The Draft Water Bill has been heavily criticised by key players in the water industry who have described it as a “disappointment” and being “a sideshow” to the bigger issues such as flooding, drought and affordability.

At a fringe event at the Conservative Party conference on Monday, representatives from three water and sewerage companies attacked the Bill, which was published in July and will come before Parliament later in the year.

Richard Flint, chief executive of Yorkshire Water, said the Bill did not address the important issues facing the country, such as heightening flood risk and how to keep water bills down.

He also said there seems to be a “loss of ambition” when comparing the Bill with the more far-reaching proposals set out by the Government in the Water White Paper in December 2011.

During the event Yorkshire Water’s Public Affairs twitter page also commented: "The draft Water Bill will have a negligible impact on the issues at the heart of the water debate."

Colin Skellett, executive chairman of Wessex Water, said the Bill, which largely focuses on competition, is “almost a sideshow” compared with the issues of flooding, droughts and affordability.

The chief operating officer at United Utilities, Russ Houlden, was equally critical, commenting:

“The Bill is frankly a disappointment. The Bill has missed a lot of those issues in the White Paper, and indeed the Bill does not deliver a lot of the promises that were set out in the White Paper.”

Houlden added that because the Bill would allow businesses to opt out of certain water costs by choosing their supplier, domestic bills would rise in order to fund the difference, a view which echoes comments made by Professor Dieter Helm of Oxford University in his recent critique of the Bill.

It appears that the utility has considerable reservations about the Bill - however, written evidence from United Utilities submitted to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (EFRA) Committee conducting pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill has yet to be published. Evidence from other utilities, including Wessex Water and Yorkshire Water, submitted in response to the Committee's call for written evidence before holding public evidence sessions, has already been published by EFRA. 

Wessex Water states in its evidence that “the effectiveness of the draft Bill in keeping bills affordable and protecting vulnerable customers is very limited.” It calls on the Government to provide the tools to ensure water affordability issues can be effectively dealt with by the water companies.

On the issue of drought, Wessex said that the Water Bill should enable licensing to become more flexible without the need for water restrictions to be imposed. “More flexible licensing should apply in areas where river flows are healthy if companies are able to demonstrate that they are taking action to support river flows in more environmentally sensitive areas,” the evidence reads.

Call for clear policy on sustainable drainage

On flooding and drainage, Wessex claimed the Bill is an “ideal opportunity” for the Government to reform drainage responsibilities in the UK, but the Bill “does nothing to change the current disaggregated approach” to the nation’s drainage infrastructure.

It goes on to say that current arrangements continue to be a “major hindrance” in achieving sustainable drainage because of “disjointed ownership, numerous funding mechanisms and multiple views of flood risks.”

Wessex advocates a catchment-based model for integrating ownership and responsibility for drainage assets to address the interdependence between several parties. It also calls on the Government to promote greater upstream approaches to flood management, such as sustainable land management and permeable paving.

Wessex also calls for a clear policy for Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) in the Water Bill.

Yorkshire Water shares Wessex’s views on sustainable drainage and believes that the Draft Water Bill “could have gone further” to tackle the issue. The utility is calling for a more integrated water management model which would address issues in a more holistic manner. It supports a proposed approach to progress reforms outlined in the Water White Paper, but omitted in the Draft Water Bill, through collaborative working groups.

The Bill has also come in for similar criticism from other water companies such as Southern Water and Anglian Water. Southern Water states in its evidence: “It is not clear to us that the reforms proposed in the Draft Water Bill are specifically oriented towards the challenges facing the sector in the future, including climate change, population growth and unsustainable over-abstraction.”

Growing concern about a Bill which might fail to deliver?

It is clear that the water companies want a more holistic approach to water management which could address the important issues such as drought and flooding. The key question is why the large water companies are only now speaking their minds on the content of the Bill, three months after it was first published.

To date the EFRA Committee has not made public any evidence submitted by water-only companies, nor written evidence submitted by Thames Water and United Utilities.

Water UK, the body which represents all the UK water and wastewater companies at both national and European level, has also not had comments about the Bill to the Committee published thus far. However, when the Draft Water Bill was first published, Water UK expressed its support for the proposals in the Bill. At the time Pamela Taylor, Chief Executive of Water UK, commented:

“Expanding the market and offering greater choice for business customers is the right reform at the right time...... By working together across the water sector, we can ensure that we can respond quickly and effectively to the challenges of greater consumer demand and climate change. We have already begun this work and we are looking forward to working with the government, with regulators and with stakeholders to develop these proposals further.”

Coupled with the fact that water minister Richard Benyon did not put in an appearance at the fringe event, the criticism suggests that there are now growing concerns about a Bill which is currently seen as failing to deliver on the key issues.

Although the element of competition is widely favoured by the UK water industry, there appears to be significant obstacles to overcome before a consensus between the Government and the water companies, as well as other players, is achieved on how to take water reform forward.

Privatising flood infrastructure

Finally, another interesting issue which came out of the discussion at the fringe event was the agreement between the water executives that the UK’s system of flood defences should be privatised because of spending cuts by the Government.

With an almost unprecedented amount of rainfall in the last six months, the flood defences in many regions of the UK have once again appeared inadequate. As part of the Government’s strategy to cut public spending, the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) budget has been slashed significantly, leading to a substantial drop in spending and many schemes earmarked for construction this year not getting off the ground.

The frequent answer to a dearth of public funds is to bring the private sector in to fill the gap. It would be interesting to know what the water companies believe private involvement in UK flood defences would entail.