Bathing Water

HC Deb 22 February 1989 vol 147 cc987-9

6. Mr. Win Griffiths

To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment if he will give the cost of full implementation of the European Economic Community directive on bathing water and the date when he expects the directive to be fully met.

Mr. Ridley

We have asked water authorities to assess the feasibility of bringing all their bathing waters up to European Community standards by 1995. The detailed .compliance programmes and the resulting cost to water consumers are not yet clear.

Mr. Griffiths

Will the Minister confirm that the cost of complying with the bathing water quality directives and of getting rid of all the dangerous derogations in the drinking water quality directive will be about £2 billion? Will he also confirm that the report in The Daily Telegraph today that the Minister had achieved the agreement of Brussels to 1995 being a reasonable time by which we should comply with the bathing water directive is absolutely untrue? When I telephoned Brussels this afternoon, I was told that when officials there read the report in The Daily Telegraph they laughed because they felt that the reporter was not telling the truth all the time. Would not 1992 be a far more reasonable date?

Mr. Ridley

I am afraid that I am not responsible for what the hon. Gentleman reads in the newspapers. However, I can give him some information. The Welsh water authority plans to spend £100 million to improve its bathing beaches in the next six years to bring all Welsh waters up to standard. That £100 million will have to be serviced and paid for by Welsh consumers. The total annual spend in England and Wales is currently over £100 million. Over that period, the hon. Gentleman can estimate the total cost of the operation, which does not include improving the quality of water so that it meets the drinking water standards, which will cost considerably more. Indeed, the hon. Gentleman's figure was probably an underestimate of the total cost. I make it clear that these costs will have to be borne by water consumers and are nothing to do with privatisation.

Sir Anthony Meyer

Is my right hon. Friend aware that there is also great concern on the Conservative Benches about the condition of some of our beaches and that many of us will be watching with great care the debates on the Water Bill to ensure that the mechanisms in that measure provide as powerful an incentive to the new water authorities to clean up the beaches as those which exist under the present arrangements?

Mr. Ridley

I can, happily, assure my hon. Friend that the new arrangements, with the National Rivers Authority in place, are infinitely preferable to the older arrangements under which there was no proper control of the investment and standards achieved. I can also comfort my hon. Friend by telling him that the savage and massive cuts in sewerage investment made by the last Labour Administration have been completely reversed and that there are now major programmes in place to finance the necessary improvements.

Mr. Matthew Taylor

Is the Secretary of State aware of the deep concern in the south-west about the condition of the beaches in the area? Is he aware that in that one area, 54 beaches are being investigated for pollution of the water, that 23 regularly fail to meet European bathing water standards and that there is a strong demand for the Government to provide adequate investment nationally to clean our water, our beaches and our environment rather than to follow the massively unpopular path of simply privatising for profit?

Mr. Ridley

We have got there already; the massive investment programme for which the hon. Gentleman calls is in place, restoring the cuts made by the Labour Government.

Mr. Oppenheim

Bearing in mind that it costs money to clear up our seas and drinking water, may I ask my right hon. Friend to agree that it is wholly in character for the Opposition to be demanding that clean-up and, at the same time, complaining about increased charges to pay for it?

Mr. Ridley

The difficulty with the present situation is that Opposition Members are demanding higher standards, with which I agree, and at the same time denying the resulting financial consequences, which they try to blame on something else.

Dr. Cunningham

Why have the Government deliberately understated the scale of the problem of polluted beaches by designating only 391, when the Royal Commission on environmental pollution recognised that there were 600 beaches in Britain popularly used by swimmers? Why did the Minister for Water and Planning stupidly mislead the public today on Radio 4 by saying that there was no health risk unless people could see sewage in the water? Will the Minister admit that colliform bacteria, salmonella, entero viruses and pathogenic micro-organisms are invisible to the naked eye?

Is it not clear that Government policy proposes insufficient control over private monopolies and can offer no deadline for the elimination of polluted beaches, as the chairman of the North-west water authority admitted to me in a recent letter? How can the Secretary of State say that the controls in his legislation are adequate when he has promised in advance immunity from prosecution to the private monopolies that he intends to set up? Will he confirm that all identified bathing waters will receive the same environmental quality objectives before privatisation takes place?

Mr. Ridley

The question on the Order Paper concerns meeting the European Community directive, and that is the question I answered. The number of beaches that qualify under that directive is contained in the numbers that were given in a written answer yesterday.

As to beaches that have not yet been cleaned, I confirm that swimming in contaminated water carries only a very small risk of disease. The system of controls—which the hon. Gentleman ought to understand by now, because he has been debating them long enough in Committee—is infinitely better than anything we have had before. The hon. Gentleman knows that to be the case, and I believe that even he agrees that if a programme of compliance is in place and adhered to, enforcement and prosecution should not take place until that programme is deviated from.