Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260
- 279)
WEDNESDAY 14 NOVEMBER 2007
MR KEVIN
WHITEMAN, MR
ROBERT SALMON,
MR DAVID
FULLWOOD, DR
JEAN VENABLES
AND MR
DAVID SISSON
Q260 Chairman:
So here you are, a group of enthusiasts sitting round the table,
you are very knowledgeable about your own drainage circumstances,
but, as we have heard, you have to interact with a whole series
of other bodies. Where do you fit in the drainage hierarchy, given
the sort of competing responsibilities for drainage issues?
Mr Sisson: I think I might deal
with that one, Chairman. Internal drainage boards are set up,
as David has said, in areas of special need, and in each of those
special need areas it sits within a region of the Environment
Agency, and they are our supervising authority, if that is the
word that you like to use. We sit alongside and have very similar
powers to local authorities, or local authorities have very similar
powers to individual drainage boards. So you have drainage boards
active in special need areas, you have local authorities sitting
beside them out of that district and then you have the Environment
Agency overseeing the whole of the land drainage and water.
Q261 Chairman:
Help me to understand the whole range of drainage circumstances
for which you actually have a responsibility, and how do you exercise
that responsibility?
Mr Sisson: Our main function is
literally managing water levels in the special need areas. That
may well be for any call on the water environment—it may
be flood defence, it may be land drainage, it may be irrigation,
it may be amenity, it may be an environmental need, but that is
our core responsibility. We effectively sit between the urban
areas and agricultural land and transfer the water away from those
areas to discharges either to the tidal regions or to main rivers,
Environment Agency main rivers.
Q262 Chairman:
Do you have any conflict between biodiversity responsibilities
and drainage responsibilities?
Mr Sisson: There can be conflicts
that impinge on operational activity. Mostly we try to work through
them with our partners and other stakeholders.
Q263 Chairman:
So in terms of the stakeholders you work with, when it comes to
setting priorities, you mentioned, I think, principally dealing
with water level issues. In terms of areas, for example, where
you have got a dyke system, you have got to get the dykes full,
so individual landowners have got to keep their drains in good
order so that they can discharge into your dykes. I say "your
dykes"—do you have something that is actually your
responsibility or is it a question of you are looking at situations
and then tasking others to do your bidding?
Mr Sisson: Yes, we do have dykes
that are nominated to be maintained, effectively, by the drainage
board at public expense, if you like, and then there are many
riparian water courses that rely on them for their point of discharge.
They can be either open water courses, as you have suggested,
dykes if you will, or they may be sections of culverts or pipes
as well. Most of the IDB areas obviously, because they are low-lying
aspects, rely on pumping for their eventual discharge and we maintain
those structures and sluices, et cetera, as well.
Q264 Chairman:
One of the issues that has come up in much of the evidence has
been about the maintenance of water courses and of existing drainage
systems. There has been a lot of blame being allocated between
different agencies. For example, members of the public have written
to the Committee saying, "If only the water courses had been
properly maintained, when the floods came in our area the water
would have got away quicker." That is the kind of comment
that we have had. As a situation in the way I have described it,
is that something you are monitoring on a continuing basis? Do
you have any disciplinary powers over riparian owners to say,
"Get your drains and your water courses in good order."
How does the interrelationship work between you and others who
also have a drainage responsibility?
Mr Sisson: There are two or three
things that you ask there. I will deal with them if I can. First
off, powers over third parties, effectively riparian owners. Yes,
there are powers within the Land Drainage Act for the drainage
board to act in a supervisory role, to require cleansing or maintenance
works. I think the other part of your question was about possibly
referring to the dykes that we maintain, or rivers maybe.
Q265 Chairman:
Yes.
Mr Sisson: Okay. There are two
things. In our own circumstances we have all had needs-based programmes
of operation and cleansing of water courses. They are all engineered
structures and have to be maintained to be fit for purpose. The
action that we normally take is we annually clean weed that grows
in them that can clog up flow, quite obviously, and we have periodically
then removed silt that has accumulated in the dykes to restore
their flow capacity and their storage capacity for dealing with
what we expect to be extreme events, but possibly not as extreme
as we received this year.
