Mike Wells
The Daily Sceptic
Governments just love to ‘pledge’ new council house building. Keir Starmer was going to build “300,000 new social and affordable houses” in 10 years. Andy Burnham says he’s going to deliver “the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period”. Welcome to Downing Street, prime minister, and say hello to the interminable delays of house-building – outside of flashy, private high-rise apartments in Manchester.
Planning delays and the rising cost of building usually get the blame for housing holdups. But sewage disposal is fast becoming a serious issue. Now a crazy dodge by desperate developers seems sure to lead to infighting in Whitehall.
A year ago my local MP Richard Fuller led a visit to Biggleswade’s 1960s sewage works – or the Biggleswade Water Recycling Centre (BWRC), as Anglian Water prefers us to call it. That’s recycling, as in: we tip it into the Ivel River (hopefully, treated well enough – but see David’s photo at the bottom).
The unmanned works struck the group as decrepit, though the tour was pre-arranged: weeds, cable-ties, gaffer-tape, lash-ups. But at least it was functioning: a quiet mid-morning in a scorching July, and sewage was gushing in at 100 litres a second – though far more can arrive in wet weather (see the intake stains in the photo above). And since I’d called round a few months earlier, the welcome board had been washed.
An efficient young engineer showed us around, explaining that he manages over 30 such sites. “Any of them as run-down as this?” I asked. “Don’t get it wrong,” he said, “this is one of my best. Many of the others are far worse.” This was what under-investment looks like in real life, not just as headlines.
Wet weather greatly increases BWRC’s load because so many rainwater pipes drain into the ‘combined sewers’, as they do in London – only modern developments have separate drains for foul and for grey water. Biggleswade’s works is certified to handle 190 litres per second and needs all of that capacity when it rains: nobody knows what will happen when 1,900 new houses which already have outline planning permission are connected. As legally, they will have to be.
This is why in late 2024 Anglian Water, like some other utilities, switched from routinely approving planning applications to always objecting – except at the few places where it has a modern sewage works, for example Milton Keynes. The logjam developers face was described in Building magazine last October: nationally, tens of thousands of new homes can’t be built because they can’t get sewer connections.
In Upper Caldecote village, just a mile from Biggleswade WRC, a developer applied last year to build 25 homes right next to the local main sewer, and Anglian of course objected – pipe network adequate but sewage works overloaded, we can’t connect you. This June the developer proposed a workaround: forget Anglian’s sewer, he’d go off-grid and build a Package Treatment Plant (PTP) serving the new estate. Ideally these PTPs empty their part-treated liquid into a reed bed, which then drains to a watercourse.
I happen to know about them, having had to install a PTP at great expense at our Connemara cottage, miles from any sewer. They smell, they need constant electricity for circulation and air pumps, and solids have to emptied by vacuum tanker. Under the ‘sewage hierarchy’, planners usually approve PTPs only where there’s absolutely no other solution – a mountain in the way, or as in our Irish case, no sewer at all.
Here at Caldecote the developer is proposing to disperse semi-treated liquid from two dozen houses into a field alongside – there’s no watercourse nearby. There’d be quarterly inspections of the system, the solids to be removed by tankers, a private management company to coordinate all this indefinitely – because utilities won’t take over a facility they didn’t build.
Backup batteries to keep the pumps running in a power cut, most likely self-starting diesel generators; waterlogging of the drainage field in wet weather, possible pollution of groundwater – the fragility and expense of all this is obvious, and one dreads to think what mortgage lenders would make of it. One home might delay flushing its toilets while fixing a problem with its private PTP, but a whole estate?
Anglian Water has 1,128 sewage works, most of them without even a man and a dog on site. Right now it’s spending £7.9 million on replacing 800 metres of water main in Biggleswade (that blue pipe), causing traffic chaos, and has no plan or budget to upgrade the sewage works until its 2030–35 spending round – and not necessarily then. Infrastructure work, UK-style, is amazingly expensive.
Central government is leaning on local planning authorities to identify sites for new housing – more than 25,000 in Central Bedfordshire by 2050, please – but will these all be required to use composting toilets? Carpeting the country with polluting private sewage plants ought to be inconceivable – what on earth would the Victorians have said? – but who will mandate the upgrades and then find the engineers, money and builders to future-proof the nation’s sewage works?
Roughly 30,000 planned homes are stalled in England for lack of sewer connection, and at least 15,000 in Northern Ireland.
Press releases and fantasy 10-year plans may play well with the public (thank you, Mr Burnham) but they don’t stop the shit coming down that pipe, and the answer can’t possibly be thousands of private PTPs. The squabble in Whitehall between those who are desperate to build homes and those whose job is to look after our land and rivers is going to be messy.
Anglian Water was contacted for comment.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
