Bag's Rants

Councils don't seem to be able to work out the simplest things.

Years and years ago our local authority looked at the reservoirs and decided they had too many. They then went and sold them off. This was in the day when your rates included water rates. That was OK as they had performed some calculations that said each household was using X gallons and each business Y gallons. We have so many households, call it H, and businesses, call them B, and that comes to a grand total of err, X*H + Y*B = Z gallons. So there was spare capacity and some money could be made.

Now it appears we are facing water shortages. Read more here. For some reason we have been building more and more houses and more and more business premises and yet, shock and horror, they are not reducing the amount of water they use. Thus the water requirement has gone up. Now call me stupid and I know some do but when the council was approving this building work could they not have worked out that the requirement for water was going up and checked to see if the load could be handled. Clearly it is way out of the control of the builders. The water boards know the capacity in that area. I don't know but even our schoolkids know, well some anyway, that increasing a variable such as H and B gives an corresponding increase in Z.

Now we have to spend more on our houses to make them water efficient, how long before we have to retrofit our houses, and only using a Dolphin, or whatever, registered plumber. The price of water will go up. You know, to discourage it's use, and we all have to live like a third world country when they seem to be more awake and building irrigation and reservoirs.

And they call it planning. You know the statement regarding piss up and breweries. They are only interested in if the size of the toilet fits in with regulations not something where they have to work out X*H + Y*B. Is is between 11 and 15 cm? If 'Yes' then build house if 'No' then reject on form WHR12763 in triplicate.

posted by Bag @ 5:04 pm