Q266 Chairman:
In terms of flooding that we are focusing on, which obviously
has arisen out of what happened this summer, were there areas
covered by IDBs that were involved in this years flooding?
Mr Sisson: Most definitely.
Q267 Chairman:
Have you been able to collate any of their observations about
what happened and any thoughts that they may have about policy
changes, responsibility changes, which ought to result from this
year's events?
Mr Sisson: Certainly David has
some figures to share with you for the Yorkshire area, and I will
pick up any general points.
Mr Fullwood: Certainly in the
East Riding of Yorkshire, which is where I am particularly involved,
and these are figures that have been verified by East Riding,
there were something like 6,300 properties affected by the floods
and there were also about nine and a half thousand hectares of
arable land affected by the floods. Most of it was on the east
side of the River Hull. That, historically, is an area called
Leven Carrs, and a "carr" land is low-lying land. What
used to happen in the pre-drainage days is that is where the water
came from the lowland areas. Hull and the East Riding seems to
be, listening to the previous people, a unique area. In the area
itself there are a number of elevated water courses, which we
call highland carriers, and they are generally above the normal
land level and they take the water from the upland areas, from
the Wold, for example, right from the east coast, and they carry
it in an elevated manner across the lowlands into the River Hull,
which is an EA maintained water course which gravitates down into
the Humber. What was happening this time, because of the sheer
volume of water, the upland water courses, the elevated water
courses, were actually over-topping and flowing down into the
lowland areas, as it would have done three, four, 500 years ago,
and it was accumulating in the "carr" land areas. The
problem then was the evacuation of that water once it got into
the lowland area, and in certain instances it stayed there for
three weeks or more. It is an estimate, but we estimate that on
the agricultural losses there was something just short of six
or seven million pounds worth of uninsured agricultural losses.
That is the Beverley area, Preston, which is not Preston Lancashire
but Preston Yorkshire.
Q268 Chairman:
That bit I understand because part of my constituency has Preston,
Lancashire in it.
Mr Fullwood: Preston Yorkshire.
Lower Ouse, Market Weighton and a group of drainage boards just
on the north bank of the Humber were significantly affected by
the lack of the ability to discharge surface water in the water
courses out into the Humber through gravity discharge points.
Burstwick drain has been mentioned. That is a gravity outpour.
Q269 Chairman:
Was that simply because the main water course was full, so there
was nowhere for the water to go?
Mr Fullwood: I think, on the question
of maintenance, had any water course been in pristine condition,
flooding would still have occurred. The question is, if the water
courses had been in better condition could we have got rid of
it quicker, and, therefore, the duration been shorter?
Q270 Chairman:
In terms of flood management messages to the Committee, you are
intensely involved in your local areas of activity as drainage
boards. Are there any things that you want to tell us that you
think we ought to know about in terms of changing flood prevention
policy in the future which you have been sitting there saying:
if only they would do so and so things would be better?
Dr Venables: I will take that
one. For many years now we have been saying that it is important
to recognise that the water level management is taking place every
day. We are rather focusing on a flood event, but every day 1.2
million hectares of land relies on active management and I think
that is an important point to consider in terms of looking at
risk management. We are looking at water level management as well.
It is a continuum, but there is a lower end, which is the water
level management every day. In addition to the land that was protected
and the original reason for doing it, which was to grow food,
we are now protecting extensive infrastructure. Roads, railways,
utilities, water supplies, all the communications networks run
through those low-lying areas, and it is absolutely vital for
the country that they are kept open and working, and that is water
level management.
Q271 Chairman:
Do you have sufficient resources to do that job?
Dr Venables: One always needs
more.
Q272 Chairman:
Turn it round the other way. Are there any potential serious risks
in the scenario that you have described that you are struggling
to cope with?
Dr Venables: I think what would
be different if we had more money would be to improve the maintenance
of structures to upgrade several of the pumping stations to cope
with impending climate change and to invest in renewal and repair.
Q273 Paddy Tipping:
Can I come back to Yorkshire Water. You talk about Hull and Sheffield.
They are pretty historic cities, big built up areas. The sewers
have been there a long time. What are the conditions? What assessment
have you made of the conditions?
