Prescott’s drought
Rod Liddle says that the government’s house-building programme is causing a water crisis ‘If it’s yellow, let it mellow, If it’s brown, flush it down.’ Advice on lavatorial behaviour given to youngsters by the headmistress of a school in London, 2005.
The charming little rhyme quoted above was a public-spirited attempt on the part of one educationist to ensure that her pupils became aware of the present water shortages. In a few years’ time she may have to alter the last line to: ‘If it’s brown, keep it around’ — which, I grant you, neither scans nor properly rhymes, but would nonetheless more accurately reflect the state we’ll be in by about 2015, or even 2010.
The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has already told us to take showers rather than baths, to wash the car with a bucket rather than a hosepipe, and not to flush our lavatories if — and I quote his eminence — ‘you’ve just had a pee’. Like you, I’m all in favour of our elected representatives involving themselves more closely in our most private acts, ablutions, micturitions and so on and would welcome all manner of official tips, hints, etc. Ken is clearly concerned by the present water crisis — right now there isn’t enough of it. Not sufficiently concerned, however, to sign up to a long-term strategy to alleviate the situation — of which more later — but certainly, in a dignified, mayoral sense, bothered.
The Environment Agency’s latest bulletin on water supplies attests to the rectitude of Ken’s concern. For July, it states: ‘River flows continued to decrease at the majority of sites ... river flows remained well below the long-term average at all sites in our Anglian, Midlands, Southern, South West and Thames regions.’ The lowest levels of all are those in southern and central England.
So that’s the rivers. As for ground-water, the situation is even worse. All are well below the long-term average and ‘levels are furthest below long-term average in the southern chalk aquifers’. The reservoirs are drying up, too, with stocks again at their lowest in the south-east of England, where they are operating at about 75 per cent of the expected level for the time of year.
So that’s why the mayor is telling us about what to do, or not do, when we ‘pee’. A hosepipe ban is just around the corner for the first time in 15 years and, as you might have predicted, it’s the water companies that are getting it in the neck. Only a matter of months after we’re told that we will have to pay an extra £70 on our water bills, we discover that Thames and Anglian and Mid Kent et al. are still having great trouble keeping hold of the stuff. The story became the familiar old one of leakage from the mains — which is, indeed, still pretty bad. But it is not so bad as it was a decade ago; the companies have been replacing their disintegrating pipes, albeit not as quickly as we might wish.
So the cause is elsewhere. Global warming, certainly: we have experienced more dry winters (winter is when the reservoirs and rivers are supposed to fill up) and in the last few months the situation has got worse. Sussex has experienced just 17 per cent of its expected rainfall lately, and the figure for the whole of the Thames catchment area is just 24 per cent.
But the real problem is a vastly increased demand. This is partly down to the fact that the south-east of England is becoming more densely populated, through internal migration and immigration. But it is also down to the fact that the people who live in the south-east have much more leisure time on their hands — and more leisure means greater use of water. Further, people are choosing to live in ever smaller ‘units’ and often choose to live by themselves. The equation, for the water companies, is very simple: the larger the household, the lower the per capita use of water. For some reason, when we’re by ourselves, we spend aeons wallowing in water.
So bearing all this in mind, you might expect the government to have taken the water issue into consideration when it announced its plans to build and build upon the south-east of England. Even in the comparative short-term, some 500,000 new homes are planned for the south-east in the four growth areas identified by John Prescott — the M11 corridor between London and Cambridge, the Milton Keynes area, the Thames Gateway and at Ashford in Kent. But in the initial stages of the plan it became absolutely clear that the government had not consulted the water companies, nor the body which represents the water industry nationally, WaterUK. It has, retrospectively, begun to do so.
One of the problems is that the water companies do not have an obligation to provide sustainable development — their job is to provide water according to demand, full stop. But that’s not all: an EUdirected strategic environmental assessment for the new homes was effectively sidestepped by Mr Prescott, who put his plan into effect before the thing had been carried out. A year ago Keith Mitchell, from the South East Regional Assembly, told the government that the proposed new homes would create a water crisis and an ever poorer standard of living and quality of life for those living in the region.
The greatest impact will be felt in London, which expects to see its population increase by 800,000 over the next ten years. A spokesman for Thames Water told me: ‘This is a huge issue for us. The new homes will have a huge impact. There will be a very serious risk of demand outstripping resources.’ This is why Thames Water has been pleading, unsuccessfully, for a desalination plant to be built in the Thames Gateway area — but this has been vetoed by Ken Livingstone as being an inefficient use of energy. Thames also wants to build a new — and enormous — reservoir in Oxfordshire, a plan to which the Mayor of London is rather less antipathetic. Of course, the people of Oxfordshire are not so sanguine. But somewhere along the line we’ll need to step on someone’s shoes, or despoil their backyard to deliver more water: you can’t have everything.
Without these two major capital projects, London will be parched. The Thames spokesman mapped out the likely effect: ‘Some of our abstraction licences will be lost because we’ll be draining too much water and there will be an adverse impact upon wildlife and the environment. We will have hosepipe bans, stringent restrictions on water use and, if we don’t get the go ahead for such projects as the desalination plant, there’ll be a serious risk of shortages and the likelihood of standpipes in the street.” Tom Oliver, from the Campaign to Protect Rural England, goes still further. ‘There is the possibility that with such increased extraction we will contaminate the chalk aquifers. There will be an enormously expensive trade-off for the environment. We’ll need to rethink the way we do our farming and encourage the planting of secondary woodland in order to keep hold of the water which falls on the land. It is a massive issue for the capital and the country.’ The CPRE itself has said, ‘The environment simply can’t take the scale of growth which has been planned. There are limits to what the environment can cope with.’ Tom Oliver suggests that the impact will fall upon the poor first and hardest: they will have higher water bills, they will face greater restrictions on their use of water. It will be, he suggests, a pretty miserable existence.
And there’s another risk, too — ironically enough, one of flooding. Rainwater needs soft ground to drain away.
All of this doom-mongering, of course, is predicated upon the fact that the government really will go ahead and concrete over most of the south-east of England (while failing to invest in costly water extraction plans to serve the new population). In drawing up its proposals, the government used a mutation of the old predict-and-provide model. But if you provide more and more cheap homes, more and more people will want to live in them and the demand increases exponentially. This is precisely what we saw with the old road-building programme: traffic very soon builds up to fill the new roads and soon enough you’re back where you started from. You might argue that, left alone, the market could solve the problem: the high cost of homes is a strong disincentive to moving to the capital and as nobody actually wants the population to increase still further, why, then, buck the market? There is no ‘shortage’ of homes in most other parts of the country.
Still, in the meantime, we must remember not to flush the lavatory too often or, as an alternative, practise better control of our bladders.
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