It’s time for a national water grid

Thanks to much of England and Wales suffering from yet another hot and dry year, planning and control of water and wastewater has rapidly emerged as a key issue.

Despite this, however, there’s a moaning and groaning sound emerging from Whitehall – the noise HM Treasury makes as it resists the now inevitable renationalization of the water industry. And despite a new PM, the new government looks as unable to resist pressure from its neoliberal bosses at 1 Horse Guards Road as its predecessors over the past half century.

Meanwhile, however, the climate-change-denial industry is melting down with indignation as fast as the bitumen in south-east England’s roads. No, they screech, of course an atmospheric gas with only 427 parts per million couldn’t possibly have any effect on anything!

No? Well perhaps we should put all the lobbyists and social media influencers promulgating this cod science in a chamber with 427ppm of cyanogen gas in its atmosphere. If any survive, they could tell us how they coped.

But water remains an issue where the Government’s shoe pinches hardest. Last year’s Government “Independent Water Commission” (the “Cunliffe Review”) was earnest but underwhelming. Plainly the industry’s future remains one of the many big timebombs ticking away in Andy Burnham’s in-tray.

Those of us who reported our way through water privatization in 1990 could see the way the industry wanted to go (“strategies to outwit the regulators”) and where it would go as soon as European Union regulation was weakened and removed. The EU forced the industry (kicking and screaming) to clean up rivers and beaches in the 1990s, though consumers were made to foot the bill to ensure the new shareholders got their profits too. Since then, it’s been profits and bonuses first and rivers and beaches back to being free, open-air, sewage treatment plants.

This barbecue summer has, of course, brought denialist-scam folk out in force, saying the answer is to build more reservoirs. But it isn’t – reservoirs store water (and evaporate it rather well too) but they don’t create it. Much of the country faces chronic water shortage and reservoirs are a partial and inadequate solution at best.

Even the water industry’s own trade body, Water UK, reminded the UK government of what it’s been quietly ignoring since at least 1930 and probably earlier – the need for Great Britain to build a national water grid. Victorian engineers showed what could be done with gravity-fed pipelines from North Wales, the Lake District etc.. Today, small amounts of water are quietly fed into the East of England, in part via rivers and canals, but it needs much more just to meet its current needs, let alone the Government’s fantasy sprawl plans.

But while Whitehall is planning to exacerbate climate-change with expanded airports and new motorways, it is doing its best to ignore the work done over the years on the National Water Grid. It’s now time to dust that off and get on with it.

And time too to remind the neoliberals at the Treasury that public capital invested in public infrastructure is actually good for the economy, despite the whines and groans from Tufton Street junk-tanks.

Jon Reeds