History behind various acts leading to something similar to the Clean Water Act in USA for Great Britain

Taxonomy

• Policy
• Legislation
• Environmental Policy
• Governance & Policy
• Water Policy
• Legislative

3 Answers

1. I should have mentioned some of the legislation relating specifically to water resources used for drinking water supplies, since you mentioned it. The most important piece of legislation was the 1963 Water Resources Act, which created the need for abstraction permits, the purpose of which is to protect downstream users of water resources. In the UK we do not have water rights as in the USA, which treat water as property. In the UK, nobody "owns" water - they are only able to use the water if they have an abstraction permit or a riparian right of use for non-consumptive purposes. Once we became part of the EU, we had a requirement to form river basin agencies and to produce water resources plans, but these were already in place as a result of the 1963 Water Resources Act, which also created River Authorities organised on a river basin basis. 

2. It's disappointing that you want to show that Britain "has failed to manage the sustainability its environment such as its water resources" when clearly you know virtually nothing about our management. The most important legislative influences on our water resources and investments in environment improvements occurred during the last 40 years, when the UK was a member of the European Union and had to comply with European Directives. There is a long list of these, but the most important are The Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (UWWTD), the Drinking Water Directive, the Bathing Water Directive. the Habitats Directive, and the Shellfish Directive. Following first drafting of these directives, all have been subsequently revised to tighten the standards, so there has been a significant ongoing investment in the UK during the last 40 years, totalling many billions of GBP. As an example, the UWWTD initially required primary treatment of coastal discharges unless the waters offshore were labelled "sensitive" and lacking adequate dilution from offshore currents. Later, all coastal discharges required secondary treatment and, with the improving standards required by the Bathing Water Directive, UV disinfection. Another important aspect is environmental regulation. We do indeed have a body equivalent to the EPA, which in England and Wales is the EA or Environment Agency. A similar body operates in Scotland (SEPA, or the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency). These came into existence when the water industry was privatised in England and Wales by the 1979 Water Act. Previously, water pollution prevention was managed by the predecessor Water Authorities, but river management functions were excluded from the privatisation and a National Rivers Authority was created. 5 years later, under the 1995 Environment Act, the NRA was merged with Her Majesty's Pollution Inspectorate (which dealt with non-water pollution) to create the EA. Prior to UK's membership of the EU and publication of the above Directives, the UK was not negligent as far as environmental protection was concerned (e.g. the 1974 Control of Pollution Act, which set new standards for the health of rivers), but had a long way to go to mitigate the effects of our industrial past. Many of our river estuaries were lifeless due to industrial and domestic discharges commenced in the 19th century with the the Industrial Revolution. Work on the River Thames progressively improved its quality and it continues today with the Thames Tideway Scheme, which is costing 22 billion GBP. The purpose of this is to intercept intermittent storm discharges and treat them downstream. There have been other such schemes, e.g. for the Mersey estuary and the Tyne estuary, which now has a good  head of migrating salmon annually, when previously it supported no life and stank in hot weather.   

   1 Comment

   1. Hi Alan,

       

      Good morning from USA. I am sorry that you felt that way about what I said " has failed to manage the sustainability its environment such as its water resources". It may be true that I am only touching the surface, but I was only looking at the timeframe in which the UK legislators took to recognize the importance of water resources long after the Industrial Revolution in 1876 made it almost unsuitable for drinking until now. That is almost 150 years of slowly progressing to improve the water quality of rivers and streams. During that time, many lives were lost from the waterborne diseases due to untreated waste being poured into the rivers and streams.  if it were not for the voice of the concerned citizens and environmental groups, nothing would have been done. Obviously at the beginning of when various acts were being passed, the industrial interest groups had upper hand with the government. It took some time before the government was able to force the industries to treat their wastes and improve the water quality of the rivers and streams.  Does that help?

      1 Comment reply

      1. Peter, I'm not sure where you're getting this from! You seem to be assuming that nothing happened from 1876 until recently, so thousands of people must have died from waterborne diseases unnecessarily. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. The main killer waterborne diseases are cholera and typhoid. There's also dysentery, but this is similar in causes to the other two and less dangerous. Cholera was eradicated in Britain by the end of the 19th century. You may have heard of the famous "handle of the Broad St pump" affair , in which Dr John Snow identified the well in Broad St, London as the cause of a local cholera outbreak. He removed the handle of the pump and the outbreak stopped. Because Snow identified the source by plotting deaths on a map, he became the founder of the science of epidemiology.    In the years that followed, increased awareness of the causes of waterborne diseases resulted in huge efforts to improve water supplies. The city of Birmingham, in the English Midlands, laid a long large diameter pipeline from mountainous north Wales, to bring fresh water to replace contaminated local supplies. Liverpool did the same and Manchester laid pipelines from the English Lake District, where they constructed a new reservoir. In London, where the distances to the pristine waters of Wales and north west England are too great, they treated the main source of contamination instead, which was the discharge of raw sewage into the River Thames. Major large diameter interceptor sewers designed by a famous engineer called Joseph Bazalgette were constructed along the banks of the Thames so the sewage was transferred to a treatment plant downstream of the city. Water treatment also improved, with general installation of slow sand filters and, slightly later, the introduction of chlorination. The only outbreak of waterborne diseases causing deaths in Britain during the 20th century occurred in the early 1920s, when a typhoid outbreak killed around 30 people in Croydon. It was found that one of the workers performing maintenance on a well was a carrier. During my career in the UK water industry when I worked on water sources, I had to have regular medical testing to ensure I had not become a carrier - as did all of my colleagues. This followed legislation in the 1945 Water Act, which reformed the industry, making it possible for small local authorities to join forces to improve and protect water supplies, by creating "Water Boards". My first job as a water engineer in the 1960s was working for such a Water Board in north west England.

3. Regulations governing water for any country broadly is the same except minor geographical variations and the extent of misuse.  Now that the commodity has been over exploited, every country has to gear up to the newer situation and understandably, therefore need to bring in applicable solutions depending upon the abuse each country has caused.  Water being the essence of living, it attracts greater attention than any other commodity / resource on earth.