4 JUNE 1948, Page 11

WATER INTO PIPES

By M. G. IONIDES NOT even the most ambitious economic planners have as yet proposed to bring the weather under their control, though there have been occasions when they have deplored its effrontery in mess- ing up their plans. The Meteorological Office, by a very recent precedent, is easy game for the role of saboteur, for not at least knowing what the weather is going to do even if it will not obey orders. The people of Manchester have a very special complaint ; too much rain stopped cricket at Old Trafford last week and too little rain has brought their water reservoirs down to a dangerous limit. Any number of people and authorities as well as the weather could be blamed for this double catastrophe.

But blaming will not fill the reservoirs this summer. Nor is Manchester alone in its predicament. Many water authorities up and down the country are in very serious difficulties ; the Metro- politan Water Board and other Northern towns are feeling the pinch acutely. It is, in fact, a big national problem in which there are close parallels with electricity. Six years' blank in new construction followed by an unexpected sharp rise in consumption ; difficulties in getting materials ; the cuts in capital investment last autumn—it is a familiar tale, and if water-supply was not something of a Cinderella among industries, we should have heard much more of it. We all take water too much for granted, possibly because water-supply is one of the most ancient of organised industries. At the beginnings of civilisation in Mesopotamia the very structure of society hinged upon an organised water-supply because without it no civilised society could exist there at all. It has always been one of the main signi of an advanced civilisation, and it is a thing in which we can least afford a serious breakdown.

The educative effect of life in the Forces for many millions of our people ; promotion of the Health Services ; rising standards of hous- ing, and perhaps a post-war instinct to consume more of everything, even if it is only water—all these have contributed to push demand well above the most liberal estimates, and the plain fact is that new works are so mirch behindhand in so many places that, with the best will in the world and the highest priorities which the Government could give, it must be some years before supply can really catch up. If the supply is not there, there is only one thing to do—take less. "Take" not " use " less, because there is no doubt that avoidable wastage is enormous. There are many towns where the citizens will waste water now at peril of finding the taps run dry at the next drought. Last summer's drought, with a recurrence during recent weeks, has dratvn down the reserves in many places to danger-level and beyond. The authorities are carrying on from day to day, but cannot build up their stocks to meet the poss:bility of a dry spell this summer. It is the water equivalent of the coal situation in the

autumn of 1946, when we faced the winter with inadequate stocks. That is the short-term picture, and it is ominous. It must rest with the people of the threatened localities to do all they can, since

in the short term no one can help them. The longer term opens up wider questions. A deliberate Government policy in housing and the social and educative services is stimulating—or even requir- ing—a much heavier consumption of water. A deliberate Govern- ment policy is destroying the capacity of water-undertakings to supply it by restrictions on capital investment and materials. What-

ever the merits of these two policies taken separately may be, and

they are many, they do not fit together. The practical problem of water-supply is first to find the water and, second, to get it into the pipes. It is significant of our times that discussion of the subject leads, and can hardly fail.to lead, straight into the realms of global economics and politics.

Sooner or later every practical problem of water-supply, as of any other industrial activity, comes to roost in Whitehall, and the further it is pursued the more it gets fiogged down in almost metaphysical issues such as the relative "social and economic advantages" of this or that course of action. An apparently simple problem of the supply of materials becomes a question of "economic choices." If you want some water-pipes you find that the " choice " is between some im- ported food supplies (which everybody wants) plus some imported gardenias (which nobody wants) and, on the other hand, the pipes

(which you want very badly but cannot have). This queer currency of " choices " takes us right back to the days of barter before money

was invented. The parties directly interested do not do the " choos- ing " ; we pay an army of civil servants to do it for us. This cur- rency has no quotable exchange-rate. It varies from authority to

authority and from time to time. It cart be used completely con- vincingly—in any direction, towards almost any conclusion you care to choose—and as often as not it cloaks the arbitrary view of its author and little more.

Yet there still persists the notion that economic planning is a science, a thing of cool calculation, of deliberate decision. The pretence lingers even though the "plan," we are told, must be "flexible," i.e., that we must not expect it to mean what it says.

Everything has to be " dovetailed " into the plan, though it is itself like a shifting quicksand. The more things are so " planned " at the

centre, the less can anyone on the job make any forward plans at all. So it is that although the Water Act is on the Statute Book ; though the River Boards Bill is having a smooth passage ; though the Ministry of Health is making invaluable surveys of water-supplies and of the flow of our rivers ; though, in fact, the instruments for a sound and sane administration are being created, the future hangs more than anything else upon how those instruments are used.

There was, and still is, a fund of goodwill towards the idea of Governmental action to co-ordinate our economy, and there is far less opposition on doctrinal or political grounds than the more sensi- tive of our enthusiasts realise. But a system cannot long persist which makes it impossible even to start a short article like this on a severely practical problem of water-supply without ending on the theory of economic planning. If all the time and ink spent on this subject during the last three years were converted into water-pipes and put end to end, they would reach, it is reliably calculated, from Land's End to John o' Groats and back several times over without ever passing through Westminster at all.