Examination of Witnesses (Questions 241
- 259)
WEDNESDAY 14 NOVEMBER 2007
MR KEVIN
WHITEMAN, MR
ROBERT SALMON,
MR DAVID
FULLWOOD, DR
JEAN VENABLES
AND MR
DAVID SISSON
Q241 Chairman:
We move on to our second set of witnesses this afternoon and welcome
from Yorkshire Water, Mr Kevin Whiteman, their Managing Director.
Is Mr Salmon around?
Mr Whiteman: He has just made
a quick visit. He was hoping to beat you, Chairman!
Chairman: We will assume he is
in the building and if he comes back Mr Salmon will perform the
function of being the Director of External Communications. Representing
the Internal Drainage Boards, we have Mr David Fullwood, who is
the Clerk to the Beverley and Holderness Internal Drainage Board
and also the Preston Internal Drainage Board and Wilberfoss &
Thornton Level Drainage Board. You are going to have to explain
all of that to us in due course. I think you take the award definitely
for the longest title this afternoon. Next to you is Dr Jean Venables,
who is the Chief Executive of the Association of Drainage Authorities,
and you are supported by Mr David Sisson, who is the engineer
to the Lindsey Marsh Internal Drainage Board. You are all very
welcome and, in the case of Yorkshire Water, can I thank you for
you written evidence. David, I think you are going to start.
Q242 David Lepper:
Thank you, Chairman. I think it is really a question for Yorkshire
Water. Sewers have obviously played an important part, particularly
in what happened in Hull, and, as I understand it, the Water Industry
Act provides for a right of connection to a public sewer and it
allows the waste water company to adopt sewers, but, Yorkshire
Water, in your evidence you say that your remit in relation to
sewerage and drainage is very narrowly defined. Can you tell us:
how do you define a sewer and how narrow is the definition of
your responsibilities towards sewerage and is it same for other
water authorities or does it vary from place to place?
Mr Whiteman: The straightforward
definition, if there is such a thing as a straightforward definition
of a sewer, is it is an underground pipe that takes water from
premises as it flows to open land. Having said that, of course,
sewers are not that straightforward because they tend to take
water from everywhere, and we have seen earlier this afternoon
from my colleagues in Hull that very often the land drains drain
into the culvert which drain into the sewers. I am sure we will
come on to Hull in more detail, but Hull is an exceptional case
and I do not think there is anywhere else that has that sort of
system in the UK. In terms of the straightforward definition of
a sewer, it is the underground pipe that takes water from premises.
Q243 David Lepper:
That is what you meant, or what your company meant, by its remit
being very narrowly defined in terms of responsibility towards
sewerage and drainage?
Mr Whiteman: I think it is, yes.
Although it is narrowly defined, of course, it is not so narrowly
applied because of the circumstances I have just described.
Q244 David Lepper:
Do most or all water companies have the same view about their
remit as you have?
Mr Whiteman: I think they move
under the same statutory framework, so they will have, yes.
Q245 David Lepper:
I am still trying to get clear exactly where your responsibilities
start. You have, if I dare say, muddied the issue a bit by talking
about water from different places perhaps all ending up in the
sewer. It is when it enters what you define as the sewer that
you have a responsibility for?
Mr Whiteman: We have a responsibility
for it and, because most urban conurbations in the UK have what
we call combined systems (so surface water and foul water running
in the same pipes), the surface water almost inevitably finds
its way into the sewers in most cities in the UK.
Mr Salmon: Perhaps I could expand
on that with the example of Hull. In the west of the city we have
a water course called Setting Dyke, which is the responsibility
of the Environment Agency, that flows directly into our sewerage
system. In the east of the city we have a land drain called the
Holderness drain that flows into our infrastructure. Water that
drains down gullies and streets and highways is the responsibility
of the local authority until it gets into our sewers. What you
find in our major cities is this tremendous interrelationship
between all of the different drains and sewerage systems. Our
definition was just to define our bit of it, which is when it
goes into those underground structures.
