Life of a Chalkstream

Monday, 23 June 2025

More fantasy figures from Southern Water

Greetings!

Move over Einstein. Put away your tables Pythagarus. Do not even bother to invent the computer Charles Babbage for a new mathematical genius is amongst us. Welcome, Tim McMahon of Southern Water, the likely recipient of the next Nobel Prize for Mathematics.

The story so far. Tim McMaths made a claim that the South-East of England was drier than Istanbul. This was soon shot down in flames, but with a brain that processes faster that the most super of supercomputers McMaths came back with new workings to prove that the South-East, though not technically drier than Istanbul, was indubitably equally dry. However, McMaths, who probably hones his calculating skills watching endless repeats of the numbers game on quiz show Countdown had to perform two feats of contorted logic to arrive (again) at this implausible claim.

Firstly, he had to include the population of London in his calculations. The last time I looked our capital was most definitely not in the south-eastern portion of England but hey-ho Tim perhaps you are lining yourself up for a Nobel Prize double to include geography. Secondly, Tim has used the historic average for Istanbul rainfall but compares it one of the driest on periods on record for South-East England.

All this I know because McMaths came up with the new ‘equally dry’ assertion having been challenged in a meeting which raised my comments in the previous Newsletter. Subsequently My Rain Truth as McMaths’ revised calculations should be known as from now on were then circulated to Southern Water employees as the official line to bail out the sinking McMaths.

Amusing as all this is, my worry is that it vividly illustrates the failing in the management culture of Southern Water. Rather than admit a mistake and move on, the employees are encouraged to hunker down behind the flimsy barricades of half-truths, defending the indefensible making both themselves and the company look, at the kindest reading, absurd.

Water company economics 101

Just to prove I am not entirely unsympathetic to the plight of Southern Water let me tell you something of the small Hampshire village of Sutton Scotney, which happens to be close to the source of the River Dever, a major River Test tributary with our beloved Bullington Manor a mile or so downstream.

Sutton Scotney, with a population of just under a thousand, is what would be regarded as a big village. It has a pub, village shop, nursing home, fire station, filling station, garage plus the substantial Naomi House, a children’s hospice. Like many villages both in Hampshire and across England it has grown substantially this century, in this case by 35% but is served by the same sewage works that was built sometime in the previous century to serve a much smaller population at a time when average household water usage was much lower.

Sutton Scotney sewage works in progress

These works have not been up to the task of serving the current 590 households of Sutton Scotney for a great many years, as evidenced by the almost permanent presence of standby tankers taking away the overflow. These tankers, which you see at similar works all over the county, cost I am told £2,000 a day, so something in the region of quarter to half a million pounds a year just to keep Sutton Scotney on sewage life support.

That would be fine if Southern Water were deriving oodles of money from the villagers, but they are not. The income from Sutton Scotney for sewerage services, based on the 76p a day/household tariff Southern will be able to charge once the new pricing kicks in, will be in the region of £165,000 a year. So currently the annual loss, with standard running costs plus the tankers, is well into six figures. Now to be fair to Southern Water they are not blind to the issue and have been, since last winter, upgrading the works with the project costing £5.2m.

It does not take a financial wizard to see that there is no way this work is going to pay out for Southern Water. Even if we assumed the running costs of the sewage works were zero, with no future maintenance bills or any cost of finance to add, the payback on that £5.2m would take 31 years. Add in any or all of the true costs and the payback is pretty well no time ever.

Sutton Scotney

This is the bind that Southern Water, Thames Water and most all of the water companies find themselves in. They have to modernise to meet customer need and environmental legislation, but the cost of that modernisation far exceeds any possible financial reward. No wonder KKR and other institutions are running for the hills or writing down the value of water company stakes to zero. They see the writing on the wall.

