There's lots of stuff being written at the moment about the ludicrous water companies with their ludicrous hosepipe bans and their ludicrous determination not to do the job we pay them for – looking after our water supplies. We particularly enjoyed this cogent little offering in the Daily Wail by Ross Clark ...
Once it was British Rail which used to lead the world in feeble excuses, telling us in February 1991 that it was the 'wrong kind of snow' which had brought the trains to a halt.
But British Rail has now been surpassed by the water companies. For despite the fact that last month was officially the wettest April for 100 years, they continue to insist that south-east England is in a dire state of drought. Last week Thames Water's 'external affairs and sustainability director' Richard Aylard even tried to convince us that the deluge won't help to end the hosepipe ban because it is the wrong time of year for rain. Ignoring the fact that streets have been flooded throughout the land, he blithely insisted that rainfall in April is of little long-term value because it will simply be absorbed by plants.
Thames Water customers, who have just seen their bills rise by 6.7 per cent and some of whom are now having to sandbag their homes against the risk of flood, may be excused a sense of bewilderment. How can the four-plus inches of rain that fell recently simply vanish?
Southern Water has also made similar excuses, telling customers that April's record rains were 'too little, too late'. It is a contemptible way to treat customers by an industry which knows it has them over a barrel. Despite privatisation, the water companies still enjoy local monopolies which give consumers no choice.
The truth is that the regular shortages customers have to endure are not simply a result of dry weather; they are a result of chronic under-investment in the public water supply. Water companies, most of which are now in foreign hands, find it more convenient to bully and frighten us into using less water than to spend money themselves on new reservoirs and pipes.
For days we have been told by water companies that the extraordinary amount of rain we have just seen is no use, because it doesn't seep into the water-bearing rock, or aquifer, deep below the soil from where they draw much of their water supply. Rather, they tell us the water is being held in the top layers of soil or that it 'runs off' ground surfaces into the rivers. This is a feeble excuse for it overlooks one obvious fact: if the water is running off into the rivers, the water companies should have made more of an effort to capture it.
In fact, ever since privatisation 20 years ago, water companies have taken the easy way out: becoming too reliant on boreholes which tap deep groundwater supplies, while failing to invest in reservoirs. Now when rain falls, instead of being collected, it mostly gets soaked up by the soil or runs off the surface of the land directly into the rivers.
The picture is complicated further by the fact that urban development prevents water from seeping into the soil and causes more to run off into rivers. A surface reservoir, however, can be rapidly filled in wet weather whatever the time of year. In fact, thanks to this month's deluge, reservoirs in London are 100 per cent full. But there are not enough reservoirs, because hardly any have been built in the past 30 years.
To be fair to Thames Water, this is not entirely the company's fault. It has had a plan since the 1980s for a £1billion reservoir – capable of holding half as much water as Windermere, England's largest lake – south of Abingdon in Oxfordshire. But the scheme was finally rejected by Tory Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman this spring after concerns about damage to wildlife habitats. Thames Water has refused, however, to consider a more environmentally friendly way of bringing much-needed water to the dry South East.
It isn't hard to guess why water companies have been so resistant to the idea of piping water across the country. If we had a national water grid, there would be nothing to prevent the Government introducing competition in the industry just as it has done with gas and electricity. That would mean the end of water companies' cosy monopolies. How then would Thames Water – part-owned by Australian investment group Macquarie – afford to pay its chief executive £1.67million in salary and bonuses as it did last year?
What Thames Water has done has been to build a desalination plant at Beckton, east London, to remove the salt from limitless supplies of sea water that lap up the Thames estuary. But it is a small venture into a technology of the type which the Spanish have been successfully using for 40 years. Spain now has more than 900 such plants compared with just Beckton here. There are no further desalination plants proposed in Thames Water's Water Resources Management Plan. What the company is planning, however, is to bombard us with ever more propaganda telling us to save water.
Last week, puzzled pedestrians braving the rain in London were handed car stickers with the slogan 'Be Proud to be Dirty', imploring them not to wash their cars. It turns out it is a campaign devised as part of Thames Water's Water Resources Management Plan – a document which every water company is obliged to produce to explain how the company intends to maintain an 'efficient and economical system of water supply'.
Yesterday, Thames followed this by launching another campaign designed to convince sceptics the water situation is still critical. 'One wet month verses two dry years. We need many wet months to make up the shortfall of the driest two years since records began', the posters state.
