110 Past, present and future tense

The picture is the cover of Al Stewart’s great 1973 album Past, Present and Future.? Still one of my favourite albums 50 years after I first heard it.

A few weeks ago Philippa Mohan contributed a guest edition of the blog asking about the application of the Fundamental Intermittent Standards for the protection of aquatic life as set out in the Urban Pollution Management Manual.? I was expecting this to prompt lots of discussion but it has not had much, apart from a few comments that I have had offline from people who want to say something but are too busy to work out what it is that they want to say.? Perhaps that is a sign of how complicated the issue that Philippa raised is.

Let’s start by getting pedantic over tenses.

Storm Overflow Discharge Reduction Plan (SODRP)

SODRP is a recent policy by the UK government to reduce the discharge of sewage over storm overflows and reduce the impact that those discharges have on the environment.

The first headline target set out in the plan is:

“Water companies will only be permitted to discharge from a storm overflow where they can demonstrate that there is no local adverse ecological impact.”

Note the tense of that target.? It doesn’t say:

• “has been no impact”
• “will be no impact”
• “is predicted to be no impact”

It says “is no impact”.

The aim of the target is to ensure that:

?”there is no wider local impact, rather than just considering the impact at a sampling point which can be far away from a storm overflow as has been done in the past.? This target protects biodiversity at both a local and national scale and will result in the complete elimination of ecological harm from storm overflows.”

It makes clear that water companies must plan to achieve all relevant targets when developing solutions.? So it is setting a planning framework – an “is predicted to be” framework.? The relevant planning framework is that set out in the Urban Pollution Management (UPM) Manual which includes the benchmark of the Fundamental Intermittent Standards.

The target is backed up by a requirement under section 82 of the Environment Act 2021, that water companies must monitor the water quality impact of their assets that discharge sewage (including storm overflows and continuous discharges from wastewater treatment works) by monitoring water quality upstream and downstream of the discharge.??

Technical guidance on implementation of this monitoring was published in April 2023.?

The guidance sets out that the monitoring will include:

• dissolved oxygen
• temperature and pH
• turbidity
• ammonia

The data (my emphasis in bold):

• must be made publicly available in near real time (within one hour) using a visualisation platform.? (So that is in the present tense).
• It is recommended to include a traffic light system (or another suitable user-friendly visualisation tool) linked to the Urban Pollution Management Fundamental Intermittent Standards. ?(So that is comparing present tense with a method intended for the predicted future tense).
• It should include immediate readings of parameters
• Long term averages should be available, based on ten-year averages. ?(So that is in the past tense).

So there is a mixture of past, present and future tenses in the requirements.? How do we resolve that.?

Well, the only requirement that is a must is the first one.

It is not actually required to compare the data to the Fundamental Intermittent Standards, it is just recommended.? So that removes one mismatch of tenses.

The last two say should, which is normally taken to mean you must do this or a suitable alternative.

So maybe all of the tenses have resolved themselves and there isn’t an issue with the use of FIS for this monitoring, as it isn’t required that it is done.

The guidance also shoots itself in the foot with the requirement for ten-year averages.? Not “averages of all data up to the last 10 years” but over exactly 10 years.? So does that mean it is not required until there is 10 years of data?

And another thing

The guidance makes clear that all water company discharges (or clusters of discharges) must be monitored unless it is impractical because the depth of water is less than 4 cm throughout the year.?

However it then says:

“Where a monitor has been placed on an asset which has then been improved and now meets the plan targets, that monitor can be removed and installed at a different asset once it has been established that the improvement has been successful. In practice, this will mean the monitor cannot be recycled until the monitors have provided at least ten years’ worth of data once the improvement has been completed.”

This doesn’t make sense for several reasons.

• The design life of monitors is likely to be about 10 years, so there would be no point in trying to reuse it at a different location.
• If the discharge was always satisfactory and so hasn’t been improved then you cannot remove the monitor.
• There is an absolute requirement to monitor all discharges, so if you removed the monitor you would just have to reinstall a new one.

Confused?? I am.

Conclusions

Fortunately the guidance is just for discussion at this stage, so there is an opportunity to get it right before it is implemented.

But, do we know what right is?