“The time has come for direct government intervention at Secretary of State level. There are two burning questions. First, please can you reform the whole system and change the ownership of water companies urgently? Second, how can you expect any local authority to give planning permission for the homes you want when the sewage system is broken? It’s going to be a very challenging time for this new government.”
Paul Arnott (full article from local press)
Many, many years ago – 45 to be precise – I would have just received my A Level Results in Economics, History and English. It’s often said that what you learn at school proves useless in later life, but those three subjects left me with a lifelong curiosity and an active engagement in them all.
In Economics, we were taught not to blow the massive tax take from North Sea Oil on debt and to rebuild the country instead. Hmm. That didn’t happen. But more usefully it taught lessons about how infrastructure spending, well-managed, could provide many great outcomes quite apart from new houses, railways or utility provisions. Jobs and growth, for example.
History, and in particular study of the Civil War and Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate afterwards, taught me that without a strong democracy with maximum participation a country inevitably relapses, in our case to the Restoration of the monarchy of Charles II. Having had the opportunity to be the first great Republic in the world a hundred years before America, we blew it, and let the landowners so keen on enclosing common land to increase rather than diminish their power. The arrogance of land ownership by a few wealthy descendants of that time blights what housing we can build and where to this day.
English took me to places where a sporty seventeen-year-old might not willingly go, for example to Geoffrey Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales peppered with glorious 14th Century characters is like a time tunnel back to medieval England, much of which is around us from the Guildhall in Exeter to dozens of our churches.
This weekend, I thought of a phrase which is credited to Chaucer a lot – when chickens come home to roost. In the Parson’s Tale, he wrote that a curse coming out of the mouth of someone would often return to haunt them as (in the Old English) “a bryd that retorneth agayn to his owene nest.” And why was I thinking of that? The answer: the antics of South West Water.
In February this year, our council at East Devon decided to pass a motion of no confidence in them, for good reason. Their infrastructure was failing across the district, and there was a lot of evidence that this was the inevitable result of paying dividends to shareholders rather than investing over many years, the results of which were sewage running down high streets, burst manhole covers, failed pumping stations, ailing treatment plants – all now coming home to roost.
At the end of last week, I took the rare action of issuing a press release. It read “Many incidents both before and after that decision have fully justified the vote, but the major sewage spill at Maer Lane last night represents an historic new low. Despite multiple reassurances from South West Water that they have Exmouth under control, they simply do not. This incident not only impacted our residents but also the tens of thousands of tourists that visit Exmouth.” I could not imagine that over last weekend it would get even worse.
The time has come for direct government intervention at Secretary of State level. There are two burning questions. First, please can you reform the whole system and change the ownership of water companies urgently? Second, how can you expect any local authority to give planning permission for the homes you want when the sewage system is broken? It’s going to be a very challenging time for this new government.
Oak View East Hill Ottery St Mary EX11 1QHRef. No: 24/1613/FUL | Validated: Fri 02 Aug 2024 | Status: Awaiting decision
East Devon Watch 