Life of a Chalkstream: 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.