Examination of Witnesses (Questions 645
- 659)
WEDNESDAY 9 JANUARY 2008
MS PAMELA
TAYLOR, MR
PHILL MILLS,
MR BRUCE
HORTON, MR
JIM MARSHALL
AND MR
RICHARD VENTERS
Chairman: We have got a fine body of
people from Water UK. For the record: Pamela Taylor, Chief Executive,
Phill Mills; Deputy Chief Executive; Mr Bruce Horton, Policy
Adviser; Mr Jim Marshall, Policy Co-ordinator; and Mr Richard
Venters, just to keep them all in order, the Legal Adviser. You
are all very welcome indeed. Thank you very much for your written
evidence. I am going to ask James Gray to start our questioning.
Q645 Mr Gray:
As a very general beginning and without seeking an encyclopaedic
response, can you tell us in Boys' Own terms that even
I would understand who is responsible for surface water drainage?
Ms Taylor: There are many responsibilities,
which is probably part of the problem. The responsibilities are
governed first of all by common law, then the Building Act which
is the responsibility of the DCLG, then the Water Industry Act
which is the responsibility of Defra, then the Highways Act which
is the responsibility of the Department for Transport; the Water
Resources Act, which is Defra, the Environment Agency, internal
drainage boards and local authorities, and the Town and Country
Planning Act, which is the planning authorities and DCLG. If this
boy is being brave, we can go into layer by layer what each of
those is but I think, as you can see, it is a complete mess and
it needs to be reformed.
Q646 Mr Gray:
It was not so much the statutory background and the regulation
of it, I was being even more Boys' Own than that, so for
example, in a town, where does the highway authority's responsibility
end and where do your members' responsibilities begin? Where in
the pipe work do I stop writing to Wiltshire County Council and
start writing to Wessex Water?
Mr Mills: To put it in that level
of language, the sewerage undertakers' responsibilities are effectively
to drain their customers' properties, so it is sometimes referred
to as roof and yard drainage, which is separate from highway drainage.
Highway drainage is the highway authority's responsibility but
more often than not that highway drainage will discharge into
the surface water sewers and pass to the sewerage undertaker.
Q647 Mr Gray:
So at what stage does it stop being the responsibility of the
highway authority and become the responsibility of the sewerage
undertaker?
Ms Taylor: In a way nobody really
knows.
Q648 Mr Gray:
That is why I was asking the question.
Ms Taylor: Exactly, in a way,
nobody knows because we have got all these beautiful separate
pieces of legislation with different responsibilities by different
government departments and so on, but obviously rain water falls
where rain water chooses to fall and when it comes to it, somebody
whose home is flooded or a village is flooded or a town or a city,
or whatever, people actually do not care at that stage. They just
want to know who is going to pick up the responsibility for dealing
with this and how quickly are they going to do that.
Q649 Mr Gray:
Sorry to press you on that but that is precisely what we are trying
to find out. I will give you an example. The town of Winterbourne
Bassett in my own constituency was flooded and we cannot discover
whether it is Wessex Water who are responsible for the sewerage
and surface water drains or whether it is Wiltshire County Council.
I want to know from you what your members' views would be as to
at what stage they take over responsibility for the drainage of
surface water or, indeed, is there no answer to that, maybe it
varies from place to place?
Ms Taylor: There is no perfect
answer to it.
Mr Mills: They will be responsible
for the surface water sewerage pipes generally in the street.
There may be separate drains from the highway but, as I said earlier,
they may connect. The root cause of the flooding, if it was something
straightforward like a blockage on a sewerage undertaker's pipe
then obviously that would be their fault, but if it was sheer
overwhelming by the volume of surface water, it really depends
where that surface water is coming from.
Q650 Mr Gray:
So your submission on behalf of the water companies would be that
there is no clarity at all as to who is responsible in different
places and it is a muddle?
Ms Taylor: That is exactly right,
it is a muddle, which is why we would like to see it reformed.
