Parched City (23 page)

Since Friends of the Earth 1986 accusation, the organisation had been compiling a picture of water company failures to meet ‘Maximum Admissible Concentrations’ (MACS), of five substances with known, or suspected, public health implications (in the absence of a law): lead, aluminium, nitrate, pesticides and trihalomethanes. Evidence was amassed through dialogue with the active participation of the water authorities and statutory water companies. In collaboration with the
Observer
newspaper, the results were splashed across nine pages of the newspaper’s Magazine, on Sunday 6th August 1989, in an article entitled
Poison on Tap
.
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The feature’s second page was dominated by a blonde boy, aged about four or five, clothed only in a pair of red shorts. Down his vulnerable torso, a series of lines connected a water contaminant with the part of his anatomy it was either suspected or known to affect. First, aluminium and lead pointed to the
boy’s head, for Alzheimer’s disease and brain damage respectively. Targeting his heart and lungs jointly were ‘pesticides’, as suspected carcinogens. Last, the nitrate line linked to the child’s stomach represented the question mark over nitrates and abdominal cancers. The feature’s remaining pages displayed the survey results with a map for each substance. London’s breaches for lead and aluminium were shown to be nil, whilst the southwest, Wales and the north of England all had widespread results contravening the EC’s Water Quality Directive. When it came to pesticides, tap water in 25 London boroughs was found to have exceeded the Maximum Admissible Concentration of 0.1 micrograms per litre for individual pesticides and 0.5 micrograms for the total potential cocktail of pesticide-related traces. The European view on the pesticide issue was a sticking point for the Government, which contested the need for such stringent concentration levels to be observed. Fred Pearce — unsurprisingly employed to interpret the results — countered the Conservative’s view. He warned readers about drinking water quality apathy in the British political establishment: ’…the World Health Organisation is less sanguine. Its study of the dangers of drinking water, published in 1987, says that many pesticides are recent formulations about which we know little.’

Nitrates — residues of nitrogen fertilisers being slowly absorbed from farmland into groundwater sources –were also detected in Greater London, but specifically in eleven of the outer suburban boroughs, including Newham, Croydon and Waltham Forest. Above the nitrate map, a small photograph of the little golden-haired boy hovered, in which he sipped nonchalantly from a glass of water. The final map, showing trihalomethane breaches, with the organic chemicals’ potential, though unproven, connections with bladder, colon and rectal cancers showed a relatively small cluster of Greater London outer boroughs had failed the MAC (Broxbourne, Enfield, Epping Forest and Haringey). On the whole, the findings certainly
unsettled the argument that rural water was better quality than urban water, at least when it came to these identified substances mostly associated with industrialised farming practices. Proof of pesticide presence in the environment certainly endorsed the motivations of the organic farming movement.
Poison on Tap
did not conclude by suggesting that people inhabiting the cerise-coloured danger zones marked on the maps should rush out and buy a lifetime’s supply of bottled water, but could the revelations warrant a wholesale rejection of tap water?

A
Guardian
journalist reported on reactions to the exposé, the following Thursday. Startled by the knee-jerk surge in bottled water sales, Jane Ellison exclaimed: ‘Does anyone still drink tap water?‘
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She was not convinced that its contents were laced with poison. The journalist’s alarm was sparked when her local wine warehouse erected a sign announcing that it had run dry, of bottled water. Ellison was bewildered that the British public suddenly believed that other EC member states had miraculously acquired supplies of trustworthy potable water, when Britons usually sipped from the safety of water bottles whilst on holiday in those countries. Her voice was a rare left-leaning echo of Water Minister Michael Howard’s pleas that tap water was trustworthy. Amidst the pollution furore, Ellison wryly observed that ‘new water purifying machines’ had made a timely appearance. Like the strike episode, those who stood to benefit commercially from any chink of doubts about tap water safety moved in swiftly to the uncertain consumer’s rescue. Those products were not confined to bottled water or the domestic sphere.

Companies that Care

During the mid-to-late ‘80s, so-called ‘sick office building syndrome’ was the subject of much discussion in the architectural press.
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There was a desire to make offices more pleasant to work in and, ultimately, more productive. For instance, a high-profile
outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease in London demonstrated the unhealthy consequences of failures in modern air-conditioning systems.
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By mid-decade, office vending machines serving up well-known instant brands of coffee, such as Nescafé, were all the rage but if one wanted a plain glass of water, it was most likely to have come from the plain tap.
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In the 1985 edition of the
Yellow Pages
business directory for Central London, the listing for ‘water
cooler’ redirects the reader to ‘refrigeration equipment’.
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Two years later, the
Yellow Pages’
water cooler re-direction instructions is entitled ‘vending machines’, where Oasis appears as the only company with an entry for a water cooler amongst its plethora of vending wares.
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However, in the 1988 edition, three suppliers are listed directly under the water cooler heading: Aqua Cool, Holywell Spring and Oasis.
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In 1989’s
Yellow Pages
, the companies touting water coolers had risen to five.
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1990 saw that figure doubled.
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Aqua Cool even had its own illustrated advertisement in the directory.

Aqua Cool water cooler advertisement, 1990. Ionics Incorporated: GE
Power and Water purchased Ionics in 2005. Copyright General Electric
Company; used with permission.

Aqua Cool’s claims of ‘outstanding purity’, as well as being chlorine, lead and nitrate free seemed to be custom-designed for the U.K. market. Despite these assurances, the advertisement does not explain the source of the water as spring or mineral. It is simply labelled ‘pure bottled water’. The advertisement’s small print revealed that in addition to London, Aqua Cool operated in Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington.

