A conversation with Dieter Helm: What would it take to fix the water industry?
Bea Gilbert spoke to Sir Dieter Helm CBE about his recent publication: 'What would it take to fix the water industry?'. They talked about improving the water system through catchment-based reform, the opportunity we have now for radical innovation, and why at-source solutions always beat end-of-pipe ‘sticking plaster’ fixes.
Bea Gilbert (BG): Under the model of the reformed water industry that you propose, how do you envision navigating conflicts of interest between water companies, farmers, developers, consumers, and other stakeholders?
Dieter Helm (DH): There's always going to be different interests from different parties, but the whole point of using a catchment-based approach and catchment regulation is that we take it out of the hands of water companies to come up with corporate plans. Instead, the catchment regulator comes up with a catchment plan, and that's on an open website for everyone to look at, download, play with, et cetera.
Once the catchment plan is agreed, essentially the catchment regulator asks people to bid to do the various things that help to achieve the objectives; so it's actually much more market-oriented than the current framework. It doesn't allow silos to persist, and it doesn't allow a monopoly to determine the outcomes. It's done from a catchment basis, and everyone's on the same level playing field in bidding, with the most efficient way of receiving revenues.
BG: That in mind, in terms of the catchment regulators and system operators engaging with the current partnerships under CaBA (Catchment-Based Approach), do you think anything will need to change?
DH: Oh, a great deal. This is, in one sense, a radical departure; but then anything piecemeal in the current context probably won't work fast enough anyway, and we have to remember how bad the current situation is – how incredibly inefficient, and how expensive it is to achieve outcomes – and we've reached the limit of bills. If we want to make improvements, which I think almost all parties want to do, and we want to do it in a framework that people can actually afford to pay for, we just can't go on like we currently are.
So, in this framework, it's in the hands of the catchment regulation and the catchment plan: consulting everyone, involving anyone, having an open website for people to try out their own ideas, et cetera. Via the bidding process, we find the cheapest and best ways of reaching the outcome. If we don't do this, people won't be able to pay, and we'll go on with the terrible state of our rivers and our water supplies.
BG: In terms of making things smooth and getting away from these terrible states: if we returned to a nationalised model, would you see this managing to not repeat the inertia, lack of innovation, and patchwork solutions that we currently see?
DH: I don’t propose a nationalised model – that’s very important. In electricity, we have the National Energy System Operator, which is essentially planning the system, with auctions for people to bid to it – and we haven't nationalised the electricity system. It would be a big mistake to think that with catchment planning and the auctioning of that plan, that means we need state ownership. We don't. Indeed, I think it would be a bad and retrograde step.
The second thing is that innovation is absolutely the core, because for the first time, anyone can come forward with ideas to show, within the catchment plan and the website, how their change is more effective and efficient than the alternatives. Instead of the water companies controlling the whole frame and then having to find ways to cajole farmers, anyone – any startup, any innovator, indeed any NGO – can come forward with ideas and plans to take things forward. Whereas the current system is about as innovation-unfriendly as you can possibly imagine, the catchment regulation and catchment planning system has innovation at its core, and there is huge scope to take forward technology. This has been a dinosaur industry for a very long time. If you think of the sewage side, this is an area for real scientific progress, a revolution in what we can do, and we must make that move forward. If we carry on like this, the rivers will carry on in their terrible state, and that's going to be bad for consumers now – but terrible for the next generation and for our natural environment.
BG: I was impressed by the number of very practical ideas you have. The main one seems to be the ‘separated and at source’ model. But aside from that, you urge a range of solutions from re-wriggling rivers through to local-level rainwater storage. Do you see a hierarchy amongst these other ideas?
DH: The fundamental starting point is that, at the moment, we focus on end-of-pipe. We focus on cleaning up pollution once it's caused, and we focus on dealing with the floodwaters when they're coming. And that has a history. Our rivers were sewers. They were used for dumping in – the seas were as well – and water was deemed to be plentiful. I want to start exactly the other way round. When it comes to water, the reason we're running around trying to build big tanks to store more stormwater at sewage works is because the water runs off so quickly. There is an issue of climate change, but that's not the main reason why we have to have more storage tanks now. It's because of the way we've developed the land. It's the road systems; it's the way agriculture works. Let's slow the flow before we have to resort to building tanks. Re-wriggling rivers is just one of those ideas; natural capital solutions are not going back to the dark ages. These are the real innovations cutting edges of what we can do.
