Fire Risk

It will make a difference as any Government should be able to recognise how vital water is to human life.

And therefore see it as a spending priority to have a resilient water system even if the investement doesn't meet commercial criteria and requires tax increases - something our current water company system cannot do.

Nothing would push a Government into action more than having a system that everyone in the country needs that doesn't work satisfactorily. Whilst those of us in Kent (as an example) have seen that does not apply to our water supply company.

Bryan

 

The evidence of my lifetime, suggests that's not necessarily the case - both at the time of privatisation, and in how the industry has been regulated. And, even so, it's a "should" rather than a "would" - my question is not about the value judgment, but about what would actually change directly as a result of this.

 

We will have to agree to disagree on 'should' or 'would'.

Bryan

 

Fair enough - I've just seen too many argument that X will change Y, when under inspection "X" is a proxy for a whole alphabet soup of other things that it's assumed will magically sort themselves if X happens.

 

DEFRA are currently considering a Southern Water application to have the ability to impose a ban on non-essential water use by busineses and households.

It seems the public consultation ran from 4 August to yesterday.

If that is granted, and if Southern Water decide to use it (possibly selectively re where to apply it) then any heritage railway still using steam (even if not in any specifc area it could be applied to) may feel under more pressure to change to diesel locos.

Bryan

 

That's it Bryan, the piece I extracted from The Guardian, about the water limitation sought by Southern Water, up-thread.

The other element for me, is where railways wrestle with whether to run steam or not, aside from optics, the fire risk, and the staff/passenger welfare risk, there's a pure cost issue. This came home to me in 2022 when I visited a line in the South specially as they had deployed heritage diesels - I got chatting to the line's GM at the end of my journey and he explained the rationale for diesel use, after having to pay a 60,000 pound excess on the railway's insurance after a farmers caught fire triggering the claim process. He said the small drop in passenger numbers by running diesel was less of a hit on revenue than having to find a further 60,000 pounds quickly. He added, that meant a hasty decision to run diesel, explain reasons to customers up front, rather than risk any further fires, causing physical and reputational damage in the community.

ATB Paul

 

I agree entirely about the environmental vandalism comments in the previous post.

The specific concern about the present abstraction issue is that the water company is proposing to over-ride the normal constraint that it can only take water out of the river when there is enough flow to prevent this action damaging the chalkstream. This is not a long-term issue, it is an immediate one.

It’s not just the fish and the fishing. Chalk streams are precious as an (internationally!) rare habitat with unique wildlife and associated landscapes. There should be no question of allowing any special licence for continued abstraction to damage that. Chalk streams, like the Darent and others near London, have been very badly damaged by abstraction in the past, sometimes leading to rivers drying up for the summer.

So it is surely much better to curb other water uses during severe droughts, and leave the rivers alone. Step 1 is a hosepipe ban (mainly as an awareness-raising tool, to help concentrate domestic users’ minds on the need to save water!). Step 2 in severe droughts should be to restrict business users (yes, including steam railways, who will be under fire-risk rules anyway) for as long as the emergency lasts. Step 3, reached in 1976, is standpipes in the street Carrying all the water home to fill ones sink does concentrate the mind on saving water!

The final last-resort step would then to take more river water from chalkstreams; but that should only be done if the situation is so had that extreme water shortages are putting health at risk.

 

I disagree with the framing of the question as a pure either/or, while agreeing that abstraction from chalk aquifers needs to be reduced and, ideally, eliminated.

This summer, there needs to be a trade-off - which may well include restrictions on business users. Standpipes are, IMHO, absolutely to be avoided if at all reasonably possible.

Longer term, there needs to be investment to make the water supply in the Southampton area much more resilient, so that it neither relies on abstraction from chalk streams nor is isolated and unable to be balanced against other areas. And "longer term" means ASAP - but recognising jobs like that aren't quick

 

Literally 60 metres from where I am sat, at great expense lies a watermain that parallels the York ring road.
I know it's there as I watched them tunnel under the River Foss from my back garden fence in about 1988.
This main runs to the Elvington Water works from Skelton north of York where the plan was to abstract water from the Ouse.
Balancing the abstraction with a similar amount of water that had been released from Kielder and piped or free flowed down to York.
The idea was to help fill up the reservoirs and water grid network in South and West Yorkshire.
Is this flow in use ?
I don't know as the emergency release valve into the Foss (Opposite my house) has only once been seen flowing under test.
The rumour is that it has been abandoned, can anyone confirm?
Would this flow help?
Bearing in mind the reservoir levels for Yorkshire Water last year.
So far we do not have a hosepipe ban in use yet but I fear it's not far from coming.

