Spending money like water
William Charlton
et n Wednesday next week the Queen will V take part in an opening ceremony for the Kielder Reservoir scheme. It will be a great day for the small group of men, elected by no one and responsible to no one, who have formed the nucleus first of the Northumbrian River Authority and then of the Water Authority. They decided on the scheme 15 years ago. Since then there have been embarrassments. Their estimates of growth in demand for water turned out to be five times too high. A chairman was jailed for corruption and a vice-chairman shot himself because he was afraid of going mad. They have seen an industrial recession and a fall in population. Shrugging all this off they have pressed for- ward to build the biggest man-made reser- voir in Europe. In the process they have destroyed one of the last unspoilt valleys in England, their annual turnover has risen from £0.4 million to £84 million, and the number of people they employ from 150 to 2,300. They have built an empire.
The Kielder White Elephant, as a recent article in New Scientist called it, is not just a huge artificial lake in the forests of north- west Northumberland. That is only the body of the animal. The trunk, in the form of a gigantic tunnel capable of squirting out water at the rate of 250 million gallons a day, stretches from the Tyne to the Tees. It is this tunnel-aqueduct, with its attendant pumping stations and pipes, which ac- counts for the greater part of the £167 million the scheme is admitted to have cost so far. The purpose of the reservoir is to release water into the upper North Tyne. Thirty miles downstream the water is then to be pumped out and sent through the tun- nel to industry on Teeside. In 1967 the authority said Teesside would be out of water by 1974; the chemical and steel in- dustries were going to grind to a halt. To- day there is still a surplus of 20 per cent on Teesside, and no prospect of a shortage anywhere else. The White Elephant will bring resources up to just about double present requirements. Hence the authority's emphasis now on the recreational facilities it is providing; though if recreation was the aim, £170 million might have been better spent than in constructing a midge-infested lake 50 miles from the nearest centres of population.
How did Kielder come into being? In 1964 Parliament rationalised a relatively large number of river boards into a smaller number of river authorities. The Northum- brian Authority got an area covering the north-east from Berwick to Middlesbrough. It first met in 1965, and the well-known An- drew Cunningham was appointed chair- man. At that time the large Cow Green reservoir in Teesdale was already being pro- moted. That finished passing through Parliament in spring 1967. In June, after a meeting with people from ICI and the Tees Valley Water Board, Mr Cunningham per- suaded the authority to set up a consultative committee to investigate further sources of supply: Cow Green, it now seemed, would not be enough. On 1 September the com- mittee (which included Mr Cunningham and seven other members of the authority) met for the first time and recommended building a Tyne-Tees aqueduct. The same day (in the same place, a private room in a Durham hotel) the authority accepted the recommendation. In the years that follow- ed, that decision was never allowed to be questioned, and once the aqueduct was decided on, a reservoir the size of Kielder was needed to fill it. The authority subse- quently made much of the fact that a work- ing party of the (national) Water Resources Board also recommended this aqueduct. Since the authority was well represented on the working party, and even supplied its first chairman, the agreement is not so sur- prising.
Two factors determined the Kielder site. First, no other site could provide enough water to fill the smallest viable aqueduct. Secondly, the people affected were defenceless. In the Thirties the Forestry Commission acquired 70,000 acres around Kielder, complete with tenants. It owned all the 70-80 houses which would have to be submerged. Owner-occupiers and private landlords raise an outcry and spend money lavishly to fight reservoir schemes, but nothing like that was to be feared from the Forestry, which justifies its meanness as a landlord by saying it has a duty to the general public. It leaped at the excuse to get rid of houses which were expensive to
Paul Johnson will resume his column next week.
repair, and actually gave evidence against its tenants, in support of the authority, at the public inquiries.
The authority testified that the whole of the new supply would be used by 2005. This forecast was based partly on figures for past consumption which objectors managed to prove false, but mainly on reported verbal assurances by unnamed Teesside employees of ICI and BSC. ICI, though it was to use nearly half of Kielder's water, never ap- peared at the inquiries, and the witness from BSC, allegedly the next biggest
user,
did not stay to be cross-questioned, perhaps because the plans on which he based his estimates had not been (and never were) all- proved by London. Despite the dubious nature of this evidence, neither the inspec- tors nor the department ever questioned the scale of the need. The authority saw the importance of public relations from the start. Its first act after deciding on Kielder was to engage the services of a major local advertising agency' The agency did well: its glossy broadsheets distributed free around the North Tye, helped to stifle local opposition, and It always had a director breathing down the necks of the young reporters covering the inquiries for the local press. The authoritY also asked Sir Frederick Gibberd, the famous landscape architect, to give evidence at the inquiries. He said the scape of the North Tyne was much less %NW' thy of preservation than that at any alter- native site; but it was remarkable that he apparently formed this opinion after a one- day visit on 21 November 1969. The Department of the Environment delayed authorising Keilder because s° many people would lose their homes. The authority bombarded MPs with documents urging them to save Teesside from drought' and the vice-chairman of the Water Resources Committee personally visited the people whose homes were at risk, asking them if they would not prefer lakeside villas. (Needless to say, these villas later turned out to be too expensive to provide',: The Kidder scheme was approved on October 1973. Two days later Mr Cann' ingham ceased to be a member of the authority. He had been voted out of the chair when London refused to sanction palatial new headquarters designed by Mr J.G. Poulson. In April 1974 he pleaded guilty to 'receiving inducements' in canner" tion with authority projects. In the sane month Parliament upgraded the liver authority into a water authority. The area remained the same and the members Most closely connected with the Kielder scheme stayed on, but the new name brought with it responsibility for sewage and certain funce tions which had been discharged by in' dependent water undertakings. The numbe,i; of employees rose from 235 to 2,110, an annual expenditure from £1.7 million to £23.2 million. Perhaps because of these excitements, the Kielder scheme advanced slowly. The con' tracts were not let until 1976, nine Years after Mr Cunningham's meetings with ICI' In the interval there had been an oil crisis and a recession, and demand had grown at only a tenth of the rate predicted. Never- theless there was no way of getting the scheme reconsidered. In the spring of 1976 prominent residents in the North Tyne valley wrote to every MP and council in the North-East, pointing out the lack of need and the likely expense. The Member in whose constituency Kielder is situated was also the Minister who approved the scheme; he said that because he was Minister he could not speak for his constituents in Parliament, and because he was MP he had to leave the ministerial decision to a col- league.
Local people opposed the scheme not because it would spoil the scenery — in fact Kielder provides pleasant relief from the Forestry's black, loss-making spruces but because of its effect on the population. The valley is marginal land and thinly populated. The reservoir displaces 50 families who had been there for generations and were the main repository of pastoral traditions and skills. With their expulsion the top end of the valley is isolated, local tradesmen have lost a vital margin of custom, and 15-20 miles of country look like going the way of many remote parts of Scotland: after hundreds of years of slow domestication they will revert to wilderness. Such losses are not easily repaired. They will not cease until bodies like water authorities are brought under effective control.
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