Malvern Water (Hansard, 15 February 1983)

§ Mr. Michael Spicer (Worcestershire, South)

It is perhaps not surprising that the two recent European Community directives on water hygiene should have touched a particularly raw nerve in Malvern, a town that I have the honour to represent in this House. After all, Malvern water has formed a part of the national heritage and culture since Queen Elizabeth I made a point of drinking it in public in the 16th century, and Queen Victoria refused to travel without it, as well as her Jersey cow, in the 19th century. I understand that to this day Malvern water is being supplied to the Royal household, and there is therefore a sense in which what is good enough for British monarchs is not good enough for the EEC.

I admit that in recent weeks there has been some confusion in the press and elsewhere about precisely why the Malvern Hills district council, in particular, has made a fuss about these two directives. The concern of this local authority—and especially the members of the public health committee on the local authority—is not so much about the directive which relates to mineral waters. The fact is that Schweppes, which is by far the largest purveyor of bottled Malvern water, has no intention of applying for this product to be treated as mineral water under the terms of the EC directive. Unlike the French and other continental examples, no claim has ever been made that Malvern water possesses any quasi-medical or magical powers. Indeed, it has always been sold as nothing but pure water. It was an early crack, which I heard only recently, of a certain Dr. Wall, who is supposed to have founded the Malvern water cure, that Malvern water is famed for containing absolutely nothing at all. The prime characteristic of Malvern water, therefore, has been that it is pure spring water.

It is perhaps that inheritance that makes the people of Malvern especially sensitive to bureaucratic burdens being placed on them which cast doubt on the proven characteristics of Malvern water. Those burdens are to be imposed because of the anxiety that, as far as I can understand it, exists in other European countries about the hygiene standards of their own water supplies. The problem is that they are to apply also to areas such as Malvern, where water has enjoyed an unparalleled reputation for purity for centuries, and where there has never been a single example of water being a hazard to anyone who has drunk it, whether a monarch or lesser mortal.

Therefore, it is not the EC directive relating to mineral water which is causing anxiety. Under EC directive 80/778, new rules will come into operation which affect all water intended for human consumption; and that is the reason for my having brought the matter before the House tonight.

It must be said at once that the new directive will not have much significance either in the process of providing bottled Malvern water or any other bottled water, or in the operations of the Severn-Trent water authority or any other water authority. The Malvern Hills district council does not expect to have to increase its current rate of sampling bottled water from the present level of one per month, nor does it expect the directive greatly to affect its relationship 269 with the Severn-Trent water authority. The problem arises, first, because the public health committee will have new responsibility for the quality control of water once it has left the main distribution system and forms part of an industrial process or is distributed within large buildings. Every small baker and food processor will from now onwards be brought under the bureaucratic eye of, in my case, the Malvern Hills district council.

However, there are wider implications than that. Perhaps more significantly, the council will have greatly to extend its monitoring of and control over the considerable number of private wells and boreholes in the district. Nobody, certainly not I, disputes the need for local authorities and those conerned with public hygiene and health to involve themselves in the process of testing water. The problem is that under the new directive—one does not want to become too technical—in for instance, chemical tests, whereas at the moment it is deemed adequate that a maximum of 16 chemical tests should take place, the number of tests under the new directive for waters from private wells and boreholes will now be increased to 64. That is four times the number of tests that exist at the moment. A similar increase applies to the bacteriological tests and, indeed, various others tests that the water or public health authorities have to engage in.

It is the extent of testing and bureaucracy with which I am concerned. Indeed, in my neck of the woods that is no mean problem. One estimate that I have received is that in the Malvern Hills district alone there are 1,000 dwellings and therefore, I suppose, between 2,000 and 3,000 people who take their water from private wells. In addition, several hundred dwellings are supplied by private boreholes. Therefore, it is of some considerable interest, certainly to anybody representing rural areas. I suspect that the further west one goes into Devon and Cornwall, the more likely it is that one would come across much the same kind of problem.

