Water

Campaign date: 09-01-2008

Kent’s latest period of drought has passed, but the South East’s long-term water-supply crisis is more serious than ever. In the past 18 years, some parts of south-east England have been under hosepipe bans eight times, even though these measures are designed for 1-in-10-year conditions. With pressure growing on our water resources – from housing growth, climate change and environmental legislation – we are facing potential deficits of a billion litres a day across the region by 2025.

It is of profound concern to us that the Government and the private water companies have not woken up to the new realities of water supply – their strategies for the future rely far too much on building reservoirs that will never fill. Only when there is a change in approach to this issue will there be a reasonable chance of balancing supply and demand through the difficult decades ahead.

CPRE Kent advocates the following:

• Maintaining and improving the natural water environment must be a first priority in water policy. The work of the Environment Agency needs to be supported to achieve an equitable balance between the needs of the environment and the needs of public supply.

• Government plans for large-scale housing growth in Kent and the wider South East must take greater account of environmental limits on water supply in current circumstances, and not just assume the water companies can be bound by their mandate to supply the public.

• The operating framework and criteria for water supply need to alter in response to the already-evident effects of climate change. The mandate, and if necessary, the organisation, of Ofwat should be changed to initiate a much stronger approach to conservation. ‘Economic level of leakage’ criteria must be strengthened.

• We all need to think and behave differently about water supply, with a much greater stress on preserving a resource that most of us have come to take for granted.

• Water efficient fittings, such as low-flow taps and dual-flush toilets, needs to be standard in all new building, and retro-fitting of existing homes should be tested as part of 106 agreements.

• Water supply strategies need to change. It needs to be recognised that reservoirs are no longer the first-choice technical solution. This is not primarily an issue of local objection: reservoirs are increasingly unsound as a technical solution given the level of water stress from over-abstraction and their increasing unreliability under climate-change conditions.

• Water recycling needs to be a leading part of all water companies’ business plans. Discharge of fresh, clean wastewater to the sea from sewage treatment plants (which takes place from the Weatherlees plant in Thanet, for example) needs to stop – this is a profligate waste of an essential resource.

CPRE Kent has become the most powerful proponent for change in approach to water supply in south-east England, primarily thanks to the campaigning work of Graham Warren, a former water-resources manager for the Environment Agency’s Kent region who chairs our Environment Committee. He has written two major reports on water supply: A Water Resource Strategy for Kent (2006) and A Water Resource Strategy for the South East of England (2007). He also gave detailed evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on Water Management in 2006.

Copies of the two Water Resource Strategies are available from the branch office or can be downloaded as pdf files (see below).

For a more condensed view of the water supply issues facing our county and our region, see the executive summaries below.

Attachments:

Campaign Issues

• Thames Gateway
• China Gateway
• Kent Climate Change Forum