§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn—[Mr. Brooke.]
2.50 am§ Mr. Tony Speller (Devon, North)I wish to bring to the attention of the House the problems associated with the Bideford area sewage treatment and the River Torridge. Bideford lies on the east and west sides of the Torridge, with a population of about 13,000. There are two communities, known as East-the-Water and West-the-Water. Northam, Westward Ho, and Appledore add a further 9,000 to the population. There are massive seasonal fluctuations of population, as the area is extremely popular with holidaymakers and tourists.
The sewage is basically domestic in character. There are three major crude outfalls. Most of the outfalls are exposed at low water and all empty into the River Torridge untreated. The effects of these discharges at Bideford are most noticeable under low tide conditions. The smell at times is really unpleasant, with pollution most apparent along the mud banks at low water springs during a dry spell. There is often an unpleasant slick carried up through the town on the flood and it is by no means uncommon to see faeces in the estuary itself.
The estuary has a high amenity value and is extensively used for recreational pursuits, including sailing, bathing, fishing, water ski-ing and general beach activities. The quality of the estuary water does not reach the standard required by the EEC bathing water directive. The South-West Water Authority admits that it will not do so, even if its present fine screening proposals are implemented instead of the originally planned and much-needed full treatment works.
In 1962, the then Devon River Board decided that matters in the area must be improved. A period of seven years was agreed as a reasonable time to prepare plans for a sewage disposal scheme. A public inquiry was held into a proposed sea outfall but the Secretary of State rejected the proposal then put forward and no decision has been reached on the design of such a scheme.
In 1970, the former Devon River Authority, successor to the Devon River Board, considered that the existing discharge was of a polluted character and, because the pollution problem was no nearer solution, recommended the Devon County Council, as planning authority, to impose a complete embargo on all new development at both Bideford and Northam, pending the implementation of a satisfactory sewerage and sewage disposal scheme. This recommendation was accepted by the county in September 1970 and still applies, except for the construction or modification of single dwellings not on an estate. The policy has been adopted by the South-West Water Authority, which succeeded the Devon River Authority. The saga of successive authorities drags on.
The general policy of recommending the planning authority to restrict development in areas where there are inadequate sewerage or sewage disposal facilities results in numerous applications for private treatment plants. The water authority opposes a proliferation of small, privately run sewage treatment plants because, although the design may be satisfactory, these plants require continual maintenance to achieve desirable standards of effluent and 953 a multiplicity of small works, sometimes with changing ownership, following completion of development, makes control difficult.
Under the provisions of section 34 of the Public Health Act 1936, owners of property have an absolute right to connect to the main drainage system. This right of connection places a considerable strain on inadequate facilities. The water authority also has the duty to
maintain or restore the wholesomeness of rivers and other inland or coastal waters.under the Rivers (Prevention of Pollution) Act 1951. The right approach must be to provide adequate and satisfactory sewerage and sewage treatment arrangements before allowing development to take place. Lack of these facilities hinders development and affects the prosperity of the area.The water authority proposal was originally to provide new pipes and pumps with a modern treatment plant that would produce an acceptable quality effluent. This would improve physically every part of the lower Torridge and the estuary, as well as removing the unpleasantness inevitable with raw sewage in a beautiful river.
The water authority's current proposal is a horror story by comparison. New pipes and pumps, yes, but no treatment at all except—a lovely phrase—fine screening. This means what it says—the taking out of the large lumps while everything else goes into the river. The whole area would probably lose its need-induced priority status, and all this after 18 or 19 years of patient waiting.
The chairman of the water authority has explained its finance problems. He has said that as the water authority had available capital resources of only £4.4 million the only way to spread this limited finance throughout the district would be to implement fine screening at Bideford and Westward Ho, with improvements to various other outfalls into the Torridge. That would be instead of carrying out the full scheme, which would cost £10 million.
In summary, therefore, the water authority, in proposing the use of fine screens only, would be providing a lower quality of effluent disposal than it requires from local developers. That is unsatisfactory to local residents and unfair to local developers. In simple terms, the treatment plant required from any private developer is of a high standard, while the treatment of effluent by the authority itself is not negligible, but nil.
