Question is: Has South West Water got a plan B

Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger welcomes Thérèse Coffey to the hot seat at the Environment Department with a watery tale.

DEAR Thérèse Firstly congratulations on your appointment. Secondly, I hope you won’t mind if I continue the practice of firing off a weekly missive to you as I have done to your predecessors for the last several years.

Environment is an extremely wide brief to manage and my only aim is to flag up issues which you may well not be alerted through the official channels or which your advisers may have concluded are not worth drawing to your attention.

So perhaps can I kick off by mentioning the little matter of water - or, rather, the lack of it here in the South West. If you check on the most recent minutes from the National Drought Group you will see some concern was expressed as to the state the country’s water resources have been left in as a result of the dry spring and even drier summer.

The picture is hardly encouraging: we are, the experts tell us, going to require exceptionally heavy winter rainfall to achieve the replenishment of both aquifers and reservoirs if we are to avoid drought conditions extending into next spring with the inevitable, unwelcome impact on farmers who rely on irrigation.

Trouble is there are, as yet, no signs of the rains appearing in anything like the required quantities. September brought us 97 per cent of normal rainfall but the first half of October delivered only 15 per cent,

And given that we appear to be locked into a cycle of dry springs there now exists only a very narrow window of opportunity to get our water stocks back up to a level where they can cope with next summer’s peak demands.

Of course in this region those demands are magnified by the arrival of millions of summer tourists. Indeed this year’s influx has undoubtedly contributed to the very worrying situation where the region’s biggest reservoir - Wimbleball

Lake, which lies in my constituency - is down to just 17 per cent of capacity and still falling.

There has never been so littler water in it since the late 1970s when impounding started on the then-new reservoir which had been built in the wake of the 1976 drought.

But what is puzzling so many of my constituents is why no restrictions on water use were announced once it was realised that hot, dry weather with record temperatures had set in for the summer. Visitors and locals alike carried on washing cars, hosing their lawns and filling swimming pools precisely as normal – because no-one instructed them to do otherwise.

The point is that South West Water, which manages Wimbleball, must have seen the level dropping day by day, with evaporation in the searing heat merely exacerbating things, yet didn’t see fit to ring any alarm bells.

We are at a situation now where we shall need monsoon-scale rainfall to get the reservoir’s stocks up to something like an adequate level in time to cope with next summer’s peak demand.

And should we not get such rain I am intrigued to know what South West Water has up its sleeve by way of a plan B, while my constituents would also like to know whether its bizarre decision not to call a drought alert and restrict usage was in any way due to the fact that with the majority of homes now metered such a move would have led to people buying less water with a commensurate drop in its profits.

Yours ever,

Ian

Paul Scullion/SWNS > The hugely depleted Wimbleball Lake in Exmoor