Water grants - we’ll have to wait

The Private Water Supply (Scotland) Regulations 2006 came into effect from July and will require tighter regulation of private water supplies such as ours.

At the same time, grants of up to £800 were announced as being available from local authorities to help improve  private water supplies.

Leaving aside the fact that the previous grant scheme was much more generous, an £800 grant would be a big help in getting a UV filtration system connected to our water supply as we’ve been quoted around £600 for parts, plus labour.

With two months having passed since the regulations came into effect, I thought I’d contact Aberdeenshire Council to see what we’d have to do to apply for the grant.

I should have known better!

While the person I spoke to at the council knew who I was and what our position with the water supply is, thanks to our efforts to get water earlier this year, he was  very apologetic as he told me the council was not in a position to act at the moment.

To apply for the grant, he explained, we’d have to have council employees inspect the croft and the water supply, before writing up a risk assessment.

However, the council employrees not yet trained in how to do the risk assessment and until then, no grant applications will be accepted.

Then, once the training has been carried out, the council has to assess several thousand private water supplies as Aberdeenshire has the most in Scotland and there will not be a large team to do this, so prioritisations will be made.

And even then, the priority is going to be commercial and large scale private water supplies, or in official speak “Type A” supplies.

As for people on “Type B” supplies, we’ll be sent an information pack but that’s all we can expect for several months at least.

Oh, and we must not carry out any improvements in the meantime as the risk assessment may find that they need to be changed or removed.

So, we will have to continue boiling our drinking water and don’t even have the option putting in a filtration system

I don’t have a problem with the person I spoke to at the council, he was polite and apologetic as he explained the situation.

What I do have a problem with is the idiots who are running things, whether on the council or the Scottish Executive. They knew the regulations were coming into effect in July 2006, but did they train staff in advance? No. Did they set up teams ready to go from the first day? No.

And while I can see the rationale behind focusing on commercial and large-scale supplies (not least because government at all levels puts business first), would it not have been better to focus on supplies with known problems first? (And yes, I know about the EU regulations that require Type A supplies to meet the Drinking Water Directive 1998.)

Politicians and bureaucrats should all have to spend a day in the stocks once a month. It would soon sharpen their focus!