Under the EC directive, my district council will have considerably to extend its surveillance of the private sources of water. The problem will be aggravated by the fact that, since the water workers' strike the re-utilisation of previously ignored or forgotten wells has now increased. The Malvern Hills district council currently estimates that it will cost it about £20,000 a year to deal with just the known sources of water, let alone the new sources of supply which are beginning, as I say, to come on tap as a result of the strike and people wanting to provide their own water. The actual costs to the council are frankly impossible to calculate, but they will obviously be higher than the present estimates.

Although it is not surprising, for the reasons I have mentioned, that Malvern should have been the first council to bring this matter to public attention, the new directives will clearly affect all parts of the country but most particularly the rural areas where there are extensive private supplies of water through wells and boreholes. I suspect that all those local authorities will have the same point of view as the Malvern Hills district council, that this is another example of a higher level of government—in this case the EC, with British Government acceptance—imposing increased administrative burdens on local government.

The feeling in the Malvern Hills is that the Government must either supply the necessary funds or find them from the EC to enable district councils to undertake these new chores. Alternatively, by a process of derogation, which 270 is a word with which I have only recently become familiar, the district councils should be allowed additional time beyond the present specified time by which they have to bring these directives into effect, which is about 16 months. That would enable them to rearrange their affairs, for example, to map out the new boreholes and the new wells which are coming on stream and thus to undertake these new tasks, if that is what they have to do, at the minimum cost to the ratepayer.

Although it is a heavy onus to put on the Minister at this hour of the night—I recognise that he did not invent this directive—I should be glad to hear the Government's attitude to this matter. When I first looked into the issue, it struck me as something of little moment, but the more I considered it the more I realised that it was a matter of some significance.

It will be interesting to hear the Government's view on two matters. If the directive that applies to water for human consumption is to come into effect, will there be relief for the hard-pressed ratepayer, and can the Government offer any stay of execution in this matter?

§ The Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. Giles Shaw)

I am delighted to be able to participate in a debate on water where there appears to be no shortage thereof. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester, South (Mr. Spicer) on standing up eloquently for the rights of Malvern water and all its consumers of whom, I suspect, there are a considerable number in the House, Mr. Deputy Speaker, perhaps not excluding your good self. Equally, I shall not be trespassing on the problems associated with the mineral water to which my hon. Friend referred as, otherwise, I should have to assume the guise of my hon. and lovely Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. My hon. Friend will no doubt be understanding if I eschew that prospect, desirable though that might be.

The debate gives me the opportunity to talk about the problems of the EC directive 80/778 on the quality of water intended for human consumption, both to private supplies and to food manufacture. We have taken steps to supply some information through the circular DOE 20/82, which the Department issued. It will be dealt with in detail in further circulars from my Department and the Department of Health and Social Security. The object, as I am sure my hon. Friend is well aware, is simply to ensure the wholesomeness of drinking water. The Department's policy on its implementation is to use the existing powers of water authorities, water companies and district councils to achieve this with the minimum of extra work and expense. I shall emphasise that later in my remarks.

I recognise that there are areas with very large numbers of private sources. Clearly, my hon. Friend's con-stituency, containing as it does the lovely district of Malvern, is one such area. It would be quite unrealistic to expect all those sources to conform to the directive's standards by 18 July 1985. Its requirements for private supplies are similar to those for public supplies, but the frequency with which they are sampled is left to the discretion of member states. My Department will concentrate on that aspect in its advice to district councils.

My first point, therefore, is that we control how we wish to implement the directive. While its provisions must be complied with by member states by 18 July 1985, it 271 does not mean that all private supplies must be sampled, analysed and approved by that date. It would be a mammoth task for Britain, with about 250,000 sources to be sampled. It would be even worse for some of our European colleagues, where the task would be 10 times greater. I intend to ensure that there is an effective system of monitoring private supplies. By effective, I mean in the results achieved and in the use of resources necessary—but not extortionate—to achieve those results.

Where necessary, the Government will explore the opportunity to test joint private supplies in one operation, thereby removing the need for expensive and time-consuming work for local authorities, and also dispensing with the inconvenience to the individual consumer of the need for frequent visits from scientists and officials. How right is my hon. Friend to be alarmed at the prospect of a steady, bureaucratic team, pipettes in hand, squirting small samples of water on to a piece of litmus paper.