For us consumers there is a mighty bill ahead. If we want plentiful water through our taps, toilets that flush away with ease and waste treatment standards that return clean water back to our rivers then charges will have to rise not just by a percentage but by many times what we currently pay. The question is whether there is a politician, both brave and wise, who can sell this difficult message.

The excitement of the opening day

My upbringing was such that I entirely missed out on coarse fishing; in east Hampshire we were blessed with chalkstreams so of bream, barbel, carp, chub and perch I knew nothing. In fact the first I knew of this strange breed of non-fly fishing folk who sought out such species was after an all-nighter at university. The residences at the University of East Anglia overlooked the Broads and at the dawn of one mid-June morning I saw figures emerge from the mist hurrying towards the water. It was, of course, 16 June, a date that had had no significance to me until that moment.

To this day, half a century or more, that vision still stays with me. I recall exactly the urgency of those figures to reach the bank, set up the rods and get fishing. The opening day was a very special event. Back then all year coarse fishing venues were few and far between. The close season meant closed to all fishing for most people, so the anticipation of the opening day ramped up as the end of the three-month fishing drought came ever closer.

People got positively excited about getting back on the water. The Angling Times doubled its page count to fulfil advertiser needs. Angling shops stocked up on all sorts of goodies. Kids pestered their fathers as if it was Christmas Day soon. In a way it is a shame that wide eyed excitement no longer exists quite as it did.

But that said, we still have a strict closed season on the rivers so I know of one person who will be exhibiting childlike enthusiasm to be back on his beloved River Wye this week. I am, of course, talking about John Bailey, both angler extraordinaire and currently in the throes of filming the eighth series of Gone Fishing for which he has been Angling Consultant since the very first episode. I know neither Bob nor Paul will gripe if I say this programme would not exist without John. You may never see him in front of the camera but believe me he is an almost Godlike presence behind the camera. He is the fishing Mr Fixit.

If you want to join John on the River Wye between his filming stints for predominately barbel and chub, check out our link. The season runs from now to late autumn with the days available for singles, pairs or groups to four. John provides everything - just bring yourself and a pair of waders.

In praise of the Summer Solstice

There is something inestimably special about the Summer Solstice. The day in the year when the upward trajectory towards summer ends, the rest of the year a slow slide toward the depths of winter. Of all the days in the year it is my favourite, albeit seasonally bitter and sweet. Usually I let sleep take me as soon as it comes but on this night I fight tiredness to enjoy every last moment of the blue/grey night that never really gets dark. Even the bats, who ordinarily return to their roosts, seem to treat this extended half-darkness as an all-night diner.

The thing about the solstice is that it is a moment in the calendar over which we have no control. Christmas. Easter. New Year. They are all human constructs. Should a cataclysmic event or manmade disaster wipe us all from the planet (my money is on the latter) none of those days will exist, the dates passing unnoticed. But the solstice is different. It has been here since the start of time. It will be here until the end of time. It regulates our very existence. Without the cadence of the seasons it creates the planet as we know it would not exist.

In truth, contemporary humankind is daft; we should have kept with the sun worshipping of the Inca tribes and their like. Our modern celebrations of made-up dates are laughable in the face evolution. The next time somebody proposes as new Bank Holiday for some notional event we should pause and ask: What date really matters?

Your photos

Here is a selection of a few photos sent with your feedback reports in the past few weeks. Thank you all and keep 'em coming!

Clockwise: Exton Manor Farm (Meon). Abbots Worthy (Itchen).

Breach Farm (Itchen). Exton Manor Farm (Meon).

Quiz

The usual random collection of questions inspired by the events that took place on this date in history or topics in the Newsletter.

1) Who ascended the British throne on this day in 1837 to reign for 63 years?

2) In what year did Royal Ascot extend from a four day fixture ending on Friday to a five day ending on Saturday? A) 1962 B) 1982 C) 2002

3) The Norfolk Broads were formed by the flooding of areas dug to extract what fuel?

Answers are at the bottom of this Newsletter.