Mr Whiteman: We do a full assessment
of the condition of the sewerage infrastructure. We have in Yorkshire
roughly 30,000 kilometres of sewer, which will be expanded by
50 per cent in 2010 when we take on responsibility for Warwickshire
IDB private sewers, so big expansion there too, and they are not
all Victorian. If you look at Sheffield, the big Don Valley sewer
was built in the eighties, I think, in Hull the sewerage infrastructure
was significantly improved in the sixties and seventies, but it
is true to say that the vast majority of those 30,000 will be
brick built Victorian sewers—there are a lot of them—and
generally they are in good condition. Having said that, because
the investment requirement over the last 15, 16 years has been
very much about improving things like treatment standards so that
we improve the quality of the rivers and the like and investing
in water quality standards as well so the drinking water quality
improved, that has squeezed out the requisite capital maintenance
investment that is necessary for a sustainable sewerage infrastructure
over the next 100, 200, 300 years. If you look at the sewer replacement
rates at the moment, you hear various quotes, but we are expecting
the last five or six hundred years with current replacement rates;
so one would hope that, as the new requirement for improved standards
of treatment start to diminish, we can expand the capital maintenance
expenditure to ensure the maintenance of the sewerage infrastructure
is sustainable. At the moment, if you look at Ofwat's assessment
of the sewerage infrastructure in Yorkshire, they do it on a performance
basis and it is considered to be stable; so there is no evidence
that collapses are getting worse or blockages are getting worse
in the overall sense that the infrastructure is deteriorating.
Mr Salmon: In fact, during flooding
events the sewers actually run free to capacity in Hull specifically.
There were no blockages in the system that impeded the flow of
water, so the sewers themselves performed well.
Q274 Paddy Tipping:
Mr Whiteman, you told us earlier on about climate change, and
it is hard to make predictions about the condition of the sewers,
but you have also said to us that there is an investment gap in
sewers because we have concentrated on water standards. What assessment
of have you made of the investment gap?
Mr Whiteman: My point is not just
about the investment in the water system but also in waste water
treatment in general. If you look at the level of investment,
if you look at Hull, in the last ten years we have spent roughly
250 million on the water infrastructure, of which 150 million
is on the waste water system, the construction of a major 11 kilometre
new sewer right across that carries all the flows to a new treatment
works. So there is significant investment taking place, but the
investment tends to be in enhancement of the service rather than
maintenance of the existing service. There is no doubt that, as
and when that enhancement starts to diminish, very often driven
by European legislation, we will be able to spend more on the
infrastructure maintenance, which is the older Victorian stock
that we have.
Mr Salmon: Let me give an example
of that. In the last five-year investment period one of the big
drivers for quality investment has been the Fresh Water Fish Directive,
which has driven investment in Yorkshire of over £200 million
in improved treatment standards for waste water treatment works,
but the comparable sum on the maintenance side for updating combined
sewer overflows, reducing sewer flooding in properties, is around
£100 million. So, I think, going forward, there are choices
to be made between the level of quality investment that will be
required (and of course that is an environment driver around climate
change) as much as what needs to be invested in the sewerage infrastructure
if we are to see repeat rainfall events of this intensity and
magnitude in the future.
Q275 Paddy Tipping:
You are about to start having discussions with Ofwat about the
next investments, are you not?
Mr Whiteman: Yes.
Q276 Paddy Tipping:
What are you saying to them and what are they saying to you?
Mr Whiteman: What we are saying,
particularly about climate change, is that we should be spending
fairly significant amounts of money as an industry in the next
five-year period to do a real fundamental assessment of how climate
change will affect us and how we should respond to it. Strangely,
of course, before this summer the vast majority of the focus about
water companies and climate change was about water supply. Suddenly
this summer has brought into very sharp focus the issue of urban
drainage too, but the numbers are huge, and when you start talking
about reengineering the drainage system of a city the numbers
are enormous. So rather than charging into just trying to put
bigger pipes in, which is not that straightforward, we should
do some fundamental research as to what exactly is required so
that where the money is spent it is spent properly and spent well.
