Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Bill

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, I have been up to my neck in water and sewage for most of my life, and if I speak for too long I know I will have some more thrown at me. I thought I would speak a bit about competence and a bit about history.

At this time in the morning many years ago I was in a hotel in Cairo and I felt rather ill. I picked up the phone because I felt so ill, but the phone did not work. I fell on the floor, and then I shrieked and someone came in. I had got something remarkably unusual: gippy tummy. A nice doctor turned up and I said, “What’s wrong with all this?”. He said, “Well, it’s the sewers, you know”. I said, “Really? I used to be in that world”. After a while, I went along to see the head man and said, “Why don’t we British, who built the sewers here for a million people in 1907, rebuild your sewers now that you have 10 million people?”.

I went out and formed a body called British Waste Water. It was a two-pound company. One pound was for me; the other person never turned up. We made a few proposals. The first thing that we had to do was bring the Egyptian swimming team back to swim across the channel that had been cancelled in 1956 when Butlins was organising it. We built a relationship.

The plan was to do a good job. We had not had much experience in the United Kingdom because there had been relatively little infrastructure spending. That project cost £2 billion. The Government provided £50 million of initial aid and another £500 million of export credit. We got all the British companies out there. They did not know what they were doing—they had not been near it. The problem was how to clean it all up. It took around eight years and, as I said, cost roughly £2 billion. The difference was made not only by the skills that were transplanted there but by Egypt suddenly being cleaned up. The tourism business could survive again because there were no problems.

To go down in Cairo, where the water table is only two feet below the ground, you have to open a hole and make a hatch like that of a submarine. Your building team go down as divers. You have to put compression in to keep the water out.

Finally, we needed to put in blue bricks. Only the British can build the best blue bricks. We wanted Egyptian bricklayers. One of them said to me, “We haven’t got the skills. Can you find some brickies?”. I was at Loughborough, where there was a pub called the Bricklayer’s Arms. We put some notices in the Bricklayer’s Arms and the brickies turned up. We then built a brick plant on the Nile, just like the pharaohs had, which was a great success. That project worked very well because the British got back their old technology. I know that whoever works on the Thames sewers will do a good job.

Out of all this comes an economic or cost-benefit analysis. I have dealt with the Thames for many years in relation to sport and recreation. I chair the Greater London and South East Council for Sport and Recreation. I have rowed up and down the Thames. I have listened to presentations which said that rowers might be poisoned. However, it is a very simple matter of collecting the right stuff and emptying it. It is not a big job.

However, what happened after Cairo? What did those same contractors do? They went off and built the Channel Tunnel. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, was involved in that as well. I am trying to say that our knowledge and experience in this country may have died in many things, but in water and sewerage we are still among the best in the world, if not the best. I have no worries about the problem of contractors. I would of course take them down the Thames in barges. It is just a question of organisation. Once upon a time, we were good at organising but this House is obviously not as good at organising its business as it ought to be.