The Politics of London Water

Abstract

TODAY Londoners enjoy a water supply which has attained a very high standard of both quality and quantity. But this situation has not come in a day. The supply of water in London has always been the subject of political contests of some kind and there is a continuity in London's fight for water. Londoners had to fight protracted battles for control over their water supply in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century the demand has occasionally come for the organisation of water supply in Greater London under a unified democratic management, but nothing has actually emerged until very recently, when Greater L<?ndon'swater supply has been vested in one of the newly-created Regional Water Authorities. The politics of water supply in Greater London, first in the nineteenth century and then in the twentieth, has been a contest between private enterprise and public ownership and management, bet\veen municipalisation and administration by an ad hoc board, between metropolitan government and local autonomy. The strategies adopted by the various participants in these contests at different times have varied in accordance with their political ideologies, their ideas of the public interest, and above all, the political circumstances of the time. The politics of London water have belonged in some sense throughout to the politics of London government reform. An attempt is made here, first, to analyse the political characteristics of London's fight for water and to narrate briefly its three different phases; and, secondly, to elucidate the decision-making process, and to test certain current generalisations about politics and social reform and the growth of the administrative state in the nineteenth-century Britain; finally, the inadequacy of the present system of management of London water supply is discussed, and some lessons are derived. The process by which a particular business or trade is recognised in Britain as a 'public utility' is political. Any private enterprise becomes a public utility whenever parliament considers it so closely connected with the public interest as to justify public regulation, and ownership, if necessary. Competition among London's water companies, which had been justified in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in terms of the benefits that consumers might receive, failed to produce the intended results as London was districted among eight ,vater companies through private agreements in the first half of the nineteenth century.! By 1850 parliament recognised that the com-