Mr Salmon: The Chairman referred
to the Foresight Report earlier on. In the water industry, the
focus, it is fair to say, has been largely on the water resources
and supply side, so we have taken very seriously the impacts of
climate change on that side. We have done long-range, 25-year
modelling in terms of the water supply resources in Yorkshire
and we are very confident that we have seen an end to hosepipe
bans in Yorkshire due to forward planning, modelling and investment
in our network. A lot of the emphasis has been on the water supply
side and we have worked with national bodies like UKWIR doing
climate change research, but largely, and this is true of the
industry as a whole, I think, on the water resources side. Of
course, if we had been having this conversation a year ago, we
would all have been talking about the need for more reservoirs,
more water resources, dry summers, and what we have seen this
June, of course, is an incredibly wet summer, which is almost
the converse of what climate change is predicting, which is wetter
winters and dryer summers. The other focus for water companies,
because we are big energy users, has been on carbon reduction
mitigation, so the water companies are very focused on energy
efficiency, carbon footprints. Just this week we have seen the
opening of a wind turbine on our waste water treatment works in
Hull paradoxically, and also our Loftsome Bridge Water Treatment
Works, which will make those works partly sustainable from an
energy point of view into the future. I think the industry is
very focused on climate change, it is very focused on these big,
important issues and what we have said to our regulator in our
current 25-year plan, our strategic direction statement that we
have put together, is that we have reached a turning point with
the sewerage network where we now need to start to take this issue
seriously and do some proper modelling, proper research to see
what the impacts are going to be on our networks going forward.
Q277 Paddy Tipping:
Tell me if I have got this wrong. What you are saying to me is
in the next investment cycle it is going to work on what you need
to do rather than physically work on the ground?
Mr Whiteman: I think that is right,
yes. Obviously there is an on-going requirement for investing
in the sewerage infrastructure, but specifically in relation to
climate change we need to have some very clear views on what it
is we are trying to plan for, and I do not think that is clear
yet.
Mr Salmon: It is fair to say,
we are already doing things, like, for example, the design of
our treatment works. We are looking at raising up generators,
having electricity supplies higher; so there are some levels of
mitigation and adaptation that we are putting in with the prospect
of these events, but, as Kevin said, we do not want to be rushed
into any big knee-jerk investments on the back of this. We need
to take a scientific, sober look at what the impact of climate
change is if we are going to see more of these repeat rainfall
events.
Q278 Paddy Tipping:
I think that is right, but it does not make easy listening for
somebody who has got foul sewage in their front room?
Mr Whiteman: I agree. What we
are not saying is that we will slow down or in any way reduce
the level of expenditure that we are putting into the sewerage
system, that we are putting in now, about reduction of, in particular,
flooding from sewers. In our 25-year strategic directive statement
that we have been asked to submit by Ofwat for this, to put some
context around the next five-year investment plan, our aspiration
there would be zero sewer flooding in 25 years' time, that it
will just not happen, because we do not think it is acceptable.
Please do not think we are in any way complacent about that, but
we do think that the major decision is around climate change investment,
because there will be some major decisions. The Chairman has already
asked a question about who pays for this; so you need to make
sure where the money is spent it is spent properly and spent well.
Q279 Paddy Tipping:
I want to come back to that point. There has been a lot of focus
on the EA's budget from 400 million to 600 million to 800 million.
There has not been a lot of discussion that I have seen about
the amount that we are going to invest in the sewage system, but
the events this year have shown us that that is the major cause.
Mr Whiteman: If you look in Yorkshire
alone our investment programme is not far short of £400 million
a year, so we have been investing enormous sums of money in the
water supply and waste water infrastructure. One would hope that
as the quality investment requirement goes down (i.e. we have
got to a stage where the rivers are in good condition, the discharges
are well treated), as that investment reduces, the slack will
be taken up by investment in the sewerage system as opposed to
the treatment system. One of our big worries is that every improvement
requirement standard from Europe does not seem to stop, and I
think there is an issue for us to consider around when is the
level of treatment good enough, because there is also the carbon
issue that goes with that. The more you treat, the more power
you have to use, the more carbon you have to use; so there is
another big question there.
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