On the advice of various authorities, therefore, development in the Bideford area of Torridgeside has been held back for nearly 20 years. The plan now produced by the water authority does not do the full job of piping and then treating the effluent. It does the piping part, but it only fine screens the sewage before pumping it straight into the Torridge. I do not condemn the water authority for its proposals. On the contrary, it is acting within its limited cash resources and the limitless demands upon that cash as it thinks best. It is much to the credit of the authority and its chairman, Mr. Len Hill, that the authority is prepared to consider amending the scheme at the request of the council. In turn, Torridge district council offers positive suggestions rather than the sterile and negative criticism that arises with disputes between water authorities and district or county councils.
The Torridge district council—a good authority—is supported entirely by Bideford town council in being completely opposed to a second-rate scheme that fails to improve the quality of the sewage discharged into the 954 Torridge river. From 1964 to 1980 about 2,400 additional dwellings have been erected within the area as a result of existing planning consents. About 1,700 of these properties pass untreated effluent into the Torridge, a river considered in 1962 to be polluted. If a fine screening operation alone is introduced on economy grounds and the priority status requiring further improvement is removed it is unlikely that a full treatment scheme will ever be implemented.
Rather than introduce fine screening alone throughout the district, I should prefer the capital allocation to be invested in full treatment in the Bideford area alone as a first stage. The other areas, where crude sewage discharges either into the Torridge or into the sea direct, could then be phased into later schemes, but could still rank as priority areas. I do not suggest that this half a loaf is satisfactory, but at least it would do part of the job well rather than all of it badly.
The water authority has agreed to defer a decision on whether to implement fine screening, provided some definite conclusion can be reached by October of this year. There is a good hope that agreement can be reached between the various authorities before then.
This is a plot without a villain and—at this moment—without a hero bearing a crock of gold to solve all our problems. Perhaps there is such a hero in the wings. I refer to the excellent and much-respected Member of the European Parliament for Devon, Lord O'Hagan, and perhaps to his Strasbourg geese and their golden eggs. The EEC is an occasional but generous contributor to individual local development projects in Devon when these find favour. Contributions are usually between £250,000 and £500,000.
If we are to receive more cash through the EEC, thanks to the efforts of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, how much better to ask for it in one chunk in order to get the infrastructure right—in this case the sewerage of an area—rather than piecemeal for one-off projects over a period of years.
There is a moral point and a commercial point to this. If the area has been blighted for nearly 20 years by pollution problems it cannot be right to slip in a partial job and say that that will do for now, while so much more is demanded from the private developer. The commercial point is simply that in an area of great natural beauty, with the most efficient shipyard in the country at Appledore, and with so much needing to be done, it is pointless not to set people free to build and prosper.
The Government are pledged to help the individual and the small firms who are pledged to help themselves. Bideford, Northam, Westward Ho and Appledore are just such small firms. In North Devon we do not ask for charity. We ask only for our fair share of resources and then to be allowed to get on with the job.
§ 3 am
§ The Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. Giles Shaw)My hon. Friend the Member for Devon, North (Mr. Speller) has been consistent in his pursuit of this problem. I think that he will expect me to remind the House that he last raised this matter on 12 March 1980 when dealing with this and other matters in connection with water supply, flooding and drainage.
955 My hon. Friend must now know that the authority was asked to reconsider its proposal to promote the Roadford reservoir and to investigate an alternative site at Higher Horslett, and its reply is under consideration.
On that occasion my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Mr. Fox), who was Under-Secretary at the time, touched on the authority's part scheme to re-sewer parts of Bideford and to treat the sewage by primary settlement only for discharge to the Taw-Torridge estuary. Commissioning of the scheme was not then expected to be completed until 1995. Some progress has been made, in that the authority's corporate plan shows that its latest version of the scheme has been brought forward for execution in the period 1982–87 at a cost of £4.7 million. However, no longer does the authority propose to adopt the process of primary settlement. This is the major factor in the Torridge district council's dislike of the less costly current proposal which the water authority favours. That point was made by my hon. Friend.
