The water sector is grappling with a comprehensive review of the European Union’s Drinking Water Directive and related laws that could expand and intensify EU demands on water utilities.
The European Commission has asked water suppliers and users for replies by 23 September to a detailed questionnaire, whose concerns go beyond the scope of the directive, notably asking for views on affordability.
As a result, said a Commission note, as well as giving Brussels officials guidance on potential changes to the directive, the answers may indicate where changes could be required to “other EU or national instruments or initiatives” affecting water.
Questionnaire topics include: drinking water quality; access; threats to supplies (such as pollution); monitoring standards; consumer information; and addressing supply problems. Another set of questions looks at the current directive’s offer of derogation for some suppliers (where human health is not threatened). The Commission is assessing whether these should be maintained.
EU environment commissioner Janez Potocnik says: “The supply of safe, good quality drinking water across the EU is a major achievement of EU legislation. But we have to look to the challenges ahead.”
In the UK, the questionnaire appears to dovetail with a domestic assessment of the water supply network. Yolanda Aguilera, technical manager at British Water, says: “We are working with water companies to confirm the state of water networks. We are trying to obtain information from groups such as the Network Management Group to map the state of the network.”
She adds: “The hope is that the provides a holistic overview from the water companies, suppliers, academics and individuals.”
Indeed, British Water hopes public consultation exercises such as this will help consumers realise that water is not an inexhaustible commodity, even in a rainy country like Britain. “So long as water comes out of the tap people don’t worry,” says Aguilera. “Information is one of the key things. People need to understand that there is a cost.”
Inspector Sue Pennison of the Drinking Water Inspectorate, welcomes the broad assessment promised by the questionnaire. She says the inspectorate “supports the risk assessment approach to drinking water safety promoted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and has already implemented this through national law”. This looks at “supplies from source to tap as opposed to a focus on end point testing, which does not make water safe”.
As for EU water industry association EurEau, its policy officer for European affairs Carla Chiaretti, says the group also “welcomes the public consultation on the quality of drinking water in the EU”.
She is happy the Commission has taken on board the risk-based approach promoted by the WHO in its Water Safety Plan (WSP), something “EurEau has consistently promoted at European level”.
Introduced in 2004, in the third edition of the WHO guidelines for drinking water quality and in the International Water Association’s (IWA) Bonn Charter for Safe Drinking Water, this “approach supports a risk-based approach to drinking water quality management and it is considered the international reference for safe management of drinking-water supply”, says Chiaretti.
Will the review lead to much concrete action? Barbara Evans, associate professor in water and environmental engineering at Leeds University, is concerned that the EU’s Right2Water initiative, which inspired this consultation, is based on the concept of regarding water as a civic right rather than a commodity that needs to be paid for.
She explains: “Europe is facing a variety of water-related crises in the coming decades, all of which require fundamental shifts in consumer behaviour, political priorities and financing.
“A much clearer and sharper debate about the role of public funding in bridging step-change investments is needed. Seeing water as a ‘right’ is a powerful idea but one that carries risky baggage in terms of reducing people’s acceptance of the real costs of high-value services.”
Evans adds: “Apart from well-publicised incidents such as this winter’s floods in the UK and in central Europe, the topic remains below the horizon for most people. Meanwhile, the continent has an endowment of ageing infrastructure, much of it unfit for a low-carbon future and lacking resilience in the face of climate change.”
Meanwhile, Dr Nick Voulvoulis, reader in environmental technology at Imperial College, London, says that as well as a decaying infrastructure, incoming threats to water security are “current and expected population growth and urbanisation, combined with changes in lifestyle and the production of goods and services to support it, which is creating additional pressures on both demand for water and availability, mainly due to water quality issues”.
Such pressures need a holistic response in policy, he says: “Sustainably managing and using water requires a new, interdisciplinary and integrated thinking that takes into account interrelationships between water, people, and the environment.”
To some extent, the questionnaire’s responses will be predictable. British Water’s Aguilera says consumer groups might flag up concerns about affordability, while “a water company will want to increase the price and spend on improvements and new technologies”.
Paul de Zylva, head of nature for Friends of the Earth (FOE), calls for industrial, agricultural and construction policy to take account of water conservation, and to factor energy into the thinking too. “If you are only thinking about energy and not water you are missing a trick,” he says, adding that “a good outcome” from the review would be “that the public start to understand that we cannot take water for granted anymore”.
In Brussels, the consultation is regarded as a key part of EU attempts to demonstrate the relevance of EU policies to citizens, and to demonstrate that it listens to their views.
Elizia Volkmann and Keith Nuthall are freelance journalists