I feel I have to flag up progress with the WWF Rivers on the Edge project I have been supporting. Particularly the beggars-belief abstraction catch-22 that WWF has identified and is perfectly illustrated on the River Beane in Herts. That poor river has a licensed abstraction limit of 49 megalitres a day from the Whitehall pump that sits beside the stream. That is A LOT of water. It represents a greater flow than the river itself most of the time. It is so much in fact that the water company Veolia never actually pumps that much. Veolia takes more like 20 megalitres a day, though demand goes up and down. The water goes to Stevenage. As part of their management plan submitted to Ofwat last year Veolia included some commendable-for-the-intent (but obviously not enough) plans to help reduce demand for water: metering, education that sort of thing. These plans required investment. Ofwat didn't allow the applied for level of investment on the grounds that there is a water surplus in that area. How do they judge there is a water surplus? The River Beane dries most years and the rest of the time is nothing more than a ghost of itself. But Ofwat in a peerlessly perverse line of reasoning that they seem to have made all their own judge there is a surplus because there is a difference between that which Veolia pumps and that which it is licensed to pump. But the license was granted way before those that granted it had any idea of the damage it would cause. It is no way at all an objective measure of how much water is available before massive environmental damage is caused. Though OFWAT might not care anyway. They have also said that the River Beane is not of national importance. Every river is of national importance. Drying up a river is environmental vandalism.
Much better news comes from the Itchen where Southern Water intend to roll out widespread metering: good on Southern Water. As a matter of interest those with meters use considerably less water than those without and they save money.
Anyway WWF held seminars last week to take a look at where things had got to with their project in relation to the Rivers Itchen, Beane and Mimram. I was asked to speak at the Beane/Mimram meeting and have copied the text of what I said below. The film I made for WWF was shown after, hence the reference to it. If you've read my stuff on this before you'll recognise some ideas, in which case I apologise: even so we could all do a bit of squeaky-wheeling on this issue and let the government know this is an important issue that needs solving:
"I first came down here, on behalf of WWF, two years ago to meet the people who had been campaigning for so long on these local rivers The Beane and Mimram. I knew about the rivers by name as streams that, like the Darenth or Misbourne, had suffered so much due to over-abstraction. For a brief while back then things were hopeful: the water company and the Environment Agency were both keen to solve a longstanding problem. Last year was the year of opportunity: all sorts of National water policy plans were finalised: water company business plans, river catchment management plans. Last year was a year a year of opportunity and the opportunity was missed.
We need to put these rivers into some kind of context: they both are chalk-streams. They rise from underground springs fed by rainwater that has percolated through this unique rock, water that has been purified, cooled and enriched by chalk and that creates a very special environment. Chalk is a limestone, but a distinct type: the softest and youngest. It gave its name to an entire geological era - the cretaceous, from the Latin for chalk - creta. Chalk is essentially one enormous fossil derived from a creature so small you need a microscope to see it: a tiny, tiny shellfish that swarmed by the billion in the sunlit and clear Cretaceous ocean and having died, fell like a ceaseless rain, for millions of years onto the ocean floor. Now that ocean floor has become the rolling downland around you and - an idea I read recently and particularly like - in a sense the whiteness of the rock reflects, over an enormous gulf of time, the brilliance of that prehistoric sun.
And the insect life in chalk streams that should be so abundant and is the building block of their amazing ecosystems, is another version of that same idea: the ancient coccolith gives its calcium to the shells and exoskeletons of the freshwater shrimp, the mayfly, even our native English crayfish. The life of the prehistoric sea reaches through time to give life to these rivers today.
There are pockets of chalk all over the world: in Australia, Texas, Israel. But only in what is called the Anglo Parisian basin are the chalk deposits washed over by a temperate, maritime climate and massive enough to give birth to chalk-streams. There are a few chalk-streams in Normandy, but because the rock dips west to east most of them are in England. And when I say most I mean just over two hundred, counting more or less every tiny rivulet that springs from chalk and has a name. That’s it.
So every chalk stream has a place.
Every chalk stream is nationally significant.
Every chalk stream is globally significant.
I say this in the film you’ll see in a minute, but I’ll say it now too to drive the point home: chalk streams are our burning rainforest, our melting glacier. Our right to mourn the decimation of special habitats elsewhere in the world is massively lessened by our inability to take care of our own.
So lets take a closer look at that inability.