Have a good Solstice weekend.

Best wishes,

Simon Cooper simon@fishingbreaks.co.uk

Founder & Managing Directorwww.fishingbreaks.co.uk

1) Queen Victoria

2) C) 2002

3) Peat

Join the Summer Kids Camp!

We have three places left on 8-11 years group (14-16 July) and five places on 12-15 years group (21-23 July). More details here ....

Friday, 6 June 2025

Where do all those water company fines go?

Greetings!

It is perhaps no small irony that, bearing in mind the opaque nature of the finances and ownership of Thames Water, that the derivation of the river name is dark and murky. And, I suspect that after this week, the management of Britain’s biggest water company, following on from a record Ofwat £123m fine and the withdrawal of the proposed financial rescue from that private equity behemoth KKK, might just want to lock themselves away in a darkened room for some considerable time.

I am sure that Rachel Reeves is rubbing her hands in glee at the prospect of the fine dropping into the Treasury bank account sometime soon though plenty question the wisdom of fining a company already on the brink of bankruptcy. That said I am sure Rachel from Accounts has already done the maths and not promised Keir too many new submarines of the back of the Ofwat penalty for that money represents under an hour of UK government annual expenditure.

You might also ask where the fine money goes to. Well, by law it must be paid to the Treasury and is not ringfenced, so it just drops into the general expenditure pot. However, there is such a thing as the Water Recovery Fund (WRF) that distributes a portion of the fines as grants to ‘restore and improve rivers, streams, canals, lakes, ponds, wetlands or estuarine waters.’ I do not think that there are many who quibble at the aims of the WRF but if, like me, you have ever entered the world of government grant applications you will know that some point you will be tempted to join the Thames Water folk in that darkened room.

I should have made this a quiz question but guess how much of £242m of fines levied in 2022/23 went into the WRF kitty, the last year for which full figures are available? I will put you out of your misery quickly, for it was just £11m, a meagre 4.5%. To my mind it is incredible that so little of the fine money goes to remediate the damage that was the cause of the fines in the first place. I guess beating up water companies gets good headlines whilst the long and less than glamorous process of putting things right is a solution too far.

Personally, I believe all water company fines and levies, should be ringfenced for the good of those aforementioned rivers, streams, canals, lakes, ponds, wetlands and estuarine waters with one notable exception, the Fishing Licence. Each year £15m should be top sliced from the fines, probably £300m plus this year, to fund the abolition of the hateful fishing licence. If Keir and Rachel want to win over a few Red Wall voters they could do a lot worse, plus save another £7m that is wasted on administration, collection, enforcement and the 900 or so prosecutions that burden the already clogged court system.

In search of the English village

Sometimes it seems, especially in an increasingly urbanised and crowded southern England, that the English village is losing out to progress. It is easy to default to a metropolitan sneer at the vision of George Orwell’s ‘old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist' but, as he wrote himself, he was not talking about these things in an absolute sense but rather as ‘characteristic fragments of the English scene’.

His words came to me last month as I sat on a warm tombstone contemplating life in the churchyard of Hartington St Giles Church, which stands on the hill above the village, as a glorious sunset lit the Derbyshire Dales for as far as I could see, somewhere down in the valley, the River Dove where I had spent the day. The air was full of the noise of church bells as the ringers took their weekly practice.

Hartington, Derbyshire

In fact, it was the church bells that had drawn me up the hill to the church, which for me is one of the most beautiful sounds in the world. As the practice continued I entered the church, sitting on the steps of the altar, as the ringers in a semi-circle of five went through their routines, a sixth substituting as they moved to the next bell rope in turn to start a new recital. For a while I was transported back to the village of my youth and such similar sounds, my reverie only interrupted by one of the ringers who invited me to take a turn. It was an act of kindness, entirely unprompted and one of those characteristic fragments of the English scene of which Orwell wrote. I did not like to tell them that the last time I grasped a bell pull rope it was as a teenager who had ‘taken drink’ and decided that waking the village after pub closing time was incredibly hilarious.

