As the heavens opened, after the most recent heat wave, it would be fair to say that water ( or at least water management ) was on our minds. With hose pipe bans in parts of Cymru / Wales and England and Water Company bonuses ( in England at least ) reaching new shocking heights. Water is the literal stuff of life, and good little earner, it’s important everywhere and especially here in Cymru / Wales where it still remains a heated political issue.
Only a couple of weeks ago the GMB ( London ) union suggested taking water from Wales to London and the SE. The plan would see water taken from United Utilities at Lake Vyrnwy in Powys via the restoration of the Cotswold canals and Sapperton Canal Tunnel in Gloucester. GMB London has said the plan could help to deal with periodic droughts in and around London.
Water also remains political issue on the other side of Offa’s Dyke, where last year in early July 2021 the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) reported that parts of England would run of of water within 20 years. Pulling no punches the PAC accused Ministers and water industry regulators of failing to act. Defra was also accuse of lacking any leadership on the issue and MPs called for the problems of water leakage to be addresses with urgency and people to be encouraged not to waste water.
Things are clearly getting worse over there for a while, two years prior to the PAC report, back in March 2019, the chief executive of the Environment Agency - the public body responsible for protecting the environment and wildlife in England - Sir James Bevan, told a Waterwise conference, that within 25 years England will not have enough water to meet demand.
He stated that the impact of climate change, combined with population growth, means the country ( England ) is facing an "existential threat", "We all need to use less water and use it more efficiently and that, in around 20 to 25 years, England would reach the "jaws of death - the point at which, unless we take action to change things, we will not have enough water to supply our needs".
In October 2018, a water company, Southern Water - which serves customers in south eastern England, stated that customer demand is estimated to be double its available supply by 2020. As a result of climate change, a reduction of the amount of water allowed to be taken from natural sources, and a rise in population demand would outstrip supply. The company's plan for 2020-2025 set out how it would overcome the deficit by reducing leakage by 15% and encourage customers to use less water.
As was noted previously, this could be both good and bad news for Wales, good news if we had control of our own natural resources and could benefit from a fair price for our water, and bad news if we don’t. For amongst our rich resources water is likely to become a valuable resource for the people of Wales in future years, and who owns, it who controls it, and who benefits is likely to remain one of the key issues, of potential dispute between Westminster and Cardiff Bay.
While our country’s voice has been significantly strengthened since 1999, with various Wales related acts, as yet we still do not have the same degree of control of our natural resources as either Scotland or Northern Ireland. Not for nothing does the issue of water rightly still understandably raises strong emotions and stirs long memories here in Wales.
This matters because of Boris Johnson ( former Mayor of London, former foreign secretary and soon to be former Prime Minister) has previously wittered on about the need for a network of canals being needed to carry water from the wet North to the dry South (for the ‘wet North’ read ‘Wales). Boris's revolutionary thought, not to mention his poor grasp of geography, was not surprisingly not an original idea.
An old idea rebadged and reborn
This is not a new idea, as back in 1973, what was then the Water Resources Board, a now defunct government agency, wrote a major report that advocated building a whole raft of infrastructure to aid the movement of water, not to mention constructing freshwater storage barrages in the Ouse, Wash and Morecambe Bay, using a network of canals to move water from north to south, extending reservoirs and building new aqueducts, not to mention constructing a series of tunnels to link up river basins to aid the movement of water.
Despite the demise of the Water Resources Board in 1974 (two years before the 1976 drought) and its replacement by regional water management bodies, which were privatised in the 1980’s this issue has never really gone away. In 2006, the Environment Agency produced a report entitled "Do we need large-scale water transfers for south-east England ?" which in a refreshingly honest answer to its own question at the time was an emphatic ‘no’.
That said, faced with a prolonged period of drought in the South East of England, DEFRA itself held a drought summit on the 20th of February of 2012. The then Con Dem Government stated that it remained committed to the remaining legislative measures set out in its Water for Life agenda , which later became the Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Act. That is as they say history, but whatever Westminster eventually decides to do in relation to water resources, we in Wales still need to have full democratic control of our own resources.
