EUC Report: EU Freshwater Policy

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Wednesday 5th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of Sub-Committee B and thank the noble Lord, Lord Carter, for introducing our report so well. Like him, I thank those who helped us with the report and all those who gave evidence to us.

Water has been cast as the bloodstream of the biosphere; it is therefore absolutely critical that we get it right. However, the Minister should understand that water is a much bigger and more complex problem than the Government’s White Paper, Water for Life, suggested. An increasing number of individuals, companies, organisations and agencies are involved, some of which are area specific. They all need to work together within the same framework and the same integrated policy, looking at the big picture.

In paragraph 201, we welcomed the requirement of the National Planning Policy Framework to take into account water management issues. That is only a start. As the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, said, there ought to be much more integration among the water companies. Moreover, something that has not been mentioned yet is the vast amount of water involved in the production of energy. That, again, is a different government department. I hope my noble friend will consider the idea of having an overarching group to look at all these problems with a view to getting a sustainable water policy and water security by 2025. The Institute of Civil Engineers suggested the establishment of a water security task force. That proposal attracts me greatly because this is such a complicated area, covering so many government departments, that it needs a more holistic approach than is being taken at the moment.

One conclusion we reached was that the cost of water was going to rise. Even with the present cost of water, a lot of people are not paying the full amount. Can my noble friend tell me what percentage of households are not paying their full water bills at the moment? I think that it is quite a large percentage, but if water prices have to rise, it is going to be an even greater percentage unless we can link water bills to greater water efficiency.

On the cost of water, the Government replied to us in their summary that they were currently revising their social and environmental guidance to Ofwat ahead of the next price review in 2014. Having looked at that guidance, I think that it is horribly overprescriptive. That takes me to our recommendation in paragraph 215, which relates to water catchment areas. These will vary hugely across the country, depending on where the water is and the type of water that is within the particular catchment. The guidance to Ofwat is going to have to be a lot more flexible than that proposed by the Government in order for it to have the effect that we want of allowing the catchment areas to become the starting process for a better infrastructure for water.

The water framework directive is slightly odd, as we discovered as we continued our discussions and debates. It has a pretty good objective but in most circumstances its goals are unobtainable. It is slightly odd to welcome a directive where the goals are unobtainable and the Commission can take infraction proceedings against member states, but I agree with our report that it has driven member states forward in trying to improve the quality of water. Can my noble friend tell me what the Commission’s policy is with regard to taking action against member states?

Page 4 of the Government’s reply on this matter, concerning paragraph 188 of the report, states:

“Achieving good status”—

that is, under the water framework directive—

“is a long term goal”.

That is a misleading statement and I am sorry that the Government made it. Actually, the water framework directive requires that all inland, estuarial and coastal waters within RBPs must reach at least good status by 2015. That is not a long-term goal; it is only just over two years away. It is true that the water framework directive goes on to 2027, but it will start clicking in at a very early stage and there is no way that countries in Europe are ever going to meet the requisite criteria.

With regard to river basin management plans, which have been key to the water framework directive, can my noble friend tell me where we are with the four renegade countries—Belgium, Greece, Portugal and Spain—that did not submit plans in time? I find it slightly odd that the Commission produced a report based on river management plans when a sixth of the EU did not even submit them.

I turn, as did my noble friend Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, to the subject of priority substances. I take a different view from the one that she takes. From the evidence that we got, I am not certain that the Commission has been given the right advice about the seriousness of these pollutants. It is very easy for it to say that it needs to prescribe more substances, and indeed on 31 January this year it put forward a directive to add another 15 substances to the priority substances list. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, identified, adding only one substance will cost £27 billion. These are huge amounts of money, and it will cost considerably more than £27 billion to deal with these problems. It is absolutely right that they should be dealt with if there is proper scientific evidence to back that up, but our evidence indicated that the Commission’s evidence for making decisions is not as good or as detailed as it should be.

I turn to our recommendation in paragraph 200 about governance. This relates to catchment management, which I have already touched on, but the government response also mentions the Environment Agency. We did not get written evidence from the Environment Agency, and I consider that to be one of the real downsides of our report. It is appalling that the agency did not write to us, although it gave us oral evidence. When it comes to catchment management, is not the Environment Agency now just too big an organisation to look at water on such a local level? It is the biggest agency in Europe, if not the world, and it is unwieldy and inflexible. Like Defra, handling anything that is not centralised is anathema to it. As long as a body such as the Environment Agency works in a centralised way, I do not see catchment areas working as we would hope. For them to work, substantial institutional, social and political changes will be required, but the present policy does not allow for that.

Paragraph 205 concerns payments to landowners. In their reply, the Government mention the work of the Forestry Commission. Can my noble friend update me on the current state of play there?

Paragraph 213 deals with the “polluter pays” principle. It is interesting that Blueprint for Water recently heavily criticised the Government in its assessment of where government work on water had got to over the past four or five years. The “polluter pays” principle is highlighted as one of the areas where not enough has been done. Of course, some polluters are easy targets—particularly farmers and landowners. They are easy to identify and it is on their land that a lot of the rain falls. However, to my mind it is not so much a question of tackling landowners and farmers; I consider urban waste water to be a far more serious problem, with chemicals being washed into the sewerage system. Individuals in urban areas have no understanding of the complications that they cause in relation to downstream clear-up. Not only should the polluter pay but the provider of services should be paid. The Government say in their response that they are going to publish an action plan with regard to expanding schemes. Can my noble friend tell me when that will be available? The government response indicated that it would be available later this year. This year is now almost over and we are approaching the next year, so can my noble friend update me on that?

Virtual water is a hugely interesting area and it will undoubtedly become much more topical in the not too distant future. What is interesting here is the amount of water that it takes to produce goods. If one looks at water on that basis rather than on a purely domestic basis, one finds that more than three-quarters of the water that we use in this country is imported, with less than a quarter coming from our own resources. It is also interesting to note that in the 20 years up to 2007 western Europe was the world’s largest importer of water, calculated on a virtual-water basis. The Commission is telling us how to conserve our water supply while we are taking water from the rest of the world, which in many cases has many more problems than we have, as the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, said.

I go back to where I started; we should have an overarching body to look into the whole subject of water and guide the Government in getting a sustainable policy for water security in the years to come. The noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, referred to the report we are currently undertaking on energy. Germany’s dash for coal and the increase in coal-fired power stations have come in the recent past, subsequent to the Commission publishing its papers. What the Germans propose totally distorts anything that has been agreed, and it will be the same in this country. However we tackle the energy crisis, it will require a huge amount of water. That needs to be taken account of when planning how to use water throughout the country. I do not believe that the Government have got their head around this. They have two different departments dealing with the same substance. I hope that my noble friend will have something positive for me on that.