Life of a Chalkstream: Pick your poison: the party manifestos on water examined

Greetings!

I must admit I am surprised how little debate there has been during this General Election campaign on water issues. That said, the Liberal Democrats – sensing blood in the water (or should that be s**t?) in the southern counties - are going big on sewage in their target seats including many that are home to famous chalkstreams. There is one Conservative MP for whom I think the net is closing who has exhibited bovine stupidity when it comes to water.

Back last summer I briefed her on a visit to the River Meon when she rather surprised me by saying that our rivers are in better condition today than any time in the past 30 years. I looked at her goggle-eyed assuming I had misheard. Later on, she repeated the same claim, at which point I gave her chapter and verse as to why this was assuredly not the case. At the end of the visit, I told her, that if she wanted to retain her seat, she should never repeat her clean water claim ever again. She looked at me with pure disdain. Fast forward to canvassing by the same MP last weekend, the now candidate, when asked on the doorstep about her stance on sewage did at least not repeat the same claim but dodged a direct answer instead announcing with great pride that the otters are returning in greater than ever numbers. That may well be true, but that is due to a law enacted in the late 1980’s. Frankly if she loses, she has nobody to blame but herself.

As to the larger picture, I have read the party manifestos so you do not have to. The easy bit is that Reform and the SNP have nothing on water whilst Plaid Cymru are brief, proposing a technical devolution of oversight of the industry from the UK government to the Senedd. The Green Party are full on proponents of renationalisation and giving £1.5bn in extra funding to DEFRA for the Environment Agency and Natural England.

Of the three main parties in England and Wales it is the Libel Democrats who have the most fully worked up policies. Without going into all the details of which the most eye catching is a Sewage Tax on water company profits, the direction of travel is best summarised by the headline statement that reads,

“End the sewage scandal by transforming water companies into public benefit companies, banning bonuses for water bosses until discharges and leaks end, and replacing Ofwat with a tough new regulator with new powers to prevent sewage dumps.”

The Conservative manifesto pledges to bring the water companies to heel by banning executive bonusses in the case of certain criminal breaches and using fine income for restoration projects. I addition they say they will,

“… reform the ‘Price Review’ regulatory process for water companies. This will consider how we move to a more localised catchment-based and outcome-focused approach, that better utilises nature-based solutions and further strengthens sanctions for water companies that fail to deliver for the public, coasts and rivers.”

Yes, I have not got any idea what that means either.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly if the polls are accurate, the Labour Party proposes to put failing water companies under special measures to clean up water, give regulators new powers to block the payment of bonuses to executives who pollute waterways bringing criminal charges against persistent law breakers. They will impose automatic and severe fines for wrongdoing and ensure independent monitoring of every outlet.

Where does that leave you, the voter, if voting purely on water policy? Clearly, the bonus thing is a common theme but that is simply dog whistle politics that will have little practical impact. On the question as to who should own the water companies, both Conservative and Labour are silent. My view is that it really does not matter who owns the companies but rather how they are run and regulated. In Northern Ireland the industry remains nationalised and the pollution record is considerably worse than in the mainland UK. Wales has not-for-profit companies with no better outcomes than anywhere else. Colleagues around Europe where you can find all manner of ownership models, tell me the water quality issues are very much the same as our own.

So, assuming no change in ownership, it will be regulation that is the key for the UK which has effectively followed a hybrid capitalist model in the past two decades that tries to balance the need for profit with both cheap water and environmental protection. In two of these three the model has clearly failed: some water companies are on the brink of bankruptcy whilst the remainder do not have the money or incentive to spend on infrastructure whilst the state of the rivers is beyond the pale, unless of course you happen to be a certain Conservative MP. The only winner, at least judged in a pecuniary sense, has been the consumer with cheap water bills.

