undertaken on river basin transfer. Essex is one of the driest counties in the country, if not the driest. We had no water shortage this year because 30 years ago a river basin transfer scheme was put in place. That facility can be made available everywhere, if need be. It is not a question of building a national water main or of transferring all the water for certain individuals to certain places, as the Minister once said, but of producing a system that can take care of the marginal deficiencies in particular areas. That is what we are talking about, and that can be done. The Government must look carefully at how they can ensure that those who have the responsibility can better balance the pressure of the present with the needs of the future.