Possibilities for sampling water from aquifers supplying a number of boreholes will also be fully explored before the Government settle on the means of implementation. The hallmark of our approach will be common sense and realism, as we ensure that the directive's requirements are met. I hope that my hon. Friend, supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Mr. Rhodes James) is in accord with that.

I should not like my hon. Friend to think that increased sampling activity means that our water supply is unsatisfactory. There is a positive case for saying that our supply is, by and large, extremely satisfactory. We have a high standard of potable water which is the envy of many other countries, including those within the EC. In the vast majority of cases, the quality of our drinking water is higher than the directive's minimum standard. I include the great majority of private boreholes and artesian supplies which, as users know, provide an adequate and uninterrupted supply of potable water, which is extremely valuable at all times, but especially now.

Under the directive, no one will run the risk of losing their water supply. Provided that there is a detailed action programme, the directive allows at least a 10-year period during which supplies that fall short of the standard can be brought up to the required quality. That, I trust, fully answers one of my hon. Friend's anxieties. Although 18 July 1985 is the operative date for the directive, there will be a significant period in which the appropriate adjustments can be made to those supplies—which could well be few in an area of such pure water as Malvern—to bring them to the required quality. There will be plenty of time for treatment to be arranged or adapted to meet the requirements of the directive. No one need fear that their supply will be removed.

I see no reason why a sampling system should not be in operation by July 1985. In many, or even most, cases district councils, in discharging their obligations under the Public Health Act 1936, are already sampling private water sources at a frequency equal to, or possibly greater than, the Department's recommended sampling rate of between one in 25 and one in 100 sources per annum.

That, if I recall my hon. Friend's comments about the thousand or more private sources, should put another time parameter into the problem. For those councils, therefore, the Department's recommendations will mean no increase in costs. For those councils that have not so far put as much 272 effort into the observance of the 1936 Act, and I cannot believe that Malvern Hills is one such council, there will need to be increased sampling activity. It is possible to argue that this was needed in any case, irrespective of any recommendation from my Department. The 1936 Act should be an effective piece of legislaion to protect water supplies from impurities.

The costs involved will not necessarily rise greatly, because the major problem with private water sources—bacterial contamination—is checked without cost to the district council by the public health laboratory service, and in most cases the number of chemical and physiochemical parameters—which I would expect to translate into terms of pH, to give it its more proper name—that need to be checked will be very small. I caution my hon. Friend not to be panicked by the 64 parameters listed in annexe 1 to the directive. For such tests, that range of substances is probably quite unnecessary.

For such councils there will be an increase in activity by environmental health officers in taking samples, but, even with the increase, a council with 1,000 private sources that does no sampling now should not find itself greatly inconvenienced by taking perhaps 200 samples in a year, While the cost of analysing those samples for a limited number of parameters, and I use that word again—it means the matters for which testing is required—would probably fall between £5,000 and £10,000 in the course of a year. I suggest therefore, to my hon. Friend that the cost to district councils of complying with the departmental recommendations must, in aggregate, be very small. The present United Kingdom requirements, laid on councils by the Department of Health and Social Security are basically guidelines, and are not mandatory in any respect.

Directive 80/778 is being implemented through existing food hygiene regulations and there is no intention on the part of the Department to do anything other than minimise the load on environmental health officers. It is the intention of the Department of Health and Social Security to issue revised guidance on food hygiene regulations, but such guidance has not yet reached the consultation stage. When it does I am quite sure that both the Department and those with whom it consults will have the resource implications very much in mind.

I hope that what I have said to my hon. Friend will have allayed any fears that hon. Members may have had, and that he may have expressed tonight, that implementation of the drinking water directive might cause considerable expenditure on the part of district councils or that the implementation would put at serious risk private supplies from boreholes and other sources.

Moreover, I assure the House that the guidelines on the detailed application of the requirements of the directives will not be issued without full consultation with interested parties. I include in that consultation with the Malvern Hills district council.