As my hon. Friend is aware, the problem is not which scheme should be favoured or implemented, given the restraints on and the allocation of public expenditure which the water authority has to endure. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his comments about the water authority and about its chairman, Mr. Len Hill, who has been grappling with a considerable inheritance of water problems in both supply and sewerage, which have left the area with one of the highest, if not the highest, domestic rate of charging and yet with some of the most intractable problems. The large influx of summer visitors raises the resident population by about 40 per cent. in a normal year. I sincerely hope that Bideford and district will have a normal summer this year.
Additionally, the authority faces the problem of development embargoes, and my hon. Friend referred to them as a major restraint on the local economy. I understand that 200 out of the 560 parishes are affected by such embargoes at present.
I preface my comments on the specific scheme by agreeing with my hon. Friend that anything that can be done to remove embargoes on development—the major restraint on the local economy—should be done, and any scheme that would result in lifting these embargoes should have a high priority. But, as my hon. Friend knows, development embargoes are in force not only in the Bideford area, but in Appledore, Northam and Westward Ho to the north and west of Bideford. These embargoes exist because of deficiencies inherited by the water authority.
The problems of the area are widespread. Dealing with Bideford alone, the structure plan provides for 73 hectares of residential land and 16 hectares of employment land to be released. If the scheme favoured by the water authority is completed, it will enable some development to proceed at Westward Ho and Northam and some limited building to take place at Appledore and Cleave, where the structure plan identifies the provision of a further 36 hectares of residential land. A tremendous amount is to be gained with a scheme that results in the embargoes being lifted. As my hon. Friend is probably aware, these development embargoes can be lifted on the scheme's inception, once it is approved for the capital programme of the water authority.
956 The problems at Appledore and Bideford relate to both deficient sewerage and water quality, with crude sewage discharges to the estuary. Likewise, the problems at Northam and Westward Ho are related to crude sewage discharges. At Northam the sewerage is deficient and at Westward Ho there is inadequate sewage treatment. My hon. Friend will appreciate that while all this is unfortunate for a prime holiday area, Bideford is also part of an area that has assisted status as defined by the Department of Industry, so the lifting of the development embargo is clearly of added importance.
Although the current proposals for Bideford fall short of a full treatment scheme, I understand that they form the first stage of such a scheme. Having checked with the water authority today, I can confirm that it remains committed in the longer term to the full scheme. It is, however, its present proposal to carry out enough works to improve sufficiently the effluent of the sewerage system to enable the development embargo to be lifted. This, I stress, is perhaps the most important single factor, and it is the initial aim of the water authority to do that—to lift the embargo and to enable the development of residential and industrial land to proceed.
Now we come to the initial question of what method is to be preferred. Alternatives for the initial stage necessary to remove the embargoes have been considered by the water authority, and a difference of opinion appears to exist between the authority and Torridge district council as to which should be adopted. The water authority favours the less expensive scheme of passing the sewage from Bideford East and West through fine screens sited locally and completing sufficient works to raise the embargoes at Appledore, Bideford, Northam and Westward Ho, whereas the district council favours a more expensive scheme, which includes primary treatment of sewage from Bideford East and West after pumping into a new site at Little America.
My hon. Friend was suggesting that the proposal by the water authority to use fine screens was somewhat horrific. Perhaps I can give him some further information. I have spoken to the authority about the problem. I have, for example, asked whether fine screening is a well-tried system. It is certainly true that in the screening to which the water authority is committed it is proposing to screen the solids from the system at a very fine mesh—at 1.5 to 2.5 mm. That system has been tested out for about three months at the authority's works, and it is satisfied that such a fine screening system can be implemented.
My hon. Friend might care to know that there are several other resorts—Blackpool, Bognor and Littlehampton, to name but three—that rely upon a fine screening process, and that they have a fine screen as large in mesh as 5 mm. So I put two points to my hon. Friend in defence of what the water authority seeks to do.