In 1989, the renowned office architect Francis Duffy wrote this snapshot of the city: ‘London, as an office centre, is changing rapidly in response to international pressures. Being such an open city — the Hong Kong of the European Community — it is easy to see in every street and skyline the architectural consequences of the globalisation of financial services and all related trades and professions.’
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At the time, projects such as the construction of Canary Wharf were well underway. The water cooler was a minor response to the market produced by developments in London’s global working culture. This was a product that appeared to offer superior quality water to the tap, wherever one was working in the world. The utilitarian tap did not fit the aesthetics of highly designed, materially luxurious office environments. Instead, they could be embellished with a Holywell Springwater Cooler; perfect ‘for companies that care about their personnel’ or a Buxton Spring Watercooler, with water drawn from a source reassuringly distant from urban
pollution.
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Some twenty different brands appeared in the 1993 edition of the
Yellow Pages
.
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The water cooler was also symbolic. It was as much a child of the neo-liberal vision of the free market’s entrepreneurial spirit as the drive to privatise the water industry as another ‘utility’. Both fitted into the new frame of water as an economic resource.

Pricing Britain’s Water

In 1988, a book written by the eminent water industry expert and water economist David Kinnersley unpacked the complex issues surrounding debates over freshwater’s value, and therefore the future management and ownership of the water and sewerage industry as it ‘stumbled’, in his words, towards privatisation.
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Kinnersley points out in
Troubled Water
how measuring water’s value in Britain’s economy shifted noticeably with the 1963 Water Resources Act, when protecting river and groundwater quality became bound up with recognising water’s value as a raw material for industry.
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From then, abstraction for commercial use was highly regulated through licences. For Kinnersley, the equation of abstraction from rivers had failed to be balanced with the price of toxic discharges going into rivers. He notes the lag of British Water Authorities in adopting the ‘Polluter Pays’ principle of other European nations: ’…the authorities hung back from serious attention to improving charges for trade effluent disposal to sewers, or promoting in Britain the concept of charges for discharges direct to rivers.’
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The economist was well placed to be critical of the shortcomings of the water authorities created as a result of the 1973 Water Act. He had been the Chief Executive of one of them.
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In the lead up to privatisation, Kinnersley was working in Whitehall as a consultant to the Secretary of State for the Environment. As part of the privatisation policy he is widely credited with masterminding the creation of the National Rivers Authority (NRA); a body that would be independent of the new
private water and sewerage companies.
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The NRA would be responsible for ‘administering river basins including deciding and enforcing constraints on all sorts of companies taking water from rivers and putting effluents in them’.
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He successfully translated his critique of the water industry into this new institution, which would be dedicated to monitoring river abstractions and discharges.

Under privatisation, water’s environmental protection looked promising. Another limit on the ‘extreme monopolies’, as Kinnersley termed the proposed private water companies, included plans to create the Office of Water (OFWAT) to keep an economic check on these water companies i.e. their charges to customers. The efficacy of these structures would only be seen once the switch to privatisation had been flicked. There is no doubt that his 1988 viewpoint demonstrates a fundamental belief that water was a commodity, even on the domestic front.

Kinnersley’s argument was based on cultural changes in water’s consumption for myriad, arguably unessential uses. For him the change in the function of clean and wastewater services from a public good to a private good was an inevitable outcome of changing standards of living. Though he accepted that the state’s role in ensuring safe water and sewers had been needed in an earlier era to protect public health, in his mind that mandate ended in the 1950s, when water consumption became increasingly tied to the use of convenient, water intensive products: dishwashers, washing machines and even multiple bathrooms. As he summarised: ‘In short, the water supply and sanitation services have become far more geared to individual ways of life, with the risk of water-borne infection very close to nil, as the service is well-managed. We can say that, in broad terms, this is far more the supply of private goods than of public ones.’
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On that basis David Kinnersley believed that metering water would best reflect its status as a private good in Britain’s modern society. Strangely, he failed to isolate water’s use for drinking as
distinct from optional water uses in his economic philosophy, though he owned that consumers had little choice over their tap water quality in comparison to bottled water. Surely his theory should have acknowledged that the value of water for drinking and cooking could not be compared ethically to washing one’s car or mixing baby food. As a person involved with the foundation of the international development charity WaterAid, in 1981, Kinnersley must have been considering the issue of water justice of some level.

For privatisation’s opponents, the argument that water had transposed from a public to a private good was not appreciated. As one 1989
Evening Standard
article reported when debates about water metering were raging: ‘In the general public, of whom 75 per cent are currently against privatisation, there is an emotional feeling about water which did not apply to gas or British Telecom - a feeling that water is not only a natural resource but a vital public health service which is unsuited to being bought and sold for profit.’
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Regardless of these emotions, privatisation was enacted that year. Other national industries, natural resources and utility-providers already stripped of their ‘British’ prefix in the hands of Thatcher’s Conservative Government, or were in a process of transition to the private sector, included aerospace, airports, electricity, gas, oil, petroleum, steel, telecommunications.
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In the case of water, like gas and electricity, its status as a ‘utility’ encompasses amongst other definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary, something that is ‘essential to the community’.
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The notion of essential or non-essential also relates to the dictates of a specific economic system, in this case capitalism, in which the drive towards progress depends on the control and commodification of natural resources. Whilst water for the production of foodstuffs such as rice might be deemed essential in many contexts, it could be argued that a limit to water being channelled into cement-mixing might check the terms of what progress is really needed
and for the benefit of whom.