 

Grand Contour Canal anyone?

I understand that these days its a bit small for ships - you need about 3000DWT to be viable and there may be issues over conflict between water transport and navigation

 

Standpipes are in my view a Good Thing - but only in the context of a near-to-last resort, in a once in fifty years emergency.

Nothing like carrying water home in buckets or bottles (and doing the same for one's elderly and disabled neighbours!) to instantly and drastically cut back domestic consumption.

But yes, there needs to be investment, not just in the Southampton region but all over the SE (as a minimum). And it may be time to weigh up the objections to building a north-to-south water grid in some form. By no means environmentally ideal, but might be the least bad option in addition to new local-area reservoirs, which will be a must.

 

Well the Social Care system plainly does not work and successive governments of all colours have done nothing about, although the new PM at the time as claimed they will do something about it.
NHS is not far behind either.

 

If you are referring to the National Water Grid of the 1970's it never got off the ground. Apart from the costs, the idea of differing water qualities being switched around the country would have caused havoc for some users such as my old company manufacturing water based cleaners and industrial/retail service products.

 

What water shortage? Depends how much money you have..

https://x.com/RiverActionUK/status/2084197597003055148

 

I don't think you need to be a died-in-the-wool socialist to realise that the way we have privatised utilities over the last 40 years has not worked for consumers, which was the premise that was sold. The most egregious example of that is the way the energy market is designed to price electricity at the price of the most costly marginal part of supply (typically the standby gas generators). That works very nicely for producers, less so for consumers. Renewable electricity remains expensive not because of its inherent cost, but because it is tied to the price of gas.

In the case of water, and more specifically sewage discharges into rivers, that was a major election issue in Southern England in 2024. Indeed, I'd tentatively suggest that it was the major issue. With the Tories essentially being tired and disliked after too long in power, I'd suggest that the Lib Dems did so strongly because they correctly tuned in to that feeling of disgust about the state of rivers, and the performance of the water companies more generally. You can argue whether their prescription would have been effective, but there is no doubt that they "got" the issue in a way that the other parties (notably Reform, as the other likely recipient of ex-Tory votes) didn't, and they were rewarded accordingly with seats.

Tom

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdrvmm53xm3o

A quirk of nature sees a less dry pocket of the country

 

And I'd accept most of that analysis, with the caveat that consumers were very happy when the structure of the market combined with regulation held their prices down - and that the political reaction you describe is in part a response to the non-economic part of that price.

What I'd want an answer to, regardless of political view, is how a change of structure would address those very real issues. For example, take energy. I may want to pay less for my electricity, and consider it vastly overpriced but I still want guaranteed supply as and when I want to use it. I've seen various analyses of the energy market; the point that all make in various ways is that removing the link between price per kWh & the marginal costs of production, supply volatility changes. As evidenced in posts about requests to stagger usage this evening, the great British public aren't always very understanding of why that should matter.

As the Brexit thread reminds us, repeatedly, it is all very well saying that something is broken and must be changed; the challenge is to define what it should be changed to so that it will work better. At the moment, whether we talk of energy, water or rail, I hear a lot of "it's broken" and much less of "this is how the change I want to make is going to make it better". And as rail demonstrates, greater government intervention is neither cost free nor necessarily in consumers' interests.

 

I would suggest when a very small number of people are getting ridiculously rich; while normal folk worry about turning on the cooker or boiler, when rivers are environmentally dead, when 25% of all drinking water is lost in leaks and a country burns.. The solution isn't hiking bills by a further 40% and it certainly isn't giving your new chief executive a £1m joining gift and rewarding shareholders with bonuses, after catastrophic failure.

The money is there, the system ensures it remains in the wrong hands and the wrong place, benefitting a very exclusive few. Those people lobby extremely hard to keep it that way too.
@Jamessquared is spot on.

 

My bold. Surely part of the problem is that some (many/most?) of the privatised water companies seem unable to deliver on the very, very basic point of providing water to customers on demand, regardless of drought or other adverse conditions. If that one thing were being done effectively, the structure underlying provision would be less important, regardless of anyone's ideological take on how utilities should be owned, controlled, or managed. It is because the current system is perceived as failing the end user that so many people, again regardless of political alignment, want to see things change.