Document zRNO2e8evb87LBeRVX84owJ0

530 New Scientist 9 March 1972 Britain's environment--nanny knows best Pollution control In Britain: the best in the world or a carve-up between Industry and government? The public cannot judge, for emission limits are secret, levels of discharge are secret, and even environmental monitoring Is sometimes secret. As the Royal Commission on Pollution demands a more open policy, Jon Tinker describes just how the facts are being concealed Jon Tinker -D-.-B-. Some of Britain's pollution rules are better suited to an Edwardian girls' school than to an advanced industrial society. Offenders are taken quietly on one side by the prefects and ticked off for letting the side down. There is no need for prosecutions: the shame of being found out is reckoned to be punishment enough. Carefully shielded from vulgar eyes, pollution control operates behind a deliberate smokescreen of evasion and reticence. Airborne or liquid emissions from each individual factory have to be authorised by a national or local regulating agency--but the permitted limits are kept secret. Pollution officers have the power to take samples of industrial discharges to make sure that they are complying with these secret limits--but any analysis of the samples remains strictly confidential. The regulating agency may re quire the factory to monitor air or water quality downwind or downstream of the dis charge--but the measurements which result are quickly hidden away in government files. The whole system operates on two prin ciples. First, there is close cooperation between regulating authority and industry. Second, each case is considered on its merits: emission limits are fixed on the basis of local conditions, rather than forced to conform to some nationwide norm. Cooperation and flexi bility are the twin watchwords of the Alkali Inspectorate, the river authorities and the Factory Inspectorate. Is flexible, cooperative British pollution control the best in the world, as many of its practitioners claim? Or do flexible officials sometimes place public health and safety at risk rather than jeopardise their cooperative relationship with the polluters? The public is unable to judge, because the facts which they need to form an opinion are hidden away in secret cabinets, guarded by the cooperating ranks of industry and the pollution officers, protected by the majesty of a dozen acts of parliament. If a factory owner should choose to pour thousands of gallons of cyanide into a river, the maximum fine the courts can impose is 100. But if a river inspector analyses a sample of this effluent, and men tions the result to a member of the public, he can be sent to prison for three months. Far too often the Prevention of Pollution Acts func tion as Acts for the Protection of Polluters. I do not mean to suggest that our pollution control agencies are incompetent, inefficient or corrupt: I believe the opposite to be true. But when faced with the delicate task of balancing environmental hazards against costly new equipment, even the best adminis trators sometimes make errors of judgement. In an open society, the comment and criticism of the scientific community, conservation groups, the press and the public would be available to spotlight such mistakes before serious harm had been done. In Britain today, data on individual emissions are guarded more closely than military blueprints. Like an elderly nursemaid, the Alkali Inspectorate suggests that publication of emission figures could only serve to alarm the public, in spite of the fact that official reports on environmental levels (mercury in shellfish and DDT in river water, for example) have been released without noticeable mass hysteria. "A nasty taste in your jam, dear? Nonsense. Nanny's looked at it very carefully and there's nothing at all wrong. Eat it up like a good boy. Nanny knows best." The defenders of the status quo claim that pollution judgements are best made in a spirit of cool, scientific detachment, in the absence of emotional public clamour. Yet these decisions are essentially political, a balance between what is technically feasible and what is economically possible, with public safety and amenity depending on the answer. The notion that government alone is clever enough to evaluate pollution problems, and that the general public is too ignorant and too stupid to understand them, I find paternalistic and offensive. Moreover, in the long term such a view is potentially totalitarian and dangerous. The regulating authorities and industry sometimes start a discussion on pollution secrecy by denying that it exists at all. To ishow that it does, the law and its implementa tion must be examined in some detail. Con sider first the water situation. England and Wales is covered by 29 river authorities, which must give permission for each discharge into a river. In granting consent, they may impose conditions; some common conditions are maxima of 30C, 1 ppm of heavy metals, 20 mg/1 of BOD and 30 mg/1 of suspended solids. Under section 7 of the Rivers (Prevention of Pollution) Act 1951, river authorities must maintain a register of consents, together with the conditions imposed, and keep it "open to inspection at all reasonable hours by any person appearing to the river board to be interested in the outlet". What, one might think, could be more open than that? Alas, the legal mind defines "interest" somewhat narrowly: the Trent River Authority recently issued a special memor andum to its staff reminding