Q246 David Lepper:
How much liaison would you have as a company with those other
agencies that have responsibilities about the way they are carrying
out their responsibilities: because the way they do it is bound
to have some impact on the service you are responsible for?
Mr Whiteman: The Environment Agency
obviously have a huge amount of interaction, because they regulate
us in many different ways. They regulate us in terms of our water
resources and abstraction, they regulate us in terms of our discharges
and we have a lot of interaction with them around drainage issues
as well. The complexity comes because everywhere is so different.
I think the Committee has seen this afternoon the Sheffield situation
is very much about rivers over-topping and filling up drains.
We were a significant victim of the floods in South Yorkshire.
Thirty of our waste water works were completely inundated. In
Hull it was about urban drainage and in Hull, almost as an accident
of history, we have a responsibility for pumping out. In the height
of the Hull floods we were pumping 52,000 litres a second out
of Hull, which is about half the flow of the River Thames, which
gives you a feel for the size of the pumping stations in Hull.
These are not small pumps with small pipes, these are big stations.
Q247 David Lepper:
You say "almost as an accident of history" you have
that responsibility; so that responsibility would lie elsewhere?
Mr Whiteman: As I say, Hull is
unique in that, because it is a combined system, because Hull
is below high-tide level, all the drainage is pumped, whereas
normally the service water would be draining straight out by gravity,
but it had not done so we pumped.
Q248 Chairman:
To follow on what Mr Lepper was saying, in paragraph 7.3.5, you
say under the heading of Selby and East Riding, "The management
of flows from the drainage system into the Humber is the responsibility
of the Environment Agency. Then you go on to repeat what you have
just said, which is, "We are dependent on this drainage system,
as sewers also discharge into it", and then you say, "We
would like to work with them to better understand these issues,
if possible to develop remedies that allow our networks to discharge
effectively rather than backing up causing our sewers to overflow."[4]
That seems to be a rather basic thing that you should have done
some considerable time ago.
Mr Whiteman: This is particularly
about Selby and East Riding rather than Hull, which is different
because this area is gravity drained. We drain into the Burstwick
drain, which is the responsibility of the Environment Agency.
I think one of the things we have to establish is that this particular
rainfall event in Hull was very, very extreme. As a result of
it, the Burstwick drain was higher than the sewerage system. Therefore,
inevitably, water flowed the other way. I think it was explained
earlier on that the arrows on some of these drains go both ways,
so the complexity is enormous.
Q249 Chairman:
Forgive me, I am not an expert in your area, but do you not do
"what if" scenarios, or do you sit there saying, "Oh
well, somebody said this is a one in 75 year or a one in 100 year
event, so we need not really bother about doing this"? When
you write down something about wanting to understand better how
your system and the Environment Agency's area of responsibility
interact, it seems to me from what you have said earlier to be
such a fundamental activity for a water company to be doing that
I am surprised to see it written down in evidence, suggesting
that this is something you have just discovered you ought to be
doing.
Mr Whiteman: I think what we have
learnt from this event is that there are times, and this was one,
when the rainfall is so intense that there is an issue about the
drainage of this area, and we have to learn from that. This was
not a normal circumstance.
Q250 Chairman:
For example, in terms of, if you like, working out the risks which
you as a public company have to cope with, do you have an in-house
futurologist, somebody who goes through with your senior management
what I call the "what if" scenarios? Putting aside the
risk assessments which have been done by the Environment Agency
and possibly others, is there somebody who says, "Look, we
have had the Foresight Report, we are aware of climate change,
we have seen before now extreme weather events, let us just play
some scenarios through the areas that we are responsible for.
If by any chance a series of potential extreme events occurs,
what does this mean? Do you do exercises like that?
Mr Whiteman: We do exercises like
that and we do plan. We are looking at how we plan for climate
change. One of the big problems about planning and investing for
climate change is that we are not actually sure what the impacts
of climate change could be. The commonest view is that it means
wetter winters and dry summers. Here we are talking about a major
summer flooding event. One of the things that we think, particularly
for Hull, is that it should be a multi-agency approach so we understand
all these interactions, and we should, as an industry, be doing
more research over the coming years in order to make sure that
the investment we have to put in is targeted and not wasted, because
the potential levels of investment that are required to deal with
this sort of event are enormous.