Abstraction licenses were mostly granted in the fifties and sixties. Stevenage and Welwyn Garden City were New Towns. A countryside busy with birdsong and buzzing insects was more or less taken for granted and scientists believed that the reservoirs of water stored away in the rocks were an abundant natural resource that could be exploited without consequence. But the scientists were wrong.
More or less straight away the observant noticed a difference in river flows.
Nothing was done. More houses were built and the chalk downs were pumped for yet more water. And the rivers eventually dried up. Now people have been actively campaigning for over twenty years. And even in that time the levels of abstraction have got worse.
When I was making this film last summer I drove miles and miles trying to find a shot that expressed just how bleak and awful a drying or dried up chalk stream can look. And I found myself up against a problem that typifies the problem of perception we all have nowadays. Once isolated in the frame of the image even the merest trickle looked kind of peaceful and pleasant. I knew I was filming a river on its death bed, but the image still evoked sparkling life. We walk by a stream and see water and a duck and we think all is well. We have become completely numbed to what these rivers should look like with an abundance of water.
In the end I got my shot on the upper Beane. And I’ve been trying to think of an analogy that would express easily the difference between a river flowing properly and the insipid trickle I filmed.
So imagine you are at the top a hill on a cool day and you drink in the clean air to fill your lungs and it feels great, like you could run a mile. You feel alive.
Now put yourself at the bottom of that hill on a hot day. You’ve got to run up it and you can only breathe through a narrow straw. When you get to the top, compare the two feelings. That is the difference between a chalk stream as it should be and a chalk stream as we have made it.
The point is that in a river the water by volume is the habitat, is the life of the stream. It isn’t good enough to have wet stones, like it wouldn’t be good enough to live in a coffin. Why should we sentence our rivers, especially rivers as rare as these, to a life on the very brink of existence, when with a little thought, some bureaucratic and political backbone, these rivers could be vibrant and living?
Maybe I should ask why shouldn’t we? What difference does it make? Another part of this film was an attempt to answer that question. Not by me. Not by WWF. But the people I bumped into as I filmed. I asked them all whether and why it mattered that there should be a healthy river they could walk beside and how much it would matter to them if that river dried up. And no matter who answered, no matter their age, background, or ethnicity, everyone said more or less the same thing: that rivers are vitally, almost spiritually significant, that they bring a sense of peace, of calm, that they are a lifeblood and their loss would be like a death at the heart of the landscape.
So people have campaigned for twenty years and the abstraction has just got worse. The River Mimram dries up. The River Beane dries up. The Environment Agency said once that it was a problem and that the water company needed to lessen the abstraction. But it wasn’t that simple. There was no easily available alternative supply and no source of compensation. So now the Environment Agency say - and I find this hard to believe but the quote is in our WWF report - that maybe it isn’t a problem after all and now they think about it there is no clearly established link between abstraction and damage to the ecology in a river. They say that further research is needed.
Veolia themselves made plans to reduce Mimram abstraction at least in some degree but last year these plans were disallowed by Ofwat: the rivers were deemed not to be nationally important - which is kind of like demolishing Hampton Court and then asserting that it is of no architectural value.
Moreover say Ofwat, there is abundance of water in this area. Why, how do they make this claim? Not by standing in their carpet slippers in the dry bed of the Beane. They make this judgement from a windowless office based on the amount of water that is licensed for abstraction: if less water is used than is licensed Ofwat says there is a surplus. But the license was granted back in the Fifties when the boffins hadn’t a clue what they were doing and had no idea what difference it would make. On the Beane the license is for a staggering 49 mega-litres a day. That’s more than flows down the river at the best of times. If all that was taken out you’d never see the river again, not even at Christmas. That is the surplus Ofwat has identified, the final exhalation of a corpse.
And it would all be vaguely forgivable if it wasn’t actually easy to resolve. If everyone in these towns used less water and the saving was passed on to the rivers, they would flow like they ought to. If Veolia fitted water meters to every single house, as Southern Water now plan to around the Itchen: if someone stepped out of the Ofwat office opened their eyes and let Veolia do this, and let them also build a pipe from Grafham Water as they have proposed: if the Environment Agency rediscovered their determination and failing all this, if our politicians compelled the lot of them to it, then these rivers would flow again."
Charles Rangeley-Wilson, speech at the launch of WWF Rivers on the Edge - Rivers Beane and Mimram, Tewinbury, 29th April 2010.
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