From Our Archive: Politics or Technocracy? The Regional Water Authorities

The 1974 reorganisation of the water industry in England and Wales brought into existence ten regional water authorities to replace over 1,600 private and municipal water and sewerage authorities and river authorities. Since then, the new system has been subjected to continued criticism and attack.

The rationale for the establishment of the authorities was overwhelmingly "technical" and “managerial". There was an explicit recognition of the increasing interdependence of all parts of the hydrological cycle and of the need to bring all aspects of water services within a particular river basin or catchment area under single management control, to ensure a more effective use of resources. Accordingly, the regional water authorities (RWAs) was given responsibility for water conservation and supply, sewerage and sewage disposal, pollution control, land drainage and flood prevention, and water recreation and fisheries within large regions whose boundaries were deter-mined on "hydrological" criteria. The RWAs are responsible to the Secretary of State for the Environment. They finance their revenue and some of the capital expenditure from rate precepts and charges to metered customers. Like local authorities, RWAs are run by members and officers. The members must contain a majority of local government representatives as well as nominees of central government, some of whom are chosen because of their connection with established interests in the region. The local government majority was a concession to complaints that local authorities were losing their water and sewerage functions. Typically, the whole authority meets infrequently four times a year in the case of the Severn-Trent Water Authority (STWA) and operates for most of the time through committees. In the STWA, there is a Policy and Resources Committee and committees on Water Management, Water, Amenity, Recreation and Fisheries and Land Drainage. On the officer side, there is a chief executive whose role is the co-ordination and control of chief officers and the development of corporate plans. The Chief Executive is the main link between the Authority and its officers and is assisted by a corporate management team of chief officers, including the Director of Operations, the Director of Finance, the Director of Scientific Services and the Director of Administration. At divisional level, there is also a corporate management team, headed by a Divisional Manager and including, in the STWA, the Divisional Operations Controller, the Divisional Engineer, the Divisional Scientist and the Divisional Finance and Administration Officer. In most authorities, the Divisional Managers are responsible to the Director of Operations, though STWA has made some changes in this respect, as we show below. The management structure has been designed to fulfil the aims of the reform, to provide a more integrated approach to the water function, while providing for the maximum operational decentralisation. This has raised a number of problems familiar to students of large organisations, notably the separation of policy making from operational control functions and the danger of isolation of the chief executive. Because of this, changes were made in the STWA. When the Director of Operations was promoted to Chief Executive, he took the responsibility for the Divisional Managers with him, thus strengthening his departmental and operational base.

The major problems, however, lie in the status and legitimacy of the RWAs, in the roles of members and officers and in the criteria for decision making which they use. The establishment of the RWAs was a clear example of the British tradition of institutional pragmatism. While, in some countries, new bodies which are set up go "into a pre-ordained category”, in Britain governments are too often content to establish new types of body, without regard to precedent. In the case of the water authorities, this was justified on the grounds that the alternative – to entrust their functions to local authorities – was inappropriate because local authority boundaries were unsuitable and because, in any case, water issues were " technical" rather than “political” in character. The latter point was reinforced by the alleged lack of interest in water on the part of many local authorities before reorganisation. The boundaries of RWAs were determined on technical criteria without regard to political considerations or to local authority or other boundaries. The absence of elected authorities corresponding to water regions in tum reinforced the case for their being appointed and ad hoc rather than elected and multifunctional. Thus the way was opened for conflicts between water authorities and local government and within the authorities themselves. These have concerned the "legitimacy" of the RWAs in the eyes of those who have to deal with them and the criteria by which they make decisions.