That may be, but it still dodges the fact that water companies are not investing in new infrastructure. Under the rules of the Water Act, they can – if they prefer – meet their obligations by managing demand for water instead.
True, it has been dry over the past two years – but in Thames Water's strategy a 'drought' has been redefined from a rare event to a regular occurrence.
From a water company's point of view you can see the attraction: given that only a third of British homes have water meters, most of us pay the same bill regardless of how much water we use. If they can cajole us into using less water, they will receive the same money for a reduced service. The problem is that when customers hear water companies complaining about water shortages when large quantities of the stuff are falling out of the sky, it is a strategy which just won't wash.
Well said, that man. Even if you do work for the nation's crummiest newspaper. It was probably no coincidence that we received this heartfelt missive from B** T***** ...
Water Meters – Short Term Gain, or Long Term Pain?
Water suppliers constantly promote the benefits of metered supplies to reduce our costs but there is increasing evidence to suggest that this may only be a short(ish)-term benefit. The number of South West Water’s (SWW) domestic customers who reduced their bills by using meters to the year end 2008 was 28,500. By March 2011 this number had fallen to 14,200, a 50+% reduction. A further 14,198 ‘free’ meters were installed in 2010/11.
Given that 71% of domestic properties in the SWW area are already fitted with meters there are clearly many dwellings that are making no savings by having their water metered. This said SWW, as a result of switches to water meters over the 3 year period to March 2011, has suffered a loss of revenue totalling £23.4M. Clearly this loss of income is unsustainable to any business, particularly when vast amounts of money have already been invested in upgrading long neglected infrastructure and for which repayment will continue for many years to come.
Despite the positive spin that water authorities attempt to put on their service provision they are, first and foremost, businesses with a monopoly within the areas that they serve and with dividends to pay to their shareholders and bonuses to their executives.
I believe that ultimately compulsory meter installation will be implemented. My main concern is that, despite reassurances from Ofwat, water suppliers will not be satisfied until such time as their charges are on a par with other utilities. In December 2009 The Walker Report was published entitled – ‘The Independent Review of Charging for Household Water and Sewerage Services’. This 226 page report strongly recommends a move towards metered domestic usage with increased support for those on low incomes. Basically, if you are already in receipt of certain State benefits, you gain to a degree; if you’re not then things are not so encouraging.
The Walker Report also discusses the idea of ‘Cross Subsidisation’ between the different water companies, whereby those customers currently paying lower charges would contribute towards the higher prices of other regions. Unsurprisingly, it is generally accepted that this would not be welcomed by water companies and their customers who already have lower charges.
Walker also proposes that consumers within a water company area could be responsible for funding improvements to water supply systems but that we, the customers, would be consulted on whether specific work and the associated cost was necessary. I believe we are all aware of the true worth of ‘customer consultation’.
The highest paid SWW Director’s income/benefits for 2011 was £506,000 (2010: £466,000), a £40,000 increase!
Can we really depend on Ofwat to do what is in the best interest of us, SWW customers? A newspaper article published in July 2011 commented, “West country MPs have reacted angrily after the “useless” watchdog that monitors water bills was given a clean bill of health. A so-called “health check” of Ofwat found no major change was needed, despite it being branded as “useful as a chocolate teapot” by critics after failing to protect South West Water customers from inflation-busting increases in charges”.
The GOS says: Go to Google and put something like “toilet flush standards” in the search box and you'll find dozens and dozens of websites that exhort you to save water. They explain how our water use has multiplied in the last fifty years, they prophesy grimly about what will happen if we don't listen, they threaten what will happen if we don't comply, and they offer bright and breezy fun ways to save water. Strangely none of them mention my own favourite solution, which is to shower with the teenage girl over the road.
I went to a bird reserve the other day, and in the public toilet there was a poster on the wall explaining how 30% of our water use is for flushing the toilet. Between 7.5 and 11 litres per flush is the norm for 60% of UK households. “Time after time, day after day, year in year out, this water expenditure is excessive and presents a significant environmental issue. Currently 30% of all the water we use is just flushed down the toilet”, they say.
