The EEC bathing water directive

Abstract

In June 1977 the French Minister of Culture and the Environment and the Minister of Health and Social Security made it known bacteriological tests on French bathing beaches had shown 77°70 to be of very good or good quality, 19070 of average quality and 4070 of poor quality. Three weeks later, the Central Press Agency of Paris had ferreted out a complete list of the unsatisfactory beaches, 28 of them in all at 23 coastal resorts, and this list was published in the French press and in the Times of 7 July 1977. From 1980 onwards this kind of bacteriological grading of bathing beaches will figure in the reports on bathing waters all member states of the community must submit to the Commission at regular intervals. By then also, no doubt, the tourist interests of the different countries will, in the spirit of fair competition embodied in the Treaty of Rome, blazon abroad their high percentage of good quality beaches and question the validity of competitors' bathing water rankings. The four grades of bathing water quality cited in the French statement are based on conformity or failure to conform to the requirements of the EEC Council 'Directive of 8 December 1975 concerning the quality of bathing water'. This Directive has already been strongly criticized by Lord Ashby (in 1975) because of the spurious uniformity it seeks to impose on bathing beaches from the Mediterranean to the north of Scotland, and also for the enormous cost of implementing it when no significant health hazard from sea bathing has so far been demonstrated. In Britain, the Directive also invites critical scrutiny for another reason. Here, the conclusion based on extensive work over two decades bathing water standards were irrelevant and impracticable has been generally accepted for many years past. Has this been a misguided view? The background to the EEC Directive and its technical aspects are scrutinized from this standpoint in what follows. Perhaps the first significant point emerges from the preamble to the Directive is the EEC was committed to bathing water standards before these were discussed at expert level. The programme of action of the European Communities, promulgated in 1973, included a provision that quality objectives are to be jointly drawn up fixing the various requirements which an environment must meet, inter alia the definition of parameters for water, including bathing water. How to define water quality objectives was the subject of a Service committee studied bathing water contamination in British coastal waters in the nineteen-fifties. He has acted as rapporteur at W H O expert meetings on bathing water hygiene. He is now Chairman of the Joint Committee on the Medical Aspects of Water Quality was set up in 1976 by the Department of Health and Social Security and the Department of the Environment.