Decision-making power in modern society can be seen as being legitimised by the criterion of personal choice – which stipulates that decisions ought to be taken according to the wishes of those who are affected by them; or by the criterion of competence-which stipulates that decisions ought to be taken by those possessing the special expertise necessary. The most common methods by which the personal choice criterion is satisfied are the market and democratic election. Water authorities, as monopolies, do not permit consumer choice through market mechanisms. Nor are they subject to election. They were clearly envisaged on their creation as deriving their legitimacy from the criterion of competence and have subsequently been defended on the ground that their work is “technical” rather than "political" in nature and that their officers possess the necessary expertise to make, by and large, the " right " decisions. If this is the case, the presence and role of local authority representatives is puzzling. The local government majority on the RWAs was essentially a concession to those complaining that the new appointed bodies lacked democratic legitimacy. Local authority representation could, because of the democratic base of local government, give the authorities some "democratic" standing but only if the local authority members actually represented local government and controlled or influenced RWA policy. In fact, they, along with other RWA members, have been expected to take off their political hats and consider questions from a largely technical point of view. Further, it has been expected that they "will develop a corporate approach and will view the problems of the region as a whole and not from a ' local constituency ' or special interest position", though it was conceded that " the tradition of representative local government will make it difficult for the local authority members to repress this instinctive response to geographical constituency considerations”. Yet it is precisely their ability to reflect the interests of their authorities which is the distinctive contribution of local authority members. Otherwise, they might as well be replaced by more technical experts. The role of the RWA members is thus ambiguous in precisely the same way as that of Regional Health Authority members. It is this conflict of roles and legitimacy, which has underlain much of the controversy over RWAs. Local government complains that water authorities arc undemocratic and unaccountable on the grounds that they are not directly elected and have the effective power to levy taxes. RWA officers, on the other hand, have insisted to us that they are efficient and accountable in that they provide a technically efficient service and are open to scrutiny and pressure from a variety of sources to ensure that they continue to do so. We thus have a direct opposition between democratic criteria for legitimacy (the personal choice criterion) and technocratic criteria (the competence criterion) and correspondingly opposed views of the meaning of "accountability", with local authority members seeing it in terms of political accountability to a constituency and RWA officers seeing it in terms of technical accountability for the efficient performance of a function.

A related difficulty is that of the criteria for decision making, particularly where water policy has implications for policy making in other bodies. Because of their clearly specified and limited responsibilities water authorities have tended to see their functions in fairly narrow terms. Their task, as they see it, is to achieve the most technically efficient means of meeting anticipated demand for their services. Local authorities, on the other hand, have wider responsibilities, including those of guiding and controlling, as well as catering for, development. The sort of conflict to which this can give rise is described by Blowers in his account of the preparation of the Bedfordshire Structure Plan. There the Anglian Water Authority proposed a new Bedford South Orbital Sewer with a capacity to accommodate a population of 158,000 in north and mid Bedfordshire. The county council, which planned for a much smaller population, argued for a lower investment but the water authority countered with the argument that the cost differences between a large and small scale project were small when compared to total investment costs. So a "technical" argument was put against a "political" argument with no clear criteria for arbitrating between them.

Another case arose when the Severn-Trent Water Authority were asked by the health authority to fluoridate water supplies. The health authority was basing its request on the " competence " criterion but, as the STWA felt unqualified to judge on this, it declared that it would not agree unless it was clear that fluoridation was favoured by the majority of people in the region. It was therefore recognising the issue as " political " and falling back on the " personal choice " criterion. But because it had been assumed that it would operate according to the competence criterion, the STWA had no means, direct or indirect, of establishing what public opinion or representative opinion in its region desired on matters of public policy. (For that matter, neither did the health authority).

Is there any way in which these conflicts can be resolved? We think that there is, but first it is necessary to break down the right distinction between "technical" and "political" matters. In an enterprise such as the water industry, nearly all issues have a technical aspect and, even more important, all have a political aspect, in that they involve decisions about the allocation of scarce resources, with a distributional impact on the community and repercussions on the work of other organisations. On many issues of planning, investment and resource allocation, as well as on issues like fluoridation, therefore, there is no one technically "correct" answer but a variety of policies reflecting alternative values and interests. In the absence of elections to establish and validate policies and priorities, these can only be decided by negotiation and compromise among the members of the authority. It therefore becomes important that water authority membership should be broadly representative and that members see their role as representing specific interests and political values in the making of policy. Corporate plans and policies could then emerge from the interplay of interests and values, with both "technical" and "political" arguments being seen as proper contributions.

The present constitution of the RWAs, with their links with central government, with local government and with various private interests and their balance between officers and members reflects the broad spectrum of bodies with an interest in questions of water policy. The difficulties have arisen from the attempt to deny the importance of these varying interests and, in effect to subordinate them all to just one set of "technical" considerations. Local politicians have often complained that water authorities are unduly " bureaucratic". We would prefer to call them "technocratic". We have argued that there are no purely "technical" solutions to the policy problems facing the water industry. Water Authorities should recognise that their work is also "political".

This article was originally published in October 1981 in Volume 52, Issue 4 of the Political Quarterly.

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