Media: the sleb culture

By Richard North - August 21, 2022

“The lack of interest in technical solutions to the water crisis in some ways typifies the trivialisation of issues in the UK”, I wrote rather despairingly in a recent Twitter post.

But, I added, it is not only the media and politicians who are at fault. There is rarely any interest on social media for real solutions. And despite my attaching short details of the Tokyo case study (extracted from here), my post got ten “likes” and only as many retweets, rather proving my point.

However, given that the water companies and the responsible authorities are manifestly failing to address the problem, and in particular the excessive leakage from the distribution system, it falls to the media to pick up the slack, this being the traditional role of the media in a supposedly democratic society.

On the leakage issue, though, I think it is fair to say that the performance of the media has been lamentable. For sure, it has jumped on the bandwagon, making a meal of the current rate of leakage, interest in the subject tends to be sporadic with little interest in the technicalities.

In a fascinating comment over ten years ago, though, we had the Guardian touch on pipework replacement, remarking that Ofwat had said it would cost £100 billion to replace all the pipes in England and Wales, with the regulator claiming that this would cut leaks by only 50 percent “because even new pipes quickly leak”.

I really should have picked up that extraordinary statement on cutting leaks at the time, as I did review the article in EUReferendum. And although I cannot source the claim at this distance, it probably isn’t too far out: I have seen papers which indicate that the failure rate of polyethylene pipework is about 8 percent over its lifetime, only it may well be higher.

But if Ofwat did make that statement ten years ago, nobody picked up on it, and while I missed it, so did the paper which published it. Compared with the Tokyo experience, where the use of high-grade materials delivers a loss rate close to zero, this must be an indictment of the UK policy of insisting on the use of cheap and largely unsatisfactory polyethylene for new and replacement pipework.

If the media response a decade ago was inadequate, though, currently it is even worse with even less attempt to analyse the technical failures, leaving it to celebrity commentators.

Ever since Bob Geldof founded Band Aid in 1984, it has been evident that sleb endorsements are a bad idea, most often doing more harm than good, yet this does not stop the Guardian offering space to “campaigner” Feargal Sharkey, former lead singer of the punk band the Undertones to make his view known on the water industry.

His authored piece is headed: “Water company CEOs try to woo me, but I’ve got only one message for them: do your jobs”, the message not being fully reflected in the text. But any such message would surely miss the point: as privatised entities, the job of the companies is to protect the financial interests of their shareholders, which they seem to be doing all too well.

Nevertheless, Sharkey is on the case when he records that the public accounts committee has berated the government for allowing water companies in England to leak more than 3 billion litres of water a day “from their badly maintained, underinvested, creaking network of pipes”.

This is indeed the case with the committee recording that “it is wholly unacceptable that over 3 billion litres are wasted every day through leakage, with no improvement in the last 20 years”.

The committee goes on to make an interesting observation though, which Sharkey ignores, even though it holds a clue as to why we are in the current situation. “From a high of over 4.5 billion litres a day in the early 1990s”, the committee says, “daily losses through leakage fell to around 3 billion at the turn of the century”.

“However”, it observes, “this reduction was followed by over a decade of complacency and inaction, which has meant water leakage is now a hugely pressing problem. No one organisation has got a thorough grip on dealing with this issue and driving the change necessary”.

A more perspicacious and better-informed campaigner might immediately have seen here the baleful influence of the Sustainable Economic Leakage Level (SELL) doctrine, which is still driving policy, as this report makes clear.

This doctrine, even now, is leaving the water companies reluctant to invest in leakage reduction as there is no economic benefit to them, and Ofwat is not allowing the companies to charge customers extra to cover the costs of leakage reduction.

The clearest indication that Sharkey hasn’t got a grip of the issues, though, comes not from his article but from a comment on Twitter, where he complains that his water company, Affinity Water, is trying to sell him insurance for his leaky pipes.

That of course, Sharkey scorns, is the same Affinity Water that leaks 154 million litres of water per day, 5.6 billion litres per year, from their own badly maintained, underinvested, creaking network of pipes. “Oh the irony”, he says.

Yet, the Ofwat definition of leakage – the amounts that are included in the official figures – includes underground losses from customers’ service pipes. And, from the Tokyo figures (which are mirrored in the UK), 97 percent of total losses come from the service pipes and the connecting communications pipes.

If the UK is ever going to get to grips with its leakage problem, the most important thing it needs to do is to implement a replacement programme for communication and service pipes, the latter usually starting at the customers’ boundaries.

And here, the plot really does start to thicken. As the law stands, service pipes are the property of the customers, who are responsible for their repair and maintenance. The water company can require customers to repair leaky pipes but they cannot compel them to replace the pipes if they are still apparently sound.

For some time, it seems, there have been discussions about water companies taking over responsibility for these pipes, with estimates that this would add about £4 to individual water bills.

The government, however, has ducked this issue which means that the water companies cannot, even if they wanted to, include supply pipe replacement as a demand-side intervention. To remedy this situation, direct government action is needed, accompanied by a change in the law.

If Sharkey wants real irony, therefore, he should note that in 2010, Dfid was lecturing the Chinese on leakage control, counselling that system leakage could be reduced by the “replacement of old pipework that is in poor condition”.

“Large scale replacement of distribution pipes”, the Department said, “will be an expensive solution, and should only be adopted where large sections of pipe are in poor structural condition or badly laid resulting in a high rate of leak repairs”.

Yet, this is largely the situation which pertains in the UK, making it an essential policy if we are ever to see leakage reduced to acceptable levels. As for Ofwat’s initial estimate of £100 billion, that is probably more like £20-40 billion for service pipes. As a structured, 30-year programme, this lies within the realms of affordability.

But with no movement towards adopting this solution, one of the ideas that the Financial Times has to offer is that “we should let Sharkey or another campaigner chair the regulator”.

With that, I don’t believe this country has any longer the intellectual capability to resolve problems such as the integrity of our water distribution system. When a paper such as the FT is offering such a trivial solution, we probably have reached a point where the national decadence is irreversible.