Prioritise sewage treatment over new reservoirs, argues committee chair

Policy makers should not “over-react” to this year’s hosepipe bans by building new reservoirs, the chair of the House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee has warned.

At a fringe meeting organised by Southern Water at the Conservative Party conference earlier this week, Robert Goodwill MP said shortages bad enough to trigger hosepipe bans only occur every “15 to 20 years”.

He said that the Kielder reservoir, which was built in the Sixties and Seventies when there had been much higher projected demand for water, is “far bigger” than it needs to be now.

Goodwill, who is a Conservative MP for the North Yorkshire constituency of Scarborough and Whitby, said water had been tanked in from Kielder to West Yorkshire when the area suffered a severe drought in the early 2000s.

And there is more capacity to move water around Yorkshire now, he said.

Investing in sewage treatment to reduce run offs into rivers is a bigger priority, Goodwill said: “We need to be very careful not to overreact to this year’s hosepipe ban. We should be spending a lot more money on moving water around and we need to look more carefully at sewage treatment.”

Citing past proposals to create a new reservoir by flooding picturesque Farndale in the Yorkshire Dales national park, he said the cost of acquiring land and homes meant such projects face big financial hurdles.

Toby Willison, director of quality and environment at Southern Water, told the same meeting that reservoirs are “fiendishly difficult” to get through planning,

The Havant Thicket reservoir, which Southern is developing with neighbouring Portsmouth Water, has already been in planning for more than ten years and is still “probably ten years” from being completed, he said: “These things take a long time.”

Willison also said that deploying nature-based solutions, like reed beds and soakaways to absorb overflows, could flatten the peak of water entering the sewage system, like the government had sought to do with its Covid-19 prevention strategy.

He said: “The strategy with Covid was to flatten the peak of infection so the hospitals didn’t get overwhelmed. That is exactly the same approach that we should be taking with the management of our sewer system: to flatten the peak of water getting into the network so it’s not overwhelming the treatment works.”