Life of a Chalkstream: July 2023

Greetings!

I have been trying to decide, amidst of the news of water companies close to insolvency, whether this is something of which we should rejoice or despair. On the one hand you could argue it is the rightful comeuppance for what Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath once termed the unacceptable face of capitalism. On the other, it might herald something infinitely worse where our barely unreasonable desire to have rivers full of clean and plentiful water, once again becomes a far, distant dream.

I could expend much ink reciting the reasons for the current financial woes of the water industry but essentially it is a tale of a business that lost sight of its purpose. Capitalism is about product and profit. You make a product which you sell for a profit. However, somewhere in the thirty four years since privatisation the industry lost sight of that purpose as the financial engineers discovered that regardless of the merits of their product, they could still turn a healthy profit. In fact, seemingly the worse the product the more money they made.

But now the industry is in the death vice of an iron maiden of its own making as they are unable the push up the bill to the consumer to cover the four way whammy of rising interest rates, rising overheads, an increasing cost for environmental compliance, and in the case of many of them, swingeing fines for delivering the aforesaid terrible product.

The huge irony of all this is that it could have all been so easily avoided had Ofwat, the industry regulator, acted on their own recommendations of the early 2000’s. It was around that time that the water companies, having begun life in the private sector as publicly traded entities on the London Stock Exchange, began to be taken private, the transition largely financed by pension and sovereign wealth funds who saw the investment in monopoly utilities as proving a safe, steady return. Ofwat warned against this, noting that loading the companies up with debt as the private finance business model demanded, would eventually end in tears. And tears we have many as Ofwat, having sounded the alarm bell, turned a deaf ear to go along for the ride as the enabler-in-chief as the rapacious water companies pretty well did what the hell they liked.

So, what now? It interests me that, despite all the outrage, there seems little appetite for renationalising the water industry. Even Will Hutton, author of the New Labour playbook of the 1990’s The State We Are In wrote at the weekend that public ownership was not the answer. We do not have to look far to see why: in Scotland and Northern Ireland the industry remains in state control and Wales it is run on a not-for-profit basis and in none of those countries are the problems any less. For good or ill, whatever your political colours, it seems nobody has the appetite to tie up £250 billion in buying back a basket case.

The private model of ownership can work; indeed, it has to work because it is the only game in town. The trick will be to find a way that allows for profit to be made from all those things we so badly need: a modern sewage system that can cope with a population of 70 million not the 50 million the current system was designed for. Water provision that is similarly resilient, capable of coping with the vagaries of the British climate without sucking dry our rivers.

We need to give the water companies space to make money from what they are meant to do, rewarding productive investment whilst hammering miscreants. But that will take regulation of both the financial and environmental kind. Regulation that has been woefully inadequate for at least two decades. Ofwat and the EA should both hang their collective heads in shame – it is they who are responsible for the state we are in.

Do Thames Water really think we all drank the Kool-Aid?

June: both wet and dry

Most of Britain had been looking to the June skies in search of rain; for those of us who make our daily living from the chalkstreams quite the reverse as June came as a blessed relief as we could finally get our mowers out on previously sodden banks.

As we enter July, I continue to believe that I’ve never come into the summer with the rivers so full which has been hard to explain to anyone sitting by a parched salmon river, though the river flow map vividly tells the same tale. At Bullington Manor on the Upper Test we are only now just starting to lift the hundred or so scaffolding boards we bought at the last minute to get you over otherwise impassable sections.

Though June was a record hot month, it was not a record dry month. We had about half the normal rainfall, but in aggregate we are still cycling a wet year with the three months to the end of May at 145% of long term average rainfall, 116% for sixth months and 111% for twelve months. It is that three month figure that cost me all those scaffold boards!

As is the monthly tradition this year, the vice king Nigel Nunn has tied a tempting set of flies for the June feedback winner to use in July. Well done to Gavin Leathem fished Upavon Farm on the River Avon in early June – the flies are in the post.

If you would like to complete a feedback form from a recent trip, click here

The suffering of a supermodel

In June we embarked on a fishing photography shoot safari on the Dorset and Wiltshire streams. Over the years I have tried to combine a bit of fishing with a bit of photography but the truth is you end up doing both badly; if you want good photos you have to resign yourself to bad fishing.

I had waited a while to get into the season before planning this date. The temptation is to head out in May but, despite the blandishments of Mayfly, it is not the best month for river photography. You might not notice it at the time but once you see the shots on screen the countryside still looks very raw. June, July and early August are absolutely the best months to capture the English countryside at its most glorious. After that the greenery doesn’t quite ping and a sort of dustiness starts to settle that dulls out even the best staged photos.

Hill Deverill

But back to June. My favourite part about these days is that we start early. It is hard to be up before the dawn in mid-June but you definitely need to be on the river at a time with a six in front of it. Jamie Pankhurst, our photographer for the day, is an early bird but Ed Burgass of Fishing TV who we had roped in as our model grumbled a bucket at the early start.

You need to be up early for the light – for some reason evenings look better to the eye but to the camera, it is the morning that counts. It is actually the other way around for the fishing. People often ask me whether it is worth a super early start; the answer is nearly always no beyond the beauty of being there. If you want to catch fish stay late. Nine times out of ten you will be rewarded more for a late finish than an early start.

Just to prove my point we definitely didn’t luck out on the catching front with no fish for the camera early on but that is as much about setting up the shot as anything else. Inevitably, the best shots require the photographer to be upstream of the ‘model’ and frequently in the river itself; all self-respecting fish are well gone by that point and frankly, having done this a lot, you save a lot of time if the casting is done without a fly.

We had a fairly ambitious schedule that day staring at Hill Deverill which is close to the source of the Wylye, before dropping south to Deans Court and Wimborne St Giles on the Allen before heading homewards to take in Avon Springs on the Avon for the final leg. Poor Ed, such were our demands on him that he was like a Pavlov dog, it only being when we let him alone to his own devices at Avon Springs for five minutes that he finally caught a fish. I am not sure he will be up for another supermodel assignment later this summer.

Avon Springs

Quiz

The normal random collection of questions inspired by the date, events or topics in the Newsletter. It is just for fun with answers at the bottom of the page.

1) Henry F. Phillips patented what on this day in 1936?

2) Who resigned as English cricket captain on this day in 1981 after 12 matches with no wins?

3) What is scopophobia?