SEWERAGE (Hansard, 19 June 1973)

§ Dr. Miller
I beg to move Amendment No. 359, in page 80, line 23, at end insert: '(2) Without prejudice to subsection (1) above a district council of a district shall have power to undertake the construction and maintenance of public sewers in so far as within their district. (3) In the case of a sewer or sewerage system which is constructed by or for the time being maintained by a district council by virtue of subsection (2) above, the regional council who are the sewerage authority shall reimburse to the district council any expenses incurred by them in carrying out the works of construction or maintenance necessary to secure the effectual drainage of the district. (4) The district council of a district who have elected to undertake the construction and maintenance of sewers within their district shall submit annually for approval by the sewerage authority a programme of works required for the effectual drainage of the district together with estimates of capital and recurring costs'. 518 If there is a sensible reason for transferring the rights, duties or obligations from a larger to a smaller authority, this is one which eminently falls into that category. I cannot imagine a sewerage system which involves a large region more than it does a district. Sewerage is a function which the district itself undertakes. It becomes an onerous, difficult and sometimes an impossible task if the area involved is very large.
There is an element of future thinking in this. At the moment we are dealing with sewage disposal as we have known it in the past and perhaps as we foresee it in the very near future. But I ask the Under-Secretary to cast his mind a little further forward. He may envisage a situation where to become involved in sewage disposal and in sewerage on a large regional scale would be an impossibility. It may be necessary in the not-too-distant future to think in terms entirely of district control.
So far I have been discussing the disposal of sewage itself. However, the discharge of effluent is involved in a situation of this kind. I ask the Under-Secretary to consider the right of purification boards, for example, to work with district councils in respect of the duty which should be given to district councils to purify effluent before dumping it into any kind of disposal system.
Once again I ask the hon. Gentleman to say why it is that in England the river purification boards will make district councils their agents and why that is not spelt out in this Bill?
If the hon. Gentleman can give me the assurance that he previously gave, that there will be the strong probability of the larger region taking the smaller districts into its confidence and relegating to them the rights which I have mentioned I shall be willing to withdraw the amendment.

§ Mr. Younger
I am interested in the hon. Gentleman's remarks but not absolutely certain that I entirely agree that it is likely that sewerage problems will become smaller in the geographical scale rather than larger. What I feel is that sewerage systems need to be designed with regard not to particular local government boundaries but to the lie of the land. We would find that district authority boundaries would be unrelated to 519 such drainage needs in future. There are many examples, of which hon. Members will be aware, of sewerage systems which serve wide areas with sewers traversing what would be the boundary of more than one district.
The hon. Member's amendment would probably introduce different arrangements in different parts of Scotland. The more densely populated and financially strong districts would be capable of maintaining a separate engineering organisation and would take advantage of the powers available to them under the amendment to take over the sewerage systems in their area.
In the more sparsely populated districts such an organisation would not be viable and would probably not arise. It would in any case be up to each district to elect or not to elect to undertake a sewerage function and it might happen that within the same region one district would decide to look after the sewers in its area while the adjoining district would not, and the regional authority might then have to maintain or construct a sewer along part of its length only, leaving it to a district authority to construct or maintain another section. A regional authority might make arrangements for some years to maintain sewers in one district to find that the district at some time wanted to begin to exercise its powers to do so, although the organisation for the work already existed and was functioning satisfactorily.
Apart from introducing undesirable complications in the planning of the service such an arrangement, under which different authorities were responsible for different aspects of it, could result in a wasteful duplication of staff, since it would involve the establishment by district authorities of their own professional organisation for the construction and maintenance of sewers. In short, it seems unsatisfactory that a district should be able to elect or not to elect to carry out a function which is properly that of the region without regard to the appropriateness of this decision to the larger background of regional sewerage requirements.
I agree with the hon. Gentleman that it is necessary to have provision for a region to devolve some powers to a district if 520 both parties wish to do so. The clause allows a regional authority to use its powers under Clause 56 to arrange for sewerage functions to be discharged by a district authority in any case where it might be appropriate that this should be done. Once again I can confirm that I believe that this is an arrangement which can be done under the Bill and one that would certainly, in the appropriate circumstances, have my blessing.

§ Dr. Miller
I much prefer the Under-Secretary when he is his usual clear and almost ebullient self rather than when he is lost in a verbiage of Civil Service jargon. I was almost constrained to push this to a Division if he had continued with the kind of stuff which his agents had given him to read. I am not seized of the argument that because one district can do this well another might not and we should therefore aim at the mediocrity of the region. I would rather have a district doing it well and if another district was not doing it so well have some method of bringing the recalcitrant district up to scratch.
I would like to set the Under-Secretary right on a point he made at the beginning of his speech. I did not indicate in any way that sewerage problems would get smaller. I said the exact opposite. It is because they are getting bigger that they will eventually have to be tackled at source at district rather than at regional level. The region may be all right for general supervision, but the problems of sewerage and the disposal of effluents will in future become so big that they will have to be tackled at the lower level, the work being devolved to the roots of the problems, as it were. That is what I said.
However, in view of the fact that I have had some assurance that there will be some encouragement to devolve these powers to districts, and as I have ventilated the matter, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.