Our resources incidentally should include those parts of our country where Severn Trent Plc runs our natural resources for a fat profit. This process can begin with repatriating control of the Crown Estates and transferring control of lands in (and off-shore) to the Welsh Government in Cardiff. For the life of me I can see no realistic reason why this feudal anachronism cannot be consigned to the dustbin of history and control of it transferred to Cymru / Wales.
We need a whole Wales strategy to develop, conserve and enhance our water supplies and our planning regulations will need to be tweaked or rewritten accordingly. We need to take a long hard realistic look at our water resources and what we get for them and how we can develop them. I see absolutely no reason why the Welsh people cannot fully benefit from any future exploitation of our natural resources, including our water.
People should not be shocked to discover that the Government of Wales Act (2006) thanks largely to Peter (formerly the pain, Lord) Hain (amongst the other usual suspects) worked hard to specifically exclude the then Assembly (now Senedd) from making any laws relating to water supply – hmm – odd that isn't it?
Such duplicitous behaviour on the part of New or re-born Old Labour is not to be unexpected, even when it ineffectually rebrands itself as the Labour Party of Wales, its early typical behaviour. Casting Tory and Labour spin and rhetoric aside, the bottom line is that all our water resources should belong to the Welsh people, not to Private corporations or to the UK Government.
In England, with its privatised water companies it’s quite frankly a mess. Much like the privatised energy companies - the only thing that they have consistently delivered is annual bonuses and higher bills. The annual bonuses paid to water company executives rose by 20% in 2021, despite most of the firms failing to meet sewage pollution targets.
In total the 22 water bosses paid themselves £24.8 million including £14.7 million in bonuses, benefits and incentives, in 2021-2022. Yet problems with leaks, water shortages and sewage releases have remain with holidaymakers literally being told to stay away from the sea at some beaches last week. Sewage discharges have been recorded in coastal areas of Cornwall, Cumbria, Devon, Essex, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Northumberland and Sussex.
Severn Trent gave out the highest payouts in bonuses, base pay and benefits to executives, reached a total of £5,939,300, and United Utilities came next paying out £4,218,000. The numbers reveal that on average executives received £100,000 in one-off payments on top of their salaries, during a period in which foul water was being pumped for 2.7 million hours into England’s rivers and swimming spots. An analysis of water companies’ annual reports found that their bonus pool for executives now stands at more than £600,000 a company on average.
Now Wales has proven itself during the Coronavirus crisis by acting independently to protect our citizens from the dysfunctionality and ineptitude of the Westminster Government. Hopefully we are slowly waking up to the idea that there is another way, another future, another choice. As Cymru / Wales comes out of this current elongated crisis, we simply cannot go back to the status-quo, certainly not when faced with a potential risk re-born aggressive centrist unionist Westminster government that’s hell bent on wrecking, undermining and rolling back devolution while simply being the glove puppet for the City of London.
Under-investment and unfair funding forms the crux of this unequal union of broken promises - not delivered by the Tories at Westminster and regularly defended by Labour in Wales and Labour in Westminster even through their support for the stagnant status-quo which has failed Wales. Our water needs to be seen for what it is - a valuable resource, a commodity, which Cymru / Wales is fortunate to have it.
Our resources should be taken for a pittance and used by large corporations who rack up significant profits and then fritted away whilst our communities and our nation get next to nothing for it. Any post BREXIT future draft Wales Bill should strengthen the powers that we in Cymru / Wales including those over our natural resources and associated planning processes and should transfer control of those parts of the Severn Trent water franchise to Dwr Cymru and Cymru / Wales.
Resource management is important, is interesting to note that almost a quarter of London's water is lost through leakages. Thames Water also have a desalination plant which is currently turned off and, since 2006, they have been promising to build a new reservoir near Abingdon but it has not happened. This is not a case of extracting a profit during a time of shortage, merely making sure that Cymru / Wales gets a fair deal and a fair price for a valuable resource.
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