ENVIRONMENTAL INDUSTRIES COMMISSION
The Floods & Water Management Bill may be good for floods, but asks Bob Sargent, vice-chair of the Environmental Industries Commission’s water management group, what about water quality?
he Flood & Water Management Bill, which recently passed through the House of Commons, provided a valuable
Failings reflect a wider problem
T
opportunity to address some of the issues affecting Members of the Environmental Industries Commission’s Water Management Working Group. The bill’s origins lay in the floods experienced in 2007 in England and the subsequent review by Sir Michael Pitt. The Pitt Review identified a number of weaknesses in the administration of flood risk management in England and made many recommendations aimed at improving matters. These were wide-ranging, but mainly focused on the fractured nature of flood management, which involves a number of public and private bodies with various aims and objectives, and on the gaps where no lead authority could be identified. The bill was intended to implement many of the Pitt recommendations that require legislative change. The 2007 floods were exceptional, but the management of surface water was one of the key failings identified. The bill proposed that local authorities should become lead authorities for the management of surface water and that the Environment Agency should have a strategic overview. EIC has been campaigning to improve the implementation of sustainable drainage systems – known as SUDS – for several years and the importance of these techniques for reducing surface water runoff and improving its management in urban areas was recognised in the Pitt Review. The bill therefore included measures intended to allow better implementation of SUDS, though EIC is not convinced it will be successful in its aims. SUDS manage rainfall in a more natural way.
Instead of draining runoff away as quickly as possible to the nearest watercourse they slow down the process by reducing runoff at source – providing more storage in the system – and use infiltration and natural systems like wetlands to reduce and improve water quality. This results in less water arriving in rivers, and what does get there arrives more slowly and in better quality. So SUDS can play a useful role in reducing flood risk in urban areas, but their use has been greatly hindered in England and Wales by legislative barriers. These have centred on how SUDS can be accommodated into the more traditional model of drainage.
SUDS can play a useful role in reducing flood risk in urban areas
Neither water companies nor local authorities
are keen to adopt and maintain drainage, which can include systems that are clearly not sewers, that could include a wetland, might collect runoff from a number of sources, and may not even discharge to a watercourse. Add to this the lack of agreed design guidance and maintenance costs, and it is not surprising there are problems. The bill proposed that SUDS should be the drainage system of first resort – it will be necessary to show they cannot work at a site before considering anything else. This is a fine sentiment, but in practice the devil will be in the detail of what is considered unworkable. Next, the bill proposed that local authorities should adopt and maintain SUDS systems. This is a crucial element, but for it to work local authorities – or any adopting authority – will have to have a source of revenue to fund the work. The proposal is that funding would be released by moving the maintenance of private sewers from local authorities to water companies, and using the money saved to fund SUDS. Unfortunately, the local authorities do not actually do much of this work, so the saving is largely illusory. Without funding very little can happen, so the bill could fail to achieve its aims. EIC’s Water Management Group is also disappointed that a more holistic approach has not been taken. This is, after all, a Flood and
Water Management Bill, and SUDS offer wider opportunities to manage water than just flood reduction. There is the quality issue, and many of our small urban watercourses are polluted by urban drainage. Low stream flows can be sustained through slow discharge of infiltrated water, and there is the opportunity to develop water harvesting and reuse systems linked to SUDS which store water at source, that is, near buildings, just where we need to provide water reuse opportunities. None of these applications of SUDS were considered in the bill, despite the obvious water management implications and the potential for adapting to climate change they present. The bill focused on the flood management aspects of SUDS only, a result of its origins in the Pitt Review. In essence these failings are a reflection on the
wider problem of there not being a water management authority with a grasp of the whole picture. Responsibility for SUDS may, arguably, be best placed in a local authority, but that authority is not concerned with water supply, nor with the quality of our rivers. So the bill presented a solution that may not work for part of the SUDS implementation issue, and ignores much of the rest. The campaign continues! ■■■
Bob Sargent is director of water environment at Hyder Consulting
May 2010 Water & Wastewater Treatment 25
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