First, it has a process that has been used by other resorts that have major amenities in terms of bathing waters; secondly, it is introducing after test a process a much finer grain of screen than that applied elsewhere. It is not surprising, therefore, that if this fine screening is installed the problems of the suspended solids in the waters of the Torridge will be reduced by about one third, which will be a major improvement over the present state of affairs.
I take issue with my hon. Friend's suggestion that what is being discussed here is horrific. I accept that it is not the proposal that the Torridge district council favours and is not a complete proposal as far as sewage treatment goes, 957 but it does offer major relief for the immediate problem at a scale of fineness that will be the best that can be produced in this country and, I suggest, with a reduction in the solids in effluent that will be substantial.
I also suggest to my hon. Friend that it would, of course, mean the lifting of the embargo in Bideford and other areas, and that factor must be heavily considered. I admit that the alternative scheme offered by Torridge district council would also lift embargoes, but, I suspect, for a rather smaller area than that preferred by the water authority.
There is, of course, a difference in the capital considerations. The district council's proposals would cost about £5,580,000, whereas that favoured by the water authority is estimated to cost £4,850,000. So the scheme favoured by the district council exceeds the cost of that available by about £730,000. Sewerage works, pumping and fine screening plant at Westward Ho and Northam, and extensions to existing outflows at Appledore and Cleave, would cost a further £1.4 million, and these additional works are included in the scheme favoured by the authority, but are not included in the scheme favoured by the Torridge district council.
I suggest, therefore, that the moneys that the water authority proposes to spend on the fine screening scheme would not only affect a wider proportion of his constituency as far as the development embargoes go, and allow the further development of the fuller treatment works, but could produce as adequate a reduction over a wider area as any other scheme.
Then there is the question of additional assistance. My hon. Friend was looking for the magic wand of the regional development fund. That fund has to operate when the scheme has been commenced, and it has to be produced within the same financial year. The ERDF can be used to assist in providing basic services for industrial areas. Some schemes in my hon. Friend's area, notably re-sewering Camborne and Redruth, the water supply scheme in Plymouth, Colliford reservoir and the trunk main into Cornwall, all received ERDF aid. Moreover, the Commission recently approved grant aid for the Caradon reservoir.
However, assistance from the ERDF is conditional upon application being made in respect of expenditure that will take place in the current EEC financial year, extending from 31 December to 1 January of the next year. Expenditure incurred more than six months previously 958 cannot be included in the application. So, although it remains a possibility, that possibility is not particularly close.
However, there is another possibility, namely schemes involving the 1972 Local Employment Act grants. The Local Employment Act grant is available and payable on that portion of the water services project which is attributable to the needs of new or expanded industry If the water authority considers that its scheme would be eligible for that grant—and bearing in mind the lifting of embargoes on industrial development, it would appear to me that it might be eligible—it could submit an application for consideration in the usual way. However, the scale of grant may not be great—about 30 per cent. for the industrial component—but it could be a source of improvement to the financing of the project.
My hon. Friend raised the matter of bathing water quality. While it may be true that the quality of the estuary bathing water may not equate to the standard that is required by the EEC bathing water directive—I am not sure whether that directive applies to the luscious waters of the Torridge estuary—the directive does not equate to public health standards. So, should visitors wish to take the plunge, it would be wrong to assume that there was a health risk in the estuary at present.
Although there is a difference of view between the two schemes, and although I welcome the possibility that both the council and the water authority might reach agreement by discussion, the scheme for fine screening appears to offer a major reduction in the problem at a modest cost, and offers a wider relief from the development embargoes in the area concerned. I cannot claim that there will he much chance of an EDRF grant, but that is a matter for the authority to consider. An employment grant assistance may be available at a lower level for the industrial component in the scheme.
Whatever else may be said, I assure my hon. Friend that the water authority will still be committed to a wider-scale scheme to complete the whole operation, as and when funds are available. In the meantime, I suggest that the scheme that it proposes has considerable merit, and I hope that at long last something positive will be done to assist his constituency,
§ Question put and agreed to.
§ Adjourned accordingly at fourteen minutes past Three o'clock am.