Rain offers relief for failing water company

Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger tells Defra Secretary Therese Coffey that some much-needed rain is not going to let South West Water off the hook.

DEAR Therese Summer is already a distant memory even though only a couple of weeks ago it seemed likely that it would continue until Christmas.

We have, at least in this corner of the country, experienced enough rain to get the rivers flowing, the reservoirs topping up and the people at South West Water congratulating themselves on having got away with it again.

‘It’ referring to the avoidance of having to impose even more draconian restrictions on consumers as a result of the company’s own failings.

The long-suffering customers have even had the drought orders lifted a little earlier than expected. But it was a close-run thing: they were saved by the rain in the end rather than as a result of any corporate activity.

But SWW officials should not luxuriate too fulsomely in the current return to normality. Because there is no disputing the fact that this year’s lack of rainfall has exposed all the cracks, faults, fissures and failings in a water supply network they are being handsomely paid to manage.

And neither I nor, I suspect, any

MP in the South West will be bamboozled by the hand-wringing that goes on whenever SWW’s shoddy performance is exposed.

Apart from anything else it is grotesquely unfair to appeal to consumers to cut back on water use in order that summer visitors will be able to avail themselves of all the water they want to rinse out their wetsuits and hose down their paddle boards.

The growth in the tourism industry down here has been long foretold yet SWW has failed to respond to the prediction with the appalling result that there has been too little water but too much sewage, with unlicensed discharges tarnishing one of the sector’s greatest assets.

I cannot begin to tell you of the levels of anger that are being directed down here at a water company that siphons so much out of people’s pockets and delivers such shabby and inadequate services in return.

I await with interest the outcomes of the Ofwat investigations into SWW while remaining moderately confident that they are unlikely to contain any cause for corporate back-slapping or champagne-quaffing.

In the meantime I want to see not airy promises but firm, costed plans brought forward for bringing water and sewerage services in the South West up to levels commensurate with what is already being charged for providing them.

And sooner rather than later. And with no talk of how much extra it’s going to cost consumers. Because SWW has already had the money. Yours ever

Ian

Reuben Hocking > Surfers Against Sewage holding a paddle-out protest earlier this year to raise a stink about the issue of sewage pollution in the region