Who owns Welsh water?

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Initially it might sound like a fairly bizarre question. Surely Welsh water belongs to Wales?
And once again the subject is being brought up in the media. Which isn't a surprise considering certain areas of the UK are almost in a continual state of drought. I'll come back to that later.

Let's look back to the 70s first, in particular to the Water Act 1973. This act restructured the water authorities in England and Wales ready for privatisation in the 80s. There is a full list of these here, but as always we only care about the ones that involve Wales. I will add that I will leave out Dee Valley Water and concentrate on the big two. I have also asked both Severn Trent and Dŵr Cymru for a complete list of their reservoirs in Wales to enable a more in depth analysis. Until then let's just focus on what can be found with a quick google.

Severn Trent. This started life as an amalgamation of 20 or so public sector water authorities, one of which was Montgomeryshire. One of the original counties of Wales and now part of Powys. They also own reservoirs in Wales.

If you are a Welsh based customer of Severn Trent I would be wondering why areas in Wales that are unmetered pay more for their water than similar areas in England. Here's the pricing guide for 2011-12 so you can check it yourself.

Clywedog reservoir, near Llandiloes in Powys. Built by damming the Afon Clywedog in 1967 to supply water to Birmingham and the Midlands. It's the tallest concrete dam in the UK with a height of 72m and a water volume of 50,000 mega litres. Let's pause right there, because I'm not sure what a mega litre is. Using this handy conversion tool I can now tell you that 50,000 ML is 50,000,000,000 Litres. So we've looked at one reservoir, built in Wales by England to supply England with Welsh water that is managed by a HQ in England that is capable of storing fifty billion litres of water.

Lake Vyrnwy, Powys. Built by flooding the Welsh village of Llanwddyn to supply Liverpool and Merseyside. It has a volume of 59,666 ML. So that's just under 60 billion litres of our water.

I don't know about you but those numbers make my head hurt. We've only looked at two English owned reservoirs in Wales yet they can provide up to 110 billion litres of water for England. Let's try and put those numbers into some perspective without resorting to Olympic sized clichés.

The BBC's diet and nutrition expert Dr Toni Steer recommends that the average adult needs between 1.5 and 3 litres of water per day.

Now let's assume that Wales' population of 3 million are all adults and all require 3 litres per day. That works out as 9,000,000 litres that Wales needs per day. or 3,285,000,000 litres per year.

Now you divide the 110 billion by our yearly requirement and we have enough to supply Wales for 33 years. Obviously that factors in no loss through evaporation and not washing (I'll cover that later), but it also factors in no more rain. Plus it's only two reservoirs in Wales. 81 more are owned by Dŵr Cymru.

So what about Dŵr Cymru, they are Welsh. Aren't they?

Dŵr Cymru / Welsh Water is owned by Glas Cymru, purchased for £1 back in 2001 after the previous company, Hyder went belly up after a decade of capitalist greed post privitisation left it with £1.85 billion in debts. It's limited to water only business dealings and is designed to be run solely for the benefit of its customers. Not all of these customers are in Wales. They also supply to customers over the border. That was the short, polite and politically correct answer, there is a longer, more in depth answer in this very good article by Glasiad ap Gruffydd.

I've taken the following from the website of DCWW.

Welsh Water is the regulated company that provides water supply and sewerage services to over three million people living and working in Wales and some adjoining areas of England.

We have 1.2 million household customers and over 110,000 business customers making us the sixth largest of the 23 regulated water companies in England and Wales.

So that's over 3 million people per day. Conveniently that is also the same number as the total population of Wales. This time, all these millions of litres of water they supply every single day does include washing, flushing toilets, washing the car, watering the garden, filling your pond and all those other things we and many across the border who are with Dŵr Cymru use our drinking water to do.

So anything else, such as the 110 billion litres in those two reservoirs in Powys is just a bonus, right? And if we were in a position where we were capable of selling our water then it would make financial sense to boost the potential on our terms. If we wanted to create a new reservoir or expand an existing one it would be our choice.

So we already know we have plenty of water for us that's fairly obvious. And as the following graphic from Defra shows Wales doesn't have any real issue with water stress. Which is just as well for our English neighbours whose continuing fascination with growth in one corner of the UK means that (according to Defra) there is "very little water available" to them.

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If you hadn't worked it out by now, that one corner where they focus all the growth is also the driest corner of the UK too. The following graphic depicts average annual rainfall for the UK for the 30 years between 1971-2000.

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If you visit this link you can play about with the interactive maps on the Met Office website. Find out how many days of rainfall, average temperature, hours of sunshine etc. They are point to the one corner of England being warmer, drier and sunnier than the rest of the UK.

In fact according to some, parts of south east England could be classed as being a semidesert.

So we've established that England has destroyed Welsh communities for the sole benefit of supplying Welsh water to England.

We've established that Wales is more than self sufficient in Water and an exporter.

We've established that many people in Wales pay more for our water than the English pay for our water.

And we've also established that England simply could not survive without taking our water.

So why can't we do anything about it? Well the problem we have in Wales is what is known as the funding gap, that is the deficit between what Wales earns and what Wales needs to earn. Otherwise known in some circles of Wales as "we are too poor, too weak and too stupid" and in England it's known as "those Taffies would never survive without our subsidies".

In previous articles we looked at how Labour MPs in Wales betrayed us by voting against devolving our natural resources and we also looked at The Crown Estate holdings in Wales that Plaid Cymru want devolved to Wales. There are those that want Wales to be given the opportunity to be able to develop its own economy, narrow the funding gap and therefore not be "such a burden" on other parts of the UK. Then there are those whose own interests are in serving the South East of England. Keeping them wealthy and keeping the other areas weak.

Here's the big reveal, water is already devolved to Wales but we are not able to benefit financially from the sale of water to people in Wales, let alone England due not having any tax raising powers. Not that this would matter because of something called...

"The Government of Wales Act 2006".*

Nestled in the miscellaneous section of this act is a clause relating to water. It states...

Intervention in case of functions relating to water etc

(1) This section applies where it appears to the Secretary of State that the exercise of a relevant function (or the failure to exercise a relevant function) in any particular case might have a serious adverse impact on—

(a) water resources in England,

(b) water supply in England, or

(c) the quality of water in England.

So we finally have our answer. Providing we let England take as much water as they require, both now and in the future the water is ours. Should we do anything to affect the supply then they retake control via the Secretary of State for Wales.

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And there is not a single thing we can do about it unless we can get out of the ridiculous habit of voting for political parties that continue to put the needs of England over our own.

And there we have it, a whole article about the colonial greed of England destroying Welsh communities and plundering Welsh water without a single mention of Tryweryn. D'oh!

*When originally published I neglected to mention the fact that Peter Hain was secretary of state for Wales in 2006, Labour were the party in charge of the UK parliament and Welsh Senedd. So despite the fact that I have 'shopped a picture of our current secretary of state into an old game with intentionally bad grammar, it's all part of Labours plan to weaken Wales from within.

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