Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
a responsibility to remove unnatural obstructions,
there is no control of discharge of unpollutedwater
to a watercourse. In principle, every right or
entitlement should be accompanied by a corre-
sponding duty or obligation on the receiving party.
In many cases, one side of the equation is implicit
rather than explicit. Thus, the Royal Commission
on Land Drainage (1927) referred to upland owners
considering that they had a right to drain their land
and consequently imposed heavy costs on lowland
landowners in order to protect themselves from
the resulting flooding. The same issues that
concerned the Royal Commission replayed 80
years later in the Pitt Report (Pitt Review 2008).
which include some rule-defined elements in
the form of 'sewers', 'ordinary' and 'main' water-
courses. Some ambiguities are already apparent:
whilst the individual Highway Authorities are
responsible for draining the roads, land is some-
times drained to the highway. Again, in some
cases, when a watercourse was culverted over it
was designated as a Public Sewer, but then reverts
to a watercourse when it returns to an open
channel. If the watercourse was not designated as
a Public Sewer, it remains a watercourse.
Attached to each component are the parties
with responsibility for it; the parties each have:
.
duties, what they must do - the power over
them;
.
rights, the power to act - what they may do;
.
source of funding - a significant form of power.
What can be seen fromFigure 17.1 is the absence of
any duties on landowners with respect to draining
their land so that a problem such as the so-called
'muddy floods' from agricultural land escapes the
legislative framework (Boardman et al. 2003).
Overall, no organization has the responsibility for
ensuring that land is effectively drained, but in-
stead specific organizations have responsibilities
for specific physical assets: the Water And Sewer-
age Companies (WASCs) have responsibility for
anything that is designated a 'Public Sewer'. Or,
organizations have responsibility for parts of the
system: notably the Internal Drainage Boards
(IDBs) are responsible for ordinary watercourses
in an area where an IDB exists, with the local
authority having the responsibility in those areas
where there is not an IDB. The duties of the
landowner adjacent to a river - the riparianowner -
are similarly confusing: there are duties under
common law (Howarth 1992) to remove unnatural
obstructions, and under statute law, the 1991 Land
Drainage Act, there are unspecified maintenance
duties to the watercourse. Specifically, the Land
Drainage Act does not define to what standard a
watercourse should be maintained.
Of particular concern is the lack of definition of
the boundaries between responsibilities; so, for
example, currently the WASC cannot refuse to
connect a properly constructed drain to its public
sewer. Equally, whilst the riparian owners have
The Differentiation of Interests and Power
The technological and economic development of
societies has resulted in a diffusion of power. In
early societies, power rested largely in the mon-
arch, the priests and large landowners. Essentially,
everyone else was a subsistence farmer who
produced relatively small surpluses of food and
was largely self-sufficient in clothing, building
and utensils.
Technological development has been accompa-
nied by specialization of skills and tasks, and
has resulted in the greater complexity of social
organization, and hence greater exchange of goods
and services between members of that society.
That differentiation necessarily resulted in
differentiation of interest - the interests of one
group were increasingly likely not to be those
of another. A market economy in particular de-
pends upon competition, or conflict, between
potential suppliers; equally, it sets up an adver-
sarial
relationship between consumers
and
suppliers.
All those sharing an interest realized that to
have a share of power it is necessary to organize,
with the medieval guilds (Postan 1972) being early
examples. Those occupations that claimed to be
a profession or trade thus organized early but by
the early 19th century so were the working
classes, both in terms of trade unions but also in
the different
forms of mutual societies (life