Q251 Chairman:
I would like to ask you on that point, because we have done work
in the past about water charging and Ofwat and the Committee obviously
understands, particularly in the context of water poverty, what
rising charges can mean to those who have low incomes. But given
that climate change, if you like, is a world phenomenon and there
are national consequences that we consider, do you believe that
the financial impact is something which should be distributed
using the normal formula where customers effectively pay for whatever
investment Ofwat sanctions, or whether there is a need for a national
view for investments which may be beyond, if you like, any one
company and its customers to bear but where that investment has
got to be made as we learn more about the impact of climate change?
Mr Whiteman: I think the impact
of climate change will be fairly universal across the country.
I think it is for the body politic to decide what the priorities
of the design standards should be, it is then for the companies
to implement them, and, wherever the money comes from eventually,
everybody is affected. So, whether it is through the water charging
system or through the tax system, again, is a political issue,
and I would suggest it should be through the water charging system.
Q252 Chairman:
The only reason I ask that question is that if you take the south-west
of England, when they had to improve their bathing water quality,
because of the sparseness of the population, the people who lived
there paid a disproportionately high additional amount, and one
could argue the same thing in the North West for those who may
have to fund the refurbishment or renewal of Victorian facilities
which may be nearing the end of their life. I suppose what we
are looking at is whether you spread some of the pain across the
whole tax payer population, which is not necessarily the water
paying population?
Mr Whiteman: I believe that one
of the rationales for the privatisation of the industry in the
first place was that he who uses the service pays the bill, and
I think that is the way it should be.
Q253 Chairman:
Let us move to internal drainage boards. I think it would be helpful
if you could describe why it was you were established and what
are your powers and purposes, to give us little back ground, please?
Mr Fullwood: Thank you, Chairman.
Drainage Boards were established 250 years ago, and basically
they were established to drain land so we could produce food to
feed the population. They were formed in obviously the low-lying
areas of land, which also happened sometimes to be the most fertile
areas of land as well. We operate now under the Land Drainage
Act, and I think the first one was 1837 or thereabouts. The latest
one is the 1991 Act. There are about 180 drainage boards in the
country. We do not cover the whole of the country; we cover parts
of it, mainly low-lying. Having said that, there is one sat up
on the Pennines, which is not exactly low-lying, but generally
they do cover low-lying areas, something like 1.2 million hectares
of land.
Q254 Chairman:
Who appoints you?
Mr Fullwood: We were set up under
the Land Drainage Act. We are a statutory body. We have elected
members and nominated members.
Q255 Chairman:
Who is the electorate?
Mr Fullwood: The electorate are
the rate-payers within the board's district, usually land owners.
The nominated members come from the local authorities, who pay
a special levy.
Q256 Chairman:
So you have a sort of ballot, do you, amongst land owners?
Mr Fullwood: Every three years
there is an election and any rate-payer within the district has
so many votes, depending on the area of land that they own within
the district. You have to own a minimum of ten acres, going back
to old money, so whatever it is in new money.
Q257 Chairman:
Are these elections fiercely contested?
Mr Fullwood: Perhaps not.
Q258 Chairman:
It is more a question of finding the volunteers?
Mr Fullwood: They are volunteers.
There is no payment.
Q259 Chairman:
Let us assume that this is day one after the elections and the
nominations have been carried out and the board has been formulated.
How do you determine what your policy objectives are and where
do you get your funding from?
Mr Fullwood: The funding comes
in two main streams. One is that we levy a rate on the occupiers
of the land within the board's district, and in the case of a
farm it is the farm buildings and property. The second main source
of income is on the special levy, which is levied on the local
authority within the board's district. That replaced the early
arrangement where every householder within the district used to
pay a drainage rate. Going back many years, that was probably
a shilling or ten pence, or something like that, and actually
collecting that money was very difficult. In 1991 they changed
the Land Drainage Act and gave it a statutory duty for the local
authority to collect that money on behalf of the drainage board.
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