Introduction
Water is an absolute necessity for human life, along with food, shelter, energy and effective waste recycling, yet water management is failing badly in the UK at present. Every time it rains heavily, there is a risk of discharge of untreated sewage into streams and rivers with consequent ecological damage and risk to human health, due to the combination of surface water and sewage.
The management of our water infrastructure must be completely restructured and modernised, to separate sewage from surface water and industrial waste.
This paper aims to provide an overview of the whole field so that we can maintain our orientation and not become lost in a maze of competing technical details.
- Climate change
Our planet’s climate is changing due to the burning of coal, oil and gas. Surface temperatures are rising, and warm air can hold about 7% more moisture for every degree Centigrade of warming, which will mean more frequent and more intense precipitation of rain, and therefore more frequent and more intense floods. Warming also means that droughts may become more frequent in some parts of the country. In the longer term, sea level rise will threaten coastal flooding. Observations recorded by the Meteorological Office confirm that our climate is becoming wetter: “UK winters for the most recent decade (2014–2023) have been 9% wetter than 1991–2020 and 24% wetter than 1961–1990, with smaller increases in summer and autumn and none in spring” .
These changes are imposing stresses on our water systems, and the stresses will become more intense in coming years.
To avoid increasing episodes of flooding, we must therefore:
1.1 Plant trees on the tops of hills
1.2 Provide fields that can be flooded (polders) in the event of heavy rainfall
1.3 Provide flood protection for settlements vulnerable to flooding
1.4 Abandon some settlements that cannot be protected
1.5 Engineer some bottlenecks e.g. bridges, with flumes and other technologies
1.6 Dredge some river channels
1.7 Protect some estuaries with tidal barrages
1.8 Ensure that the rainwater run-off from all new build housing and hard surfacing is unable to get in to the sewers, and is returned to the earth as close as possible to the site that it originates from. - Sewage
-
We are poisoning the environment by throwing away a substance that has value as a fertiliser and an energy source. Human excrement is a valuable resource when properly treated, but an ecocidal agent if released into water ways in its raw state. Proper treatment of sewage entails keeping it strictly separated from surface water running off from things like roofs and roads, and strictly separated from industrial waste.
We therefore need to
2.1 Create many new channels for surface water to run back to waterways without mixing with sewage.
2.2 Treat sewage (uncontaminated by industrial waste) by anaerobic digestion to produce valuable soil conditioner and biogas that can be fed into the gas grid.
2.4 Enable sewage to be recycled safely by identifying all forms of industrial and chemical waste, separate them from sewage, and find ways of managing them in a scientific way by combining them with other wastes, sometimes creating value for what was previously a waste industrial product.
- Agricultural waste
Slurry from cattle sheds often overflows into local ditches and streams, especially in times of heavy rainfall, just as happens with human sewage. Cattle and poultry effluents should therefore be digested to produce soil conditioner (fertiliser) and usable biogas.
Inevitably, corporations that manufacture artificial fertiliser will work hard to prevent this outcome, and we must be prepared to meet all their push-back talking points.
This brief overview shows that there is a huge amount of work to be done, which will require a serious amount of money.
Paying for Water
Ofwat in December 2024 allowed water companies (WCs) to raise water bills by about 35% to pay for work in separating stormwater from sewage. It is very clear indeed that it is absurd to expect that water and sewage bill payers could or should pay for all the necessary work listed above which is needed to rationalise water management in the UK.
We are talking here about a massive infrastructure operation on a par with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933, when he created employment to meet the economic suffering caused by the Great Depression of 1929-39.
The money for reform must be raised by central government to address a crisis of water management that adversely impacts the health of both humans and our aquatic environment, a long crisis that has been created by years of neglect and complacency, to be compounded in coming decades by the effects of climate change. There is a clear need for Keynesian-style investment into this vital element of our national life.
Neo-liberal economists and politicians (be they Tory, LibDem, or Labour) will use their influence in the legacy and social media to scream long and loud in protest at this suggestion, because to them, money is the only reality worth considering.
Neo-liberalism is the exceedingly questionable idea that self serving (largely) men, competing against each other for ever-increasing accumulations of monetary wealth, without any external restraint or regulation, will produce the best of all possible worlds. Ecological and human health to net-liberalists is a mere “externality” to economics. They have no concept of investment in human health or in ecology, they only think of investment in strictly financial terms. They cannot understand that investment can change a “waste” into value, or that healthy rivers, streams and oceans have value also.
The neoliberal hysteria will be amplified by a campaign by manufacturers of artificial fertilisers against the use of sewage derived soil conditioners, as mentioned above.
This is a battle that we must be prepared to fight and win, because it is the opening battle of an ideological war between neo-liberalism and real, ecological economics of the coming century, an economics which is based on the relation between mankind and the environment that is our life-support system.
The money needed to reform the way water is managed in the UK can be raised by a combination of:
- terminating the experiment of privatisation
- a tax on the richest layers of British society
- a contribution from Quantitative Easing
De-privatisation
Responsibility for water was taken from local government in 1974 and put under regional water authorities (RWAs). Investment in water services fell by 2/3rds between 1970 and 1980 because borrowing was forbidden under the Conservatives in power at the time. Margaret Thatcher privatised the RWAs in 1989, and allowed the private companies to borrow, so investment in infrastructure increased after privatisation. The debt owed by the RWAs was cancelled in order to facilitate privatisation. Debt has increased from zero in 1989 to £60.6 billion by 2022, so that a proportion of water bills (19% in the case of Wessex Water) is diverted to paying interest on the corporations’ debt.
