However, the water companies do not have unlimited
abstraction rights, their right to abstract being suspended once the daily
river flow falls below a certain threshold. It seems a sensible and
rational precaution in times of a drought. Why would a water company want
to over exploit a natural resource? I’ll tell you why, because they have a
get-out-of-jail free card which, with a mighty bound, they are able to free
themselves of such pesky regulation.
They are playing that card right now, as you read this
piece. The flow on the River Test has fallen below the threshold of 355
million litres per day. At this moment Southern Water should stop the
pumping to rely on alternate sources, desalination plants, reservoirs
and their like to maintain supplies to homes and businesses.
Oh, just a minute. There is no desalination plant – Southern
Water owners Macquarie have cancelled it. Reservoirs? Heaven forbid that
anyone should build a new one. It hasn’t happened in the 33 years since
privatisation and the only one sure to happen for now is Havant Thicket
opening (we hope) in 2029. However, it is not owned by Southern Water who
will have to buy this water if they want it. Or they probably won’t.
Because what do water companies care? When the going gets
tough they turn to those guardians of the chalkstreams the Environment
Agency and Natural England for a waiver to the regulations. Please sir, may
we carry on pumping? Of course you can boys, don’t worry about it.
You can see where the water companies are coming from in all
this. If there is no incentive, no hard stop to the amount of water they
can freely pillage, so why bother with expensive infrastructure? They
simply lodge a Drought Permit application which allows for a seven-day
formal consultation period (you can imagine how that ‘consultation’ goes
….) before the waiver is granted.
It is easy to blame the water companies, but they will only
operate within the rules of the game, so what is the solution? Clearly
the EA and Natural England are no use; there is zero chance that the
applications coming down the line for the Test, Itchen and many other
parched chalkstreams this summer will be denied despite the ecological
consequences.
The fault really lies with government. They fixed the rules
of this particular game, so they need to fix them back. It should not be
difficult to use the power of the market to alter the behaviour of the
water companies.
Simply charge them a usurious amount for these waivers. A
charge levied in such a way that it can’t be passed on to the customers and
a charge that makes building new infrastructure look cheap. At that point
I’d happily wager we’ll rapidly see a rash of reservoir building,
desalination plant construction and a host of other imaginative solutions.
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