Letter from the Chief Inspector to the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the First Secretary of the National Assembly for Wales
To
The Rt Hon Margaret Beckett MP
Secretary of State for the Environment,
Food and Rural Affairsand
The Rt Hon Rhodri Morgan AM
First Secretary of State, the Welsh Assembly Government
I am pleased to submit the Inspectorate's twelfth Annual Report covering the year ended 31 December 2001. It provides an account of the checks made by the Inspectorate and the conclusions reached upon the quality of water supplied by the 26 water companies of England and Wales.
I am able to report a further improvement to the high quality of drinking water with 99.86% of around 2.8 million tests showing compliance with the standards. There was a 9% reduction in the number of tests breaching the standards compared with 2000. This is the ninth year-on-year improvement with the number of tests breaching the standards now less than one twelfth of the figure in 1992. The figures reflect the success of the major regulatory driven investment programmes which began in 1990, with greatly enhanced water treatment and significant improvements to the distribution systems.
It is also pleasing to report that since the Cryptosporidium Regulations were implemented from the year 2000 onwards, there have been no reported confirmed cases of cryptosporidiosis related to mains drinking water in any of the water supply areas monitored under the regulations. This is a strong indication that regulatory pressure, on performance of the operation of water treatment plant, is resulting in a consistently high level of particle removal.
Programmes of work are under way to meet the requirements of new and revised standards of the 1998 European Directive by the end of 2003. One important aspect is the tighter standard for lead, with good progress being made on plumbosolvency control to minimise the pick up from lead service pipes. This approach is achieving rapid compliance with the new standard in some areas, with the prospect of greatly reducing the amount of lead pipe replacement which will be required. In this report I give some results on monitoring against the new or revised standards, as the beginning of establishing the new elements of the baseline, against which further improvements can be measured. I believe that these are the first monitoring data, related to the 1998 Directive, to be published by a Member State.
This report, my ninth, will be my last, as I am shortly finishing my term of office. It has been a privilege to serve as head of the Drinking Water Inspectorate.
Michael Rouse
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Published 10 July 2002
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