Q651 Chairman:
If it is a muddle what is your recommendation as to how it should
be sorted out?
Ms Taylor: One thing that we have
looked at is all of these Acts which give various bodies certain
statutory responsibilities but, as we can see from our discussion,
it actually does not add up to a whole. What we would like to
see is one body taking overall responsibility. What we are not
looking for is one body to be put on top of the existing muddle.
We are looking for the existing muddle to be taken away to rationalise
both the legislation and bring the bodies together so that you
have one organisation. In terms of who might be the most appropriate
organisation, we think the most appropriate department would be
Defra and we think the most appropriate organisation would probably
be the Environment Agency, provided it was sufficiently funded
to carry out the role.
Q652 Chairman:
I was musing on this because one of the issues is not directly
related to water utilities but to the whole question that you
raised, Pamela, in terms of people just want somebody to do something
about it. A number of submissions we have had, particularly from
members of the public, have looked at ditches, drains and other
items which they, from a lay standpoint, say if only somebody
could come and unblock it the job would be better. Should we be
looking at some kind of registration system for those who have
a responsibility for the different elements of the water chain
so that it is absolutely clear who at each point is responsible,
including highway authorities, statutory bodies like the ones
you represent, riparian landowners; almost the equivalent of the
Land Registry but for water?
Ms Taylor: Yes. At the moment
for example you will have some highway drainage which goes straight
into sewers and the sewers really cannot cope with the increased
intensity of rainfall so we are seeing that happen. You have things
called SUDS—sustainable urban drainage systems—where
nobody is particularly clear who is responsible for maintaining
them and so on, so it is absolutely right there is such a lack
of clarity in this area and we need that clarity.
Q653 Chairman:
Okay, let us move on to an issue which I know our colleague David
Taylor wanted to raise but David, sadly, has not been able to
be with us just at this moment so I will ask the question for
him. When the review of the lessons learned about Hull was done,
Professor Coulthard found a series of what he described as "serious
issues" which referred to the design, maintenance and operation
of Yorkshire Water's pumped drainage system. He described particularly
the Bransholme pumping system which failed during the floods and
he raised the general issue that if a water company gets its calculations
or its design wrong and things do not happen as they should do,
are the risks associated with that allocated correctly?
Ms Taylor: When something goes
wrong, that can either be that it goes wrong immediately and it
is obvious from the start that a water company has got it wrong
(which, to our knowledge, does not happen and certainly should
not happen because of the methods of design and calculations that
there are now) or something can go wrong because it is no longer
fit for purpose but was fit for purpose at the time. I think what
we are seeing now is increasingly intense rainfall patterns. We
are certainly noticing and recording that they are getting more
intense and they were not happening to us before. Things like
that which were built in good faith and good calculation at the
time to cope no longer can cope with the extreme weather conditions
that we are currently seeing. Certainly we would be in favour
of all utilities needing to review their systems all of the time
to make sure that the systems they have got are actually fit for
purpose. Obviously, as we know, some of the sewers and other assets
are 150 years old or more and they had not been designed with
this in mind, although fortunately, as we know, with some of the
Victorian engineering it was over-engineered, which was lucky
for us.
Mr Horton: One of the key things
about last summer's floods that we need to remember, and everyone
I think recognises, is the exceptional nature of them. They caught
to a large extent not only water utilities but other utilities
and many others by surprise and we need to take stock of that.
There are certainly things you can do to reduce the risk of your
assets failing under those circumstances and companies will undertake
risk assessments to look at their assets. You can certainly do
things like raising the level of equipment, putting flood defences
around infrastructure and assets and so on. Companies will be
looking at that again in the light of last year's events.
Mr Marshall: Water companies as
well have quite good in-house expertise in this whole area of
modelling and design, it is what they do, so we are quite confident
that the systems built to the current design standards are fit
for purpose. It is a case of how time changes these.