Hartington, though something of a tourist destination and a place for second homers, seems to have hung on to what for most English villages would be its rural past, but for Hartington is its rural present. The main street reverberates with the regular passage of tractors and exotic agricultural machinery. Battered pickups stop to buy lunch. The village actually stinks of s**t with working farms still in operation. The baaing of sheep is omnipresent during lambing.

Heading back down the hill to the centre I passed the village pond, fed by a little stream which I think eventually joins the Dove proper, I took heart at the sight of masses of Large Dark Olives hatching from the pond. All it seemed to me, at that moment at least, was right with the world and the Englishness of which Orwell wrote in 1941 had not entirely vanished.

Sunset and church bells over Hartington

The walk back of all walk backs

Towards the end of the Biden Presidency, I think we all became quite used to the regular walk backs as a host of White House spokesmen and women retracted some of Joe’s less than lucid comments. However, I think Southern Water have manged to even outdo the machinations in Washington.

If you recall in my Newsletter Swifts in the Belfry I reported that Tim McMahon, Director of Water at Southern Water pronounced [wrongly] that, "If you look at the south-east of England, it's drier than Sydney, Istanbul, Dallas, Marrakech." and that "We need to reduce customers' usage.”

This prompted one of my readers to write to Southern Water CEO Lawrence Gosden for elucidation. This is the reply he received:

Dear Mr Wilkinson,

Thank you for taking the time to contact our CEO Lawrence Gosden, about a recent quote from our Director of Water, Tim McMahon. As a member of the Executive Review Team, he has asked me to respond on his behalf.

Having contacted Tim McMahon, he has explained that the quote “If you look at the South-East of England, it's drier than Sydney, Istanbul, Dallas, Marrakech” is in the context of a population equivalent.

Regarding the second highlighted quote of "We need to reduce customers' usage”, our main focus is on protecting the environment i.e. reducing abstraction and climate change protection.

If you have additional questions or would like further advice, please do not hesitate to get back in touch. Our contact details are below and if you include my name then I will make sure I continue to oversee your query.

Yours sincerely,

Aaron Severn

Executive Review Team

I am still trying to get my head around this complete word salad of a letter; it is just more utter nonsense not least because the population of Istanbul is 16.2m compared to South-East England at 9.4m, with the former six times more densely populated than the latter with half the average rainfall of England. By my calculations that makes Istanbul 12 times drier than South-East England in the context of population equivalent.

I think we should all club together to send the entire Southern Water management team on a seminar entitled: When In Hole Stop Digging.

You paid for this view

On the downs above Nether Wallop the corner of a wheat field has been set aside for a rather lovely display of poppies. I thought you might appreciate the photo because, as Jeremy pointed out in Clarkson’s Farm, you are paying for it!

That was the month that was May

The votes are in – it was a one of the most prolific Mayfly seasons in living memory with some glorious, un-Maylike weather in the early to middle weeks of the month. I think that, as does the Head Keeper at the most famous fishing club of all time, so how could we both possibly be wrong?!

You might consider by now, after all these years, I would have become jaded by the hatch, but it still gladdens my heart like few other events in the year and gives me faith in the eternal nature of Mother Nature. If fact, as I sat dining bedside the river at The Mayfly Inn just upstream of Stockbridge at 9pm on Saturday my companions upbraided me for failing to be part of the conversation as I preferred the company of the spinners that danced and dived in the growing dusk.

So, that is almost it for another Mayfly year though if you are in search of that final ‘fix’ it is common to see good hatches, albeit sporadic, on the River Avon and its tributaries. June, of course, is a reset with smaller flies with more tactical nous required so the winner from the May Feedback Draw for Nigel Nunn’s June selection, is Michael Bowen who fished Middleton Estate, who will be well set for this month.