We shouldn't have to pay for storage tanks when it's cheaper to change things about roads or cover crops. Roads should be porous. We could have winter cover crops on fields. In the worst case, maize crops are left barren in the winter, with fast runoff. This just doesn't have to happen. And when it comes to sewage, we flush it down and make no distinction of what we're doing or how we do it. If, for example, you have a septic tank, you can't put sewage in it. Why can you put it down the main sewage system but not in a septic tank? These are elementary changes that we could make.
Finally, just at the domestic level, it's not just what you flush down the toilet. It's the fact that most houses don't have water butts. Water butts are, in a sense, a very old technology, but it's not just about having water to water the garden; it's slowing the flow. It makes a great deal of difference, and in drought areas, why don't we build tanks under houses? If you go to the Isles of Scilly, you'll find at least one hotel which is built on, as its foundation, a huge tank to collect the water from roofs. We're finally, in 2028, going to make new houses have heat pumps and solar panels. Why did it take so long just for new houses, let alone the rest? Similarly, why do new houses not have, for example, water storage? Beyond that, there's an unpleasant dimension of this politically, but it's really important to understand. You and I are the polluters. We let the water run quickly off our houses into the system. We flush the loo, and we use this infrastructure, which is hardwired to flush water off fast. So, in the end, we have to pay. You can pay it in your water bill, for cleaning up the mess, or you could pay it in a cheaper way, which has stopped the problem in the first place. We have to get away from the idea that it's all the fault of the water companies. It’s also your fault and my fault. The system and industry exist for us ultimately, and we have to take responsibility. It’s in our interest to do this, because it’s cheaper.
BG: You refer quite a lot to the Victorian approach, and how it answered the questions that it needed to answer at the time – they took actions that made sense, and at the times that they needed to. How can we ensure that we embed sustainable approaches that are resilient to potential future environmental and social change, and don't just answer the current challenges that we face?
DH: The first point that I've learned throughout my career about policy is it happens after a crisis, not before. We never sort out our energy mess until there's a really big crisis, and in water, it's only addressed on its fundamentals when the existing system fails so badly. The Bazalgette moment in the middle of the 19th century was a moment where the stink of London was so horrific that even the parliamentarians couldn't meet. Something obviously had finally to be done, and a radical solution was adopted: the London sewerage system. We are again at that moment. Whether you watch documentaries on television or you look at the papers, everyone's utterly fed up with what we've got, and everybody is affected by these stark rises in bills. It's a crisis. Don't waste it. Right now, we have an opportunity with a crisis to do something fundamental and radical, because none of the sticky plasters work, right down to the sticky plasters keeping the fabric of Thames Water's board together.
We have that chance. There's no point in doing it for the next 5 years. It's a 50-year project. Bazalgette turned out to be 200 years virtually, or 150 years. There aren't short-term ways of doing radical things, and if you just build some more tanks, which is what we're doing at the moment, all over the sewage works, they can overflow. It's going to go wrong. Making sure the next generation has decent infrastructure is absolutely fundamental to the economy – and it's not just about water, it's about the other infrastructures too. This is the moment of crisis, and in one sense, "great". We can do something about it now, and anything else will just leave even more problems for the next generation that we've got now. This is a solvable problem.
BG: It's the first time I've heard the crisis framed as a potentially good thing!
DH: It helps to have some grey hair. Over my career, people have become more and more specialised in smaller and smaller problems. It's the way science develops. You can find a scientist who knows absolutely everything about one dimension of the DNA code. But this is a case, as with energy, where you need a holistic approach to the system as a whole. You can promote all sorts of advances in science, but within this frame, there needs to be an organisation of the science and the knowledge base for a comprehensive solution. That's the challenge; it is so difficult to find scientists who grasp the whole picture.
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Header Image: Dieter Helm at Chatham House, London | CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
