Fishing Breaks - The untruths of the Environment Agency

Life on a Chalkstream

25th February 2022

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The untruths of the Environment Agency

How the Environment Agency uses climate change to deflect the true reasons for the impending water supply drought

Dead and soon forgotten
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Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill
Quiz

Greetings!

The Environment Agency (EA) are at it again. Last week came news from the government in the form of the Consumer Council for Water (CCW) that we are going to run out of drinking water in parts of Britain within the next 20 years. Who is to blame? Well, if you take the EA at their word, it is climate change.

My antipathy for the EA, mostly surrounding their inability to prosecute polluters, is well known. In that they make me despair but in their claims of climate change they enrage me. They are just plain wrong – more of that in a moment. But in raising the spectre of climate change they are giving not only themselves, but the water industry, government, and the regulators, a get out of jail free card. ‘Look’, they say to us apparently bone headed consumers of water who know no better, ‘it is not our fault. It is all those pesky fossil fuel burners who will cause your taps to run dry.’ Frankly, this line of reasoning is arrant nonsense.

Roadford Reservoir

Sewage and waste management aside (I know that is a big aside) the water industry in Britain does a good job of providing reliable, cheap, clean water to homes and businesses. Can you think of the last time your taps ran dry or your water was declared unsafe? As a percentage of total delivery, the failures are vanishingly small. And as for cost my metered water bill this year will be less than my TV licence and for most households the amount spent on water will be in the bottom quartile of the household bill totem. In that lies part of the problem.

Since privatisation in 1989 the regulator OFWAT has exerted downward pressure on water bills. Water is seen as a social need so, as such, needs to be as cheap as possible buying in to the naïve argument that since rain falls for free from the heavens it should equally work its way to our taps as close to free as possible. This, of course, ignores the vast infrastructure required to supply 28 million homes plus millions of businesses. And most of that infrastructure predates privatisation – take for instance reservoirs.

Heading west on the A30 through Devon you will see the brown tourist signs for Roadford Reservoir, the last reservoir built in Britain. Astonishingly it opened 33 years ago. I say astonishingly because in those 33 years the UK population has risen by 11 million. That is a 20% increase in demand for water (we use a bit less per household/year than we did in the 1980’s but the number of households has increased with the atomisation of families) with no consequent increase in supply bar one single desalination plant opened in Beckton, east London in 2010. If you have by now done the math, you will have worked out that Roadford Reservoir opened in 1989; it was the product of a nationalised water industry when there was the political will to force through difficult planning decisions and add the construction cost to bills.

Of course, you are only able to store water if you have it, so the EA have extensively modelled rainfall in England and Wales for the next 50 years. Their conclusions? Well, the total rainfall is not going to change much, maybe a few percentage points either side of historical norms. It’s a fairly anodyne conclusion; hardly a Greta Thunberg prediction of water apocalypse. At worst the EA predict slightly drier winters and slightly wetter summers which, if accurate, will actually help water provision. And anyway, regardless of modelling, we probably use less than a quarter of all rainfall for our water needs.

For here is the truth about water supply. For 8-9 months of the year there is more water than anyone can possibly need. Reservoirs are full to brimming. Rivers flow mightily. Groundwater supplies, even in the sensitive chalkstream regions, can give up what people need without harm. But in those critical months, broadly July-October, the natural capital of water can run dry. This is when we need reservoirs and desalination plants, but as with the energy industry, three decades of complacency, pencil sharpening and an unwillingness to plan for the future has left the UK vulnerable at the moments of need.

Which is a shame. Reservoirs are not only reliable and relatively inexpensive, but they soon become integral to the landscape. Can anyone imagine Northumberland today without Kielder or the east Midlands without Rutland Water? These two were part of the great reservoir building boom of 1950-79 when 29 of the current 47 reservoirs in England and Wales were built. We should be doing this again. The tiny Portsmouth Water Company, who control an area newly classified by the CWC as under ‘serious water stress’ is the only water firm in the British Isles with an agreed plan to build a new reservoir, the Havant Thicket reservoir in east Hampshire, at a cost of £120 million to supply 160,000 people. Taking that as a guide, and assuming we want to fill the population/storage gap left during the first 30 years of privatisation, building enough new reservoir capacity nationwide will cost £8.5 billion.

That doesn’t sound a lot of money for an infrastructure project that will give us water security, whilst protecting rivers and wetlands from over abstraction for generations to come. That is because it isn’t. Assuming the full cost devolves to domestic bill payers that is just an extra £15 per person per year with the construction cost is spread over 20 years. Or put in the argot the Government seems to prefer, a ‘green levy’ of 9% on bills.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds to me like a pretty good trade.

Artist's impression of Havant Thicket reservoir

Dead and forgotten

We had a lucky miss in the storms last week as a 110ft poplar fell parallel to the fishing cabin here at Nether Wallop Mill, just missing by three feet.

I must admit I cannot say I am sorry; it is a tree I inherited, and I’ve always hated it. There is something un-English about this Lombardy poplar (I guess there is a clue in the name) which grows tall without any canopy, a horrible massive stick insect of a tree which is apt to shed branches.

The mature poplar height is really 50-60 feet, but you’ll see plenty of plantations of taller specimens in river valleys, often planted by the Wilkinson Match Company (previously Bryant & May, Wilkinson Sword and British Match Corporation) for the UK match and basket making industries. Planting reached its peak in the 1960’s by which time there was close to 20,000 acres of poplars. However, as basket manufacture turned from natural fibre to plastics and consumption of matches steadily declined most of these trees were left standing, like mine, destined to die from the trunk upwards awaiting the wind of fate from a storm such as Eunice.

There has been a slight resurgence in interest for these poplars in recent years with the demand for woodchip for bioenergy. If you have such a plantation the income will hardly be life changing but it will at least defray the cost of preparing the ground for replanting.

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It took me a while to find out the explanation - sometimes this could be your email account blocking externally hosted images or a firewall blocking access to our image servers. However, Constant Contact Help have acknowledged this is as an ongoing issue which they thought they had resolved last June but, as of 3 February, it remains a problem depending on the email service you use.

In the meantime, you can read the Newsletter either via my Blogger page or via this web page. Until this issue is finally resolved this link will feature in the header of this and future Newsletters. Or you may check your email settings via this link.

Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill

I have written here, and elsewhere, about the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill which is currently making its way through Parliament.

It is regarded by many, as reflected in the speeches in the House of Lords where the Bill began its legislative life last year, as an appalling piece of legislation based on the fallacious belief that leaving the EU struck out from British law the concept that animals felt pain and fear. Since animal sentience was recognised in UK law back to the 19^th century this was clearly a nonsense that began its life on 21^st century social media.

The current Bill is actually a strange confection with no actual duty to protect sentient animals. Rather, it sets up an Animal Sentience Committee under Ministerial control that will have a statutory duty to consider whether government policy will have a negative impact on the welfare of animals. The definition of sentient is wide, including all vertebrates, plus molluscs and, if the Minister, decides, any invertebrate of his or her choosing. The Committee, as you might imagine, is seen as potentially the perfect vehicle for all sorts of lobbying from animal activists who might see the welfare angle as the perfect vehicle for inciting wider social changes.

As of today, the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill is at the House of Commons Report Stage so just two further steps away from Royal Assent – the government have used all their firepower thus far to ensure that all attempts at amendment are defeated. Why such a bad Bill, that will make the Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991 appear as lucid as the Ten Commandments, has such zealous support in the corridors of power is a mystery but has it, it has.

The only small crumb of comfort I can find is in recent asides in both The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator who suggest the Bill might be conveniently parked. Does anyone have any further intel?