Orders of the Day — Rural Water Supplies and Sewerage Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 26 November 1965.

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Photo of Sir Timothy Kitson Sir Timothy Kitson , Richmond (Yorks) 12:00, 26 November 1965

I do not want to detain the House for very long because many of the points which I had intended to raise have already been discussed by my hon. Friend the Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page) and other hon. Members on this side of the House. As I am in the process of selling a quarter of an acre of land to a local council for a sewerage plant, I ought at this stage to declare an interest, although it is only a very small one in the Bill.

I welcome the increase of £30 million from the Exchequer towards expenditure on rural water supplies and sewerage. There is no doubt that there is still a need for special Exchequer assistance towards meeting costly water supply and sewerage schemes, as many hon. Members have said. In many rural areas there is still a great deal of work to be done. The hon. and learned Member for Montgomery (Mr. Hooson) explained the great problems of his constituency, but I can assure him that my constituency is rather larger than his and I have been confronted by many of the difficulties which he mentioned.

I was astonished when I looked at the figures in the Journal of the British Waterworks Association of January, 1965——and these figures have been mentioned today—suggesting that there are still about 200.000 dwellings in England and Wales without a tap. That is about 1 per cent. of the total number of dwellings in England and Wales.

There is no doubt that the momentum of improvement in recent years has been greater as the impact of amalgamations and the regrouping of water undertakings has become more marked. There is also no doubt that as each year goes by the provision of sewerage and water supplies becomes a more costly operation, not only because labour and other costs are rising, but also because, as local authorities have given priority to areas of a higher density of population, they increasingly have the more sparsely populated areas to deal with. As they are reaching the end of their programmes, a great deal of this money will have to be used to pay for the more expensive schemes. It is estimated that the supply of water for the next 50,000 properties will cost about £15 million. I do not know whether that is the Parliamentary Secretary's figure, but it shows that even the sum of £30 million will still leave a good deal of ground to be covered.

I associate myself with the plea which the Rural District Councils Association has been making to the Ministry for a review or reconsideration of the amount of grant which can be paid for each property being brought into a scheme for grant aid for sewerage and water supplies. I understand that the average cost per property for sewerage works, based on 1964 prices, is £375 and that for water it is between £217 and £367. These are the estimated costs for work up to 1969. The Ministry is in the process of reviewing the position and I understand that the Association is suggesting that the figures should be increased from about £400 to £600 for sewerage schemes and from about £300 to £500 for water schemes because of the considerable increases in prices.

When he comes to distributing this further £30 million, will the Minister consider providing substantially increased financial assistance to water boards established in areas such as my own, the Northallerton and Dales Water Board? The Parliamentary Secretary knows only too well some of the problems with which that Board has been confronted. I am grateful for all the time and consideration—and it must have been a great deal of time—which he has given to this problem, although he has not been able to give us the financial assistance for which we had hoped.

The position in the Northallerton and Dales Water Board is that because of the cost of providing water, water rates rose so substantially that there were protest meetings which attracted an attendance of 25 to 35 per cent. of the ratepayers from a town of 6,000 people. The local councils had to take more than 100 people to court in order to get them to pay their water rates. There was a public inquiry and the Minister altered the maximum charges. As the Parliamentary Secretary knows, two of the seven councils now have before the Minister an application, under Section 40 of the Water Act, 1945, for the abolition of differentials and a further reduction of maximum rates and charges contained in the Northallerton and Dales Water Board area, an application which will result in yet another public inquiry.

I agree with the hon. and learned Member for Montgomery that it is extremely annoying when a large quantity of water is taken out of an area like this, which supplies Leeds—a good deal of water is taken from the hon. and learned Gentleman's area to supply Liverpool—in the receiving areas water rates and charges are one-third or one-quarter of those paid by the people in the area from which the water is taken.

The Explanatory and Financial Memorandum says: Part of the cost of implementing schemes which are grant-aided under the provision of the Bill will fall on the rates. This will probably lead to an increase in the rate deficiency grant (in Scotland, Exchequer equalisation grant), but the amount of this increase cannot be estimated. Does this mean that the Minister will take steps to give practical effect to these sentiments? Can this not be done if he does not persist in fixing maximum rates and charges which must operate before precepting can take place? I should like some clarification on that.

On more than one occasion, I have been in conflict with other members of the Conservative Party for advocating that there would be some good in water nationalisation. We would have fewer difficulties in my own area. This might be the only last resort. When the water board in my area was formed—and this has been the case in many areas—it covered an area with a small rateable value and the capital expenditure and the capital works with which it is now confronted are almost impossible for it to undertake in the next 10 years. I felt, and I still feel, although I have no love for nationalisation, that some benefits may come from it, although the overhead costs of administering such a policy would probably outweigh those benefits in the long term. Water boards should be made of a rather more substantial size than the one which we have formed in my own area. Whilst supporting this Bill I feel that the Minister ought to look at the points raised by the hon. Member for Crosby about installation of new supplies.

In some of the villages in my area, the bacteriological condition of the water is extremely bad. A complete new water supply is required. The water board is considering a river extraction scheme that will cost £250,000. But because the villages which will receive water from this new scheme have a water supply present, none of this money can be grant-aided. It is an extremely serious state of affairs and I hope that, as a result of the Government producing this £30 million, we shall succeed in doing away with privies on earth before we have a man on the moon.