It is heartening to see that the issue of the regulator does feature in the manifestos, though I am not sure the Green proposal for throwing more money at already failing bodies would help. The real point and addressed in part by the Liberal Democrats is that Ofwat, the Environment Agency and Natural England do not operate independently. The choices they make and the decisions they hand down are strictly defined by the brief set by the government. That brief, if we are to spend the money required on bigger and better sewage plants, new reservoirs, desalination plants and a national grid of water can only come through increased water bills. Nobody seems prepared to speak that hard truth and nor does anyone address that other elephant in the room that 40% of all river pollution is due to agriculture.

Based on this paucity of truth I suspect that for our rivers, whoever walks down Downing Street on the morning of 5/July, the manifesto pledges will make little difference.

An unusual McNabb

I had forgotten the pleasure of downstream wet fly; just lob it out there and let the river do the rest. It took a golf trip to southern Ireland to remind me of this long lost skill (sic) where, with a certain rat-like cunning I had arranged the itinerary for morning golf and afternoon fishing.

I spent many of my late teenage years fishing on the west coast in Ireland, drifting for hours on lochs with the occasional foray to the tea coloured rivers where I caught my first ever Atlantic salmon. So, last week when a friend from overseas, on a visit to England for a wedding persuaded me that a side trip to south-west Ireland to sample the golf courses of Kerry, Killarney and Cork was a wise idea I hatched the above plan.

Caragh Lake

Frankly, I had no idea there were such an array of high end courses and that there was such a huge industry surrounding them, largely due it seems to the vast number of Americans who account for 95% of visitors paying for a single round what the locals pay for annual membership. It is remarkable – at every course luxury coaches (and sometimes helicopters) lined up to disgorge excited parties who fall upon the branded merchandise like locusts, stripping the shelves before heading to the first tee where the caddies did passable imitations of the antics of those made famous in the 1980 movie Caddyshack starring Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield and Bill Murray.

The first hotel, of gorgeous Art and Crafts design, which left you feeling like a guest in Daphne du Maurier’s Manderley, looked over Caragh Lake with Ireland’s tallest mountain range, the McGillicuddy Reeks, as a backdrop. I was assured that the fish were both small and scarce (half the prediction would turn out to be true ….), but undeterred I took the oars and headed out putting on a fly of indeterminate origin, somewhere between and Daddy Long Legs and spider. The old skills of drifting with the wind along the shoreline soon came back though I have to confess the first fish was caught as I trolled the line when moving the boat. As predicted it was small, as were the following four who all rose to my leggy spider. It was a happy hour.

River Currane

Two days later I was 75 miles southwest within casting distance of the Atlantic on the short River Currane (just half a mile long) that flows from Lough Currane to empty into Ballinskelligs Bay at Waterville. My first attempts at securing the fishing in the grounds of the hotel were rebuffed: the water is too low I was told. I pondered this for a while and then went to find the owner in the kitchen, explaining that, though it might seem odd to them, this Englishman was perfectly content to take his chances with the brown trout. I suspect more to humour me that anything else, my pleadings were accepted.

Two hours later, with twenty five fish to my name including ten small sea trout, known as juners locally, and one salmon, the first of the year at Waterville House, I was to become something of celebrity at the hotel, not least because the large window of the bar overlooked the river. To be honest, nobody was more shocked by the outcome than me. Anticipating just trout I had tied on a size 16 Gold Ribbed Hares Ear with a bead on a light tippet; had a salmon been a possibility I would certainly have gone a different route. But such are the vagaries of fly fishing – success comes in the strangest ways in the most unlikely manner sometimes so I stuck with my chalkstream faithful until the squally rain of early evening drove me inside.

A birdie of the golf variety, a salmon, sea trout and brown trout in a single day is a variation on a McNab I never expected and will probably never repeat.

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) Who celebrated a golden jubilee on this day is 1887?

2) How many general elections have there been in the UK this century?

3) Racing began at what is now Ascot Racecourse in 1711 but when did the Royal Enclosure come into being? A) 1722 B) 1822 C) 1922