14 pence

Following features about the River Ivel 14 pence expedition by canoe from Ivel Springs to Offord on BBC Look East (1st September 18:30 News) and on BBC Three Counties Radio (2nd September 08:50) a statement from Affinity Water was read out each time saying they will be reducing abstraction by 228 Million litres a year - like this was going to be a major contribution to preventing the upper part of this rare chalk river from drying out like it did in 2018-19 and has again now in 2022.

The person reading the statement on the radio even added: 'gosh, that sounds a lot!'

Unfortunately we never got a chance to reply, because that 228 million litres a year is actually not a lot at all.

Affinity water are currently abstracting about 13 million litres every day from their boreholes at Baldock and Letchworth.

That is 4,745,000,000, or 4.745 billon, litres per year.

So Affinity's much publicized 228 million litres equals a mere 4.8% of that 4.745 billon litres.

It's up to you to decide if this tiny reduction in abstraction is likely to make a difference to our river. RevIvel certainly didn't think it would, so earlier this year it commissioned it's own scientist to investigate. The resulting Lawson Repo rt notes that to maintain a healthy chalk river, abstraction should be less than 10% of average recharge as per the CaBA chalk stream strateg y.

Recharge is the amount of rainfall which lands on the river catchment every year, soaks in to the ground, descends through the chalk to the aquifer, to eventually emerge from the springs into the river. This is how all chalk rivers work, the clear, mineral-rich, constant-temperature water which emerges from chalk springs supports a unique and beautiful biodiversity in the river below, but the upper Ivel is dead because no water, not a drop, is emerging from the springs, and the river is bone dry.

Just below Norton Mill 24 August 2022 - photo Nick Balmer

The river is not dry because its been a particularly hot and dry summer in 2022; historically, the river never dried out. It's dry because Affinity Water's abstractions have gradually risen to around 50% of average recharge, putting it amongst the most heavily abstracted chalk rivers in the whole World.

The Lawson Report calculates that to meet the 10% recharge limit, abstraction must be reduced by 81%. This makes the 4.8% reduction promised by Affinity look very modest indeed.

Obviously Affinity Water can't just stop supplying the missing 4.517 billion litres per year to their customers in the Baldock and Letchworth area, but there is a simple solution, which is to back off pumping the boreholes, let the springs flow, let the river run, let the biodiversity recover, and abstract that same water further down stream.

Government may get a lot of flak for underinvestment in the water supply industry, but actually this was all thought of fifty or sixty years ago and the infrastructure to achieve it was installed in the 1970's. Water runs down the river Ivel into the Great Ouse, and 10 miles further on it is abstracted at Offord into Grafham Water reservoir, it is then easily returned to the Baldock and Letchworth area via the existing water distribution network.

Affinity Water has a big campaign going at the moment called Save Our Streams. It's perfectly within Affinity's power to save our stream; the infrastructure is in place, and the cost to reduce abstraction to 10% of recharge and rescue miles of river for people and wildlife to enjoy is just 14 pence per person per week.

£0.14 per week. That’s right, just fourteen pence per week added to water bills for every person Affinity water supplies with water in the Baldock and Letchworth area would permanently save the river Ivel.

For the second time in three years our rare and beautiful chalk river Ivel is again bone dry at Ivel Springs nature reserve and all the way to Radwell. It is not dry because of the recent hot weather or the drought; Ivel springs is supplied with mineral rich ground water from the vast reserves under the Weston Hills and probably has not dried up through natural causes since the last Ice age.

It's dry because the Environment Agency lets Affinity Water pump about 13 million litres of water every day from their boreholes at Baldock into the public water supply before that water has a chance to get into the river. Affinity Water receives in excess of £5 million per annum in sales of this water.

For a long time both organizations denied that this pumping of 13,000 tons of water per day had much, if any, effect on the river, so earlier this year, revIvel commissioned an independent study. The Lawson report was published in July. It not only exposed some discrepancies in their data and hence the conclusions they had come to, but unexpectedly proposed an almost ready to go solution.

The plan is simple: Reduce abstraction at Baldock immediately to a much more sustainable 2.4 million litres per day. This will allow the ground water to rise back to its natural level and spill out of the springs which supply the river all year round just as they always did. It might take a while to get going, perhaps 18 months, because they’ve been taking so much water for so long that the natural ground water level has been depressed by as much as 8 metres, but it will happen. The water flows 17 miles down the Ivel to Tempsford where it joins the Great Ouse, and then a further 9 miles to Offord where it is sucked out by the existing infrastructure into Grafham Water reservoir. From Grafham, clean water is returned up the existing plumbing into the Baldock and Letchworth local water network so there is no net change in public water supply availability.

All this new water in the Ivel will let it thrive for the first time in perhaps 100 years; the benefits to people, wildlife and the environment will be massive; maybe we will even see the trout which have been absent for so long.

Of course there might be a cost to all this, and Affinity provides us with the figures on page 107 of Appendix 4 to their Business Plan for 2020 - 2025. They say it costs £60 to pump one million litres from their own boreholes or £217 to buy the same thing from Anglian Water at Grafham.

This means the Lawson Plan could cost Affinity an extra £607,433 per annum to supply that same 13 million litres per day to its customers in the Baldock and Letchworth area. On page 4 of their Plan for Customers and Communities Affinity Water says its customers use an average of 152 litres of water per person per day. This means that 13 million litres supplies 85,526 people. If you divide the extra cost of saving the Ivel by that number of people, it works out at 14 pence each per week.

Saving this rare chalk river is entirely possible; what else can you buy for just 14 pence a week?

Is 228 million litres a lot?

Fourteen pence to save the river Ivel