Analysis by the Labour Party has found that over the past three years, 117 litres of water per household has been wasted every day as a result of leaky pipes across the network.
“This is the equivalent of over two washing machine cycles or a bath and a half of wasted water every day for every UK household, demonstrating the scale of the UK’s water leak crisis,” Labour said.
It added that across the country over three billion litres of water are lost every day, which is the equivalent to four Lake Windermere’s being lost in water leaks every year.
OK, so how much will it cost to stop this happening?
An investigation by The Telegraph earlier this year found that water companies are releasing raw sewage into rivers more than 1,000 times a day despite being told to do so only when there is heavy rainfall.
Raw sewage was discharged into rivers and coastal areas for more than 3.1 million hours on more than 400,000 occasions throughout 2020, according to data from the Environment Agency.
OK, so what’s the cost of stopping it?
To be even more precise, what’s the cost of stopping it and what’s the benefit of doing so?
In fact, is it worth it?
I don’t even mind what the answer is but I do insist that’s the question that must be answered.
I’m sure that we’d all agree to clean up everything if it cost 50 p a year each. And if it cost £1,000 a year per household then those river swimmers can deal with the occasional turd. Shrug.
Leaky pipes are the Water equivalent of pot holes. They can be tolerated until there are too many or they become too big.
Sewage in the rivers is what a Water Company should be about. They exist to take the sewage away somewhere safe. The cost is immaterial. It is their job.
I should explain.
I pay two sets of water rates. One to a water provider the ither to a sewage company.
So i have two basic customer requiremnts: I turn on the tap and water comes out, I flush the loo and last night’s curry disappears.
But I expect the water from my tap to be clean and the water from pipes to go somewhere safe. It is why I pay my bills.
@Ottokring
But do you pay enough in bills to cover the service provided? — real life evidence suggests maybe not. How much more in bills would you be willing to pay to guarantee No Turd Left Behind rather than, say, 0.01%, 0.001% getting through?
“…Lake Windermere’s…”
Grocer alert!
117 litres of water per household
equivalent of over two washing machine cycles
or a bath and a half of wasted water every day for every UK household
over three billion litres of water
equivalent to four Lake Windermere’s
It would have been helpful to have that in terms of London buses and the size of Wales and bushels of superfluous apostrophe’s?
Matt
I expect 0%.
They’ve been doing it long enough, they should never have to discharge raw sewage into a river.
To continue TMB’s line of thinking, it’s Peak demetricating Britain that the “Bath and a half” thus becomes a new standard unit of volume, rather than just the “Bath”.
Personally I think the pound should be redenominated. As the Shilling.
Ottokring,
London’s basic sewer network is ~150 years old, and was built as a combined surface + foul sewer. It was specifically designed such that if its capacity was exceeded (due to heavy rain) it discharged into the river, rather than back up and flood properties. 150 years of growth and change in water use means that happened more frequently (the sewer is now operating to support a population that is much greater than it was designed for), and as a result Tideway is being built to deal with most of those discharges (but not all – various technical and financial reasons I believe). As I understand it, the sewer system was built (then operated without extension for most of its life) by ‘the state’, but it’s now-privatised TW that is addressing the issue.
‘ The cost is immaterial. It is their job.’
Then you pay it Ottokiring.
“then those river swimmers can deal with the occasional turd”
Would that be David Walliams?
So much financial engineering has been done on the water companies. Loaded with debt, huge dividends extracted, they are now zombie firms at risk of any rise in interest rates or increase in regulation.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens when they start going bust one by one.
@EvilDrSmith
+1. And, on a slightly smaller scale, the same thing happens across the country – it’s the inevitable result of having a sewage system that handles both waste water and rain runoff, exceptional rain has the potential to overwhelm the system. We could build a new system that segregated the two, and sewage discharges could cease entirely, but it would cost trillions (I’m not aware of anywhere else in the world that operates such a system).
Where I grew up, the local river was the Darwen and we used to amuse ourselves trying to guess what colour it would be running as a result of effluent from Crown Paints (it was often full of sewage, too). The paint factory is still there, but the river now has otters – water quality has vastly improved over the intervening 50 years, to the point where trying to improve it further, rapidly runs into diminishing returns.
guess whose back
Chris M
Magnolia otters with two heads ?
@polio
“guess whose back”
Slim Shady?
“We could build a new system that segregated the two, and sewage discharges could cease entirely, but it would cost trillions (I’m not aware of anywhere else in the world that operates such a system).”
Most cities in the western USA separate sewage from storm water, Los Angeles being the prime example. Storm drains are large-diameter concrete pipes that empty into concrete-lined rivers, and this water does not enter the sewage system.
Yes Tim, the cost is more important, also living standards
I’d rather have sewage overflow dumped in rivers, sea than overflowing into streets and homes
Also, since 80s or before rain & sewage go down separate systems. How much of the “sewage” is bird/animal/dog poo, litter etc from rain & road drains? Or simply washed into river by rain?
Some years ago I was holidaying on Vancouver Island. Big argument going on. Now, we may think of the Canucks as lovely, polite (except when it comes to the national religion – Ice Hockey), eco friendly whale huggers, the peeps on the island weren’t prepared to pay billions of dollars to have their effluent properly treated – they were quite happy to keep pumping all their shit into the ocean.
And to think Vancouver was where Greenpeace began all those years ago (including Patrick Moore, despite the attempt by Greenpeace to erase him from history….And for those in the UK of a certain demographic, no, not the glockenspiel playing, Sky at Night, Patrick Moore).