Who will protect our rivers?
Published: 06-07-2010
Gemma Watts, PR & Events Manager, Protect Kent
6 July 2010
As temperatures continue to rise and there is no immediate prospect of significant rainfall to replenish our supplies, Protect Kent today warns of increasing risk of damage to our environmental resources in the south east.
Two local supply companies, South East Water and Thames Water Utilities, have both undergone public inquiries into their proposed five-year Water Resource Management Plans. The increasing environmental impact of public supply development in this region featured prominently in both these inquiries.
Both inquiries have been attended by Protect Kent representatives who detailed their objection to the schemes outlined by the Companies for further exploiting the Region’s river and groundwater resources, given that many supply areas are already officially designated as “Water Scarce”.
Both Companies have plans for new reservoirs but Protect Kent has objected on grounds that the abstraction needed to keep these reservoirs full would cause further depletion of river flows and degrade the associated wetland habitats.
The Companies both acknowledge that current levels of abstraction are unsustainable and can damage habitats and environmental quality. In the catchment area of Kent’s River Stour, fed by springs from the Chalk Downs, the Environment Agency has identified a number of public supply boreholes, licensed since the mid/late 1960s, which draw heavily on flows in the river system.
South East Water are aware that these sources of supply will at some stage need to be shut down, or radically reduced in output; but finding alternative sources will be expensive and almost inevitably lead to increases in charges to consumers.
Protect Kent, in its evidence to the South East Water inquiry, expressed concern at the delay in carrying out the necessary remedial measures and also made known their objection to the Company’s Plans to construct a large off-stream reservoir at Broadoak near Canterbury. This, in their view, would not resolve the supply problem and would draw further on flows in the Stour, accelerating the deterioration in river quality already recorded by the Environment Agency.
Protect Kent has now presented the outline of an alternative strategy for consideration by the Inquiry as the basis for a more comprehensive long term strategy for the SE Region as a whole; one which would make more use of our renewable water resources and also give higher priority to the restoration of our endangered rivers and wetlands
Mr Graham Warren, Protect Kent’s expert on water supply matters, said:
“One thing we have learned from recent drought experience is that no water company acting alone is likely to be able to meet the future combined challenges of climate change, population growth and environmental deterioration.
It will require a strategy which integrates the water supply and environmental management functions on a scale that can only be sustained and operated cost-effectively if the companies co-operate as a truly Regional entity.”
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