Q654 Chairman:
But you have just said the words the "systems built to current
design standards" whereas Pamela Taylor a second ago quite
rightly reminded us that much of our water infrastructure is of
a vintage when current design standards did not apply. Sometimes
they got it more right than the current ones might do but otherwise
in certain cases we might be going in the opposite direction.
Mr Marshall: Fortunately, we had
a tendency to over-engineer in the older networks. We do work
with our regulator to agree the investment requirements to deal
with the ageing infrastructure on a risk-based approach.
Mr Mills: The other point to make
there is that with the impact of climate change and changing weather
patterns and storm intensities and the weather we had last summer,
the companies have been doing a lot of work through UKWIR, which
is UK Water Industry Research, looking at the impacts of climate
change on the sewerage systems but also on water supply implications
as well and a significant amount of work looking at what the new
design standards should be for sewers for the 21st century. That
work has been started and is on-going next year as well.
Mr Horton: Uncertainty is the
key issue there because when you are looking at climate change
scenarios for drainage and flood risk management, what you are
looking at firstly is worldwide temperature and precipitation
scenarios; then you are looking to refine that into national and
then regional scenarios; then you need to factor in what mitigation
strategies we may take. You need to think about land use planning
and growth in terms of new developments and so on. At every one
of those layers you are adding more and more uncertainty into
the equation, so that is one of the key challenges and at the
end of the day what we are looking for really is very short interval
rainfall data in very localised areas, literally five or ten minute
rainfall data and that is where the impact of extreme weather
events will cause local flooding.
Q655 Chairman:
Have you got any objective data collected by the water companies
to substantiate this? Going back to Mr Marshall's point about
being fit for purpose, the implication of what he was saying is
that some of the infrastructure cannot cope because of the severity
of rainfall which we are now seeing, but you, Mr Horton, were
implying that perhaps we should be collecting some data on the
severity issue. Have we got the body of evidence to justify what
Mr Marshall has said? There is a gentleman behind shaking his
head so I am assuming that he has sent me the body language message
answer that says no to that. Is that true?
Ms Taylor: We do collect the data
obviously but the point that Bruce is making is that you can have
data but when it comes to localised flooding, whether it is a
village near where I live where the water just shot down the hillside
and there had never been any history of flooding in that village
before and may not be again, then to have that kind of very localised
data at the moment is just not possible. What we are saying is
that there are so many layers of uncertainty here that in addition
therefore to looking at who owns what and sorting out responsibilities
and so on, we also need to look at sewer design and we also need
to look at the way in which we use our sewers and drainage. Another
thing we have to try and do is slow down water, which at the moment
is a big difficulty for us.
Q656 Chairman:
I think King Canute tried that without much success.
Ms Taylor: He did.
Mr Mills: There are different
techniques we can use.
Ms Taylor: Just one other thought
that when we were talking about liability and so on there are
also private sewers and drains that connect into the public system
but many people do not know that they own those private sewers
and drains and that liability currently lies with the householder.
I am sure most householders are completely unaware of this. We
are pleased though that these sewers now are going to be given
to the water companies. I say we are pleased; it makes sense that
we should be given them, but at the moment there is quite a lot
of doubt as to how many miles there are of them. It is probably
125,000 miles of these that we are going to be given. Not many
people know the mapping in terms of where they are, not many people
know in what good condition or otherwise they are, but because
of the risk of flooding and the importance of being able to plan
overall we will be accepting that responsibility and it will mean
that the sewerage network will be better managed and more integrated
in the future than we are able to do at the moment.
Q657 Mr Gray:
Does that mean septic tanks and all that?
Mr Mills: No, it does not mean
private sewerage treatment works or cesspits and the devices you
mention.
Q658 Mr Gray:
It is private sewage systems?
Mr Mills: Private sewers that
are currently discharged to the public sewerage system but for
which householders are responsible.
Q659 Mr Drew:
Following the events of last year, clearly individual water companies
have rethought through what plans they need to have in place.
I just wonder to what extent firstly you have done work collectively—
Ms Taylor: Yes.
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