Life of a Chalkstream: The Great S**t Show

Greetings!

Over the winter I played with the idea of writing a book about the water industry. Not just the water industry we know today, 30 years on from privatisation, but rather an examination of how we are where we are. A history of British s**t if you like.

In the course of the research, it became abundantly clear to me that we have never really addressed the problem of human, farming and industrial waste with any real regard to the environment. We often hold the great Victorian sewerage system as the high point of public waste management but really this is a giant myth. Yes, it was impressive. Yes, it did move vast quantities of waste away from human habitation. But to mostly where? Rivers and coastal waters, of course. Collectively, across the British Isles, since the first home sewer was recorded in the Orkneys five millennia ago it has been a case of down the pipe, out of sight and out of mind.

Jump forward to the Tudor age to see the first attempt at government intervention by none other than Henry VIII, who didn’t just worry about his many wives apparently. Such was the prevalence of fetid open sewers in London and other major cities that he created the Commissioners and Courts of Sewers who were tasked with ensuring they kept flowing ever onwards to river and sea.

And so, it has continued since then with numerous attempts to keep sewers, and the changing nature of waste, apace with the growing population in the intervening centuries. But essentially the problems we see of the 21^st century are little different to those of both the 19^th and 20^th centuries. In 1870 the six leading salmon rivers produced 185,000 fish; by 1939 the figure was 50,000. Goodness knows what feeble figure that is today. In 1900 one third of all typhoid cases could be traced back to contaminated shellfish harvested from British coastal waters. Today Surfers for Sewage have an online map of waters to avoid. In 1908 the Royal Commission on Sewage Disposal sets a contamination standard that effectively legalises sewage dumping in rivers and sea. Sound familiar? By the 1960’s the same standard was still in force so that by the end of the decade 60% of all sewage treatment works were estimated to be failing to meet the standards established at the end of the 19th century.

It was a wretched mess with 170 water providers and over 1,000 sewage treatment companies. “Something must be done!”, went up the shout, the result being the 1973 Water Act that established 10 new publicly owned regional water authorities that would manage the supply of water and sewerage services for England and Wales on a fully integrated basis, operating investment on a cost recovery basis.

It was on the rocks of that phrase “cost recovery basis” that the 1973 Act was to flounder. The growing population, environmental concerns and EU legislation meant that the required investment could only be recovered through ever higher consumer bills. Civil servants offering up spending plans to their political masters got little more than blank stares – there are not many votes to be had in s**t. So, with every passing year, as the problems worsened, the potential bill became higher and higher.

The problem was resolved, at least from a political if not environmental perspective, by the privatisation of the water and sewerage industry in 1989. But the question must be asked was this the sale of the century or the offloading of already degraded assets? The answer is definitely and definitely.

It was pretty sweet deal for the privateers with a one-off injection of public capital, the write off of significant government debt and the provision of capital tax allowances. And once they had their feet under the table, they soon found it easy to run rings around the regulator OFWAT and swat away the EA as the annoying fly in the room.

As to the assets, namely the physical structures that move and treat sewage, they clearly were not up to the job in 1989. Today? Well, if the population had remained stable there might have been some opportunity for catch up, but the British population has exploded by 20% since privatisation – an extra 11 million people with no matching increase is sewerage capacity. I see it around here in the villages of the Test Valley every day where emergency fleets of giant tankers stand by each morning to take away the waste from local sewage plants built 50 years ago for populations a half or a third of what they are today.

The only chink of light I see in all this is a growing public awareness of sewage pollution but is there the will to spend money on any significant scale to make up for half a century of inaction? Judging by a recent comment from George Eustice, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, probably not. He wondered whether an annual £12 increase in water and sewage bills could be justified to pay for some minor improvements. £12? Really! That is just 3% on the average water bill and doesn’t even match inflation.

As a certain tennis player once said, you cannot be serious. It seems The Great S**t Show is set to run and run.

Fancy your own slice of fishing?

You may recognise this picture from a Newsletter around this time last year when 2,328 yards of the River Itchen and 33 acres of water meadows, just upstream of Winchester at Abbots Worthy, came up for sale. It went under offer pretty quickly but for a variety of reasons the deal never went through so it has been remarketed this spring at £1.1m.

At the time some of you wrote or spoke to me to say you’d be interested if I was putting together a group of like-minded fly fishers for some kind of joint purchase. As things moved quickly it was not on the cards but this time around there might be a different opportunity.

If you are interested in exploring the possibility, just drop me an email to express your interest stating what proportion of the asking price (minimum 10%) you would be willing to take. It is obviously highly speculative at this early stage so there is no obligation on any side, and I’ll treat all expressions of interest in total confidence.

Click for more details of the Savills listing Mill Lane, Abbots Worthy, Winchester, Hampshire, SO21.

Fly Fishing Trout in the Small Stillwaters

Up front I am proud to confess that Peter Cockwill, author of the just published Fly Fishing Trout in the Small Stillwaters, is a guide and instructor of this parish. So, I hope I am not being biased when I say this book, the seventh by Peter, is truly excellent and certainly the best manual on fly fishing since Charles Jardine’s Guide to Fly Fishing for Trout way back in the last millennium.

Let us be clear, this is a not a book for the novice – it requires a certain level of knowledge – maybe a couple of years on trout lakes after which time you’ve learnt the basics and are probably advancing your expertise largely by trial and error, and most likely more of the latter than former. If you want to be a more knowledgeable stillwater fisher, then Peter’s book is perfect.

For instance, he tells you what trout eat beyond the obvious; it is that sort of knowledge that turns a blank day into a limit. Depressed and confounded by a lake covered in scum? Peter tells you how to fish that, and other challenging surface conditions, successfully. Every chapter is divided into short sections, with apposite headings, which makes the book an easy reference manual.

If you are looking for a leisure read, then look elsewhere. But if you want a book to pull out of your fishing bag to find the key to catching when you and others are not, then I believe this book will be a godsend.

Fly Fishing Trout in the Small Stillwaters is available direct from Peter Cockwill by post for £29.99 or in person at £25 from Dever Springs, Hampshire. petercockwill@aol.com