Privatisation means that the WCs must pay dividends annually to their shareholders. In 2022-3 the companies paid out £1.4 billion in dividends to shareholders, nearly 11% of the companies’ total revenues, or 22% of capital investment.
In other words, without privatisation, about 22% more could have been applied to preventing sewage spillages into our environment.
The public are overwhelmingly against water privatisation. A YouGov poll in 2022 showed that only 8% of people supported privatised water, whereas 63% wanted public ownership. Even of Conservative voters, 58% wanted public ownership, with only 12% supporting the privatised system. Sadly, the Conservative, LibDem and Labour parties lack the courage to start to unpick Thatcher’s toxic legacy, and only the Green Party is calling for de-privatisation of the WCs.
Privatisation need not come at a huge cost. The share value of failing companies can fall away to nothing, so the Government can easily take them over when this happens. Thames Water is near this point in 2024. A water bill strike could bring other companies to that point.
An inventive way of de-privatisation of WCs is by punishing spillages, not by imposing fines, but by acquiring company shares instead. Directors could see power slip out of their hands every time another spillage happens. There is a petition calling for this method here: https://weownit.org.uk/act-now/take-shares-not-fines
Privatised WCs are clearly failing, and re-nationalisation or WCs will signal the beginning of the end of the doctrine of neo-liberalism, which has to be cleared away before we can address the global cluster of major social and environmental problems that we face in our time.
A tax on the rich
Households in the bottom decile (tenth) in the United Kingdom earned, on average, £18,706 per year in 2022/23, compared with the top decile which earned £185,358 pounds per year.
The richest 1% of British people hold more wealth than 70% of ordinary British people
Profs Wilkinson and Pickett have shown very clearly that such inequality of income and wealth creates a society that is less healthy, more unhappy, and more dysfunctional than a society that is more equal.
Therefore, the case for raising money from the rich for renovating our water infrastructure is very strong indeed.
The counter-argument that will be raised is that if we raise taxes in the UK, rich people will move abroad. However, rich people tend to hold assets like land and grand houses in the UK, and these assets cannot be moved. These assets can always be taxed, and money can be raised on them.
Additionally, Britain is a regrettably backwards and conservative country; other countries are more progressive, so there will be an international movement to tax the rich, leaving the rich with nowhere to go and nothing to do except pay their fair share of taxation.
Quantitative Easing
Most money is created by private banks in the process of granting a loan. When a person is granted a loan by a bank, two accounts are created, an asset in the books of the lender, and a liability in the account of the debtor. The debtor then, in subsequent years, pays back first the interest and finally the capital amount, at which point the asset and liability accounts cancel each other out, and the bank is left with a profit, which represents new money in the economy.
The State is allowed by the banks to create cash out of nothing, and may also create money by what is known as Quantitative Easing.
Viewing the problem of water management in the UK economy, we have the following:
- A pollution problem that requires a large amount of work
- Unemployed people who could do this work, preferably using Green Wage Subsidy
- Available tools and materials to do this work
- Available skills and knowledge to carry out this work
- A beneficial outcome in terms of healthy waters, increased biodiversity, biogas, soil conditioner, an upskilled workforce, and a more equal society
Therefore is is perfectly reasonable to create the money required to carry out this work by Quantitative Easing (QE).
The objection will be raised that QE can lead to hyper-inflation. This is true in some circumstances, where money is just injected into the economy unlinked to any productivity or project by governments in stressful circumstances such as civil war.
It is therefore clear that the money can be raised by central government to pay for renovation of our water management.
THE PROGRAMME
What are the practical tasks that need to be done? Like most big changes, it needs action at every level: Government, business, and householders.
Action by Government
- Keep to Labour’s manifesto promise: Labour will put failing water companies under special measures to clean up our water. We will give regulators new powers to block the payment of bonuses to executives who pollute our waterways and bring criminal charges against persistent law breakers. We will impose automatic and severe fines for wrongdoing and ensure independent monitoring of every outlet.
- Government will legislate on separating sewage from surface water in all new developments, with very few exceptions
- Government will initiate pilot trials on the processing of industrial waste, reviewing discharges from selected industrial sites, building up ways of neutralising acidic wastes with alkaline wastes, flocculating substances in solution, and so on. This will result in no more mixing of industrial and domestic sewers.
- All hard surface installation will have to pay a levy to create conduits to separate surface water from sewage
- A timetable and plan will be laid out for achieving separation for surface water, sewage and industrial waste.
- Review the exact duties of the various bodies with control over water, and provide clear lines of communication and responsibility.
Action by Local Government
Ditches may be provided with channels at a set height above normal water levels that will divert excess water into adjacent fields, creating mini-polders.
Action by WCs
1. Continuation of present programme of providing reservoirs to contain storm water
2. WC newsletters to carry methodical educational pages, and set up competitions for school children to answer questions showing their comprehension of the content of these pages
3. Where flooding has in the past led to sewage flowing back into houses via sewers, WCs may provide non-return valves on the property to prevent future occurrences.
4. WCs will partner with other authorities charged with managing water in creating schemes to reduce local flooding.
5. Publicise the financial advantages of having a water meter
6. Assist in provision of smart water butts that when filled, slowly release water to a soakaway, in preparation for the next downpour
Action by householders
1. Buy shares in local WCs to enable bill payers’ voices to be heard at WC AGMs.
2. Consider installing a composting toilet
3. Install water gardens and soakaways in the garden
4. Donate to FoE Middle East, in order to raise consciousness of the real value of water.
Dr Richard Lawson for Local Action 4 Water
Tuesday 14 January 2025