There actually is no shortage of water. The world's full of the bloody stuff. Scotland's full of it. Wales is full of it. Tewkesbury's got a fair bit, as well. It's just that it's in the worng places. How is that a problem? We can build trains that do 200mph, we can put a man on the moon, we can dive to bottom of the deepest ocean, we have oil tankers five miles long, at any given moment there are more people in the air over America than there are on the ground ... we're good at moving things, so why can't we move some water a couple of hundred miles down the A1?
Odd, isn't it, how the environmental gurus who these days rule our lives, or would like to rule our lives, never pause to wonder whether some of the things modern society does might actually be right? I mean, do we ever hear them saying “Hmm, so there are 7 billion people in the world, are there? That sounds about right ...”?
Do they ever wonder if there's a damn good reason why mankind has never taken seriously the idea of generating electricity by collecting cow farts? Does it occur to them that farmers might possibly be responsible custodians of the countryside, or that there may in fact be certain species of bird, animal or fungus that are not under threat of imminent extinction from mankind's activities?
Of course not. The knee-jerk reaction is alive and well and living in ... well, practically everywhere, really ... the Guardian, the BBC, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Save the Whales, you name it, they jerk to it. Especially the BBC.
Lots of people in the world? God, that's terrible news, it's bound to be unsustainable, no of course we haven't actually done any research, but it stands to reason, doesn't it, they're all going to starve? Farmers? Well, they plough the earth and scatter stuff on it so they're bound to be damaging some little earwig or something, why can't they leave the earth alone and let Mother Nature get on with it, seeds being broadcast on the wind or dropping out of starlings' bottoms and so on? And as for motorways, factories, housing estates, docks, railways, gas terminals, anything that disturbs a single blade of grass, we should ban them all because the welfare of thousands of humans is infinitely less important than a blade of grass, we can all see that!
So stupid are these earnest, cagoule-clad erstwhile hippies that they are actually damaging the resources they seek to save. Since 1st January 2001 the Water Regulations (1999), which replaced the previous Water Byelaws, require cisterns to have a maximum capacity of 6 litres. Even this volume represents an average water expenditure per person of 30 litres a day, they wail. They suggest the “problem” is not insoluble.
That's the way it works, incidentally. Think of a figure, call it “a problem”, start a campaign to make us all feel guilty that we haven't resolved it, then get themselves comfy jobs in which they are paid to persuade us to solve the problem, carefully ignoring the fact that it wasn't real in the first place but something they made up.
Anyway, they say we can solve the problem of the profligate potties – all we have to do is (a) stop going to the lavvy altogether (by (i) not drinking, (ii) not eating and (iii) dying), (b) flush the loo with our washing-up water, or (c) invent a new kind of toilet that is flushed with spit. If we don't do some or all of these things, they threaten us with global famine, rising sea-levels, increased volcanic activity in Basingstoke and £1,000 fines for non-compliance.
The manufacturers of toilet equipment have jumped on the band wagon. Instead of designing effective toilet bowls like the ones you get in Germany where the debris is whooshed off a horizontal shelf by a vicious jet of water, they've given us the dual-flush cistern. A short push produces 4 litres of water, which isn't enough to do the job so you have to press again and hold the button. This produces a princely 6 litres, which gets most of the “material” just round the u-bend where it'll sit for the next hour staining the water brown.
You don't fancy this, and anyway there are still two little poo-ettes bobbing buoyantly in the pan, so you wait until the cistern has refilled and you give it another long flush which finally does the trick.
That's really environmentally friendly, isn't it? Makes you feel really responsible for Mother Earth and all the little earwigs, doesn't it? You've used a total of 16 litres of water to do a job that used to be done more effectively by a high-level cistern with a chain you pulled to release an irresistible deluge of about 10 litres of water from a height of seven feet, sweeping all before it. And we saved the planet all right in those days - I mean, the planet's still here, isn't it?
One manufacturer even suggests we should install “the Sandringham low flush close-coupled dual flush WC which has a 4 litre long flush and a 2.6 litre short flush, ensuring maximum water economy. 2.6 litres may seem a particularly low volume, but it is sufficient when delivered by the ergonomic Sandringham WC”. Sufficient? Sufficient for what? To gently moisten your turds in the hope they'll take the hint, grow fins and swim away by themselves?
Give me strength! And I mean that – give me a strong flush from a considerable height, and I'll use a damn sight less water. That's what you want, isn't it?
Bastards.
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
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