them that the only people entitled to see the register were those with a property interest at the point of discharge. In other words, the polluter or his landlord is entitled to know what is the level of discharge a river authority considers satisfactory, but not the farmer whose cows drink out of the river, nor the man who owns the i j i j 1 ] i j | j i ! > J r rj ; to . ! o* j TOWOLDMONOQ59227 New Scientist 6 March 1972 531 fishing rights downstream. And certainly not of ^ction 12. One possibility being discussed the general public. Most river authorities would follow Northumbria's lead, and publish appear to take a similar view to the Trent: a list of the worst polluters, and details of the Thames and the Yorkshire Ouse do, for their effluents, in the authority's minutes or example. Not even a group of scientists from annual report. Nowadays, less and less a local university can look at the register of industrial pollution is released direct into consents: they are not what lawyers would rivers, for it is general policy to divert it into call "interested". local authority sewers. Under the Public Not all river authorities have this maidenly Health Acts of 1936 and 1937, the local reticence. The Northumbrian RA neatly gets authority is obliged to accept trade effluents, round section 7 by recording full details of but it may impose conditions as to chemical every consent in its minutes. These (under and physical quality. Local authority regula paragraph 18 of the fourth schedule to the tion of trade effluent to sewers receives little Water Resources Act 1963) must be made publicity, but it forms the greatest part of available to local electors, and are in fact water pollution control in Britain. Since some I I distributed to the press. Ralph Dyson, pollutants--some heavy metals, for example Northumbria's chief pollution officer, is --can poison the microflora which degrade shocked at the idea of secrecy. "We're a sewage in treatment plants, unexpected con public body. Details of consents are public tamination can cause the sewage works to property. We can't hush them up--it would be discharge virtually raw sewage through its most unwise to try to do so." outfall into the river. Consent conditions, though, are only part of The publication of consent conditions, or of the story. According to the Jeger report, the results of samples of trade effluent, does threequarters of all our sewage works outfalls not appear to be specifically forbidden by the fail to conform with their consent conditions, Public Health Acts. However, such details are and industrial discharges to rivers may well normally kept secret, and section 287 of the be nearly as bad. River authorities can take 1936 Act is usually held to justify this; it samples of effluent--they even have statutory threatens three months' imprisonment if a powers of entry into factories to do so--but local official "discloses to any person any they are expressly forbidden by section 12 of information'obtained by him in the factory, the Rivers (Prevention of Pollution) Act 1961 workshop or workplace with regard tp any from disclosing any information derived from manufacturing process or trade secret such samples. Moreover, river authorities can As Kenneth Tyler of the Association of Public require dischargers to install monitoring Health Inspectors put it to me: "an inspector equipment in the river some yards below the would be a very unwise man if he 'stflfted point of discharge; this is often done with hot releasing details of individual discha^g to water effluent from a power station. Since the sewers." \ I monitor is the property of the polluter, so are What justification is advanced for keeping ! any figures it collects, and it is an offence for secret all details of discharges into public i i the river authority to disclose them. Of course, the authority could install its own re cording equipment, but it would then have to rivers and public sewers? A CBI spokesman told me that "it would be possible for a competitor to gain useful information from an pay for it, and there is no way the cost could effluent", and the Chemical Industries be recovered from the polluter. Since river Association, somewhat more pompously, authorities are, in general, scandalously short claimed that since Britain made her way in of scientific equipment, they are unlikely to the world by technological innovation, secrecy pass up the opportunity of getting industry to was essential. It is indeed conceivable that an pay for it instead. analysis of a works effluent could give a com petitor a clue to the vital catalyst in a new Discharge levels secret process, and it is also true that not all pro So there we have it. The polluter is a fac cesses are protected by patents. There are tory or a sewage works. His discharge is con still a few trades--dyestuffs and textiles, for trolled by a river authority, two-thirds of example--where idiosyncratic recipes still whose members are nominated by local play an important if declining part. councils. Councils are rarely unmindful of the In practice, though, the notion of industrial difficulties besetting local factories or local secrets leaking away down the plughole is sewage works: sometimes factory owners and regarded as ludicrous by most chemists. sewage authority chairmen actually sit on the Plants usually have only one outfall, which river authority's pollution committee, the drains dozens of separate processes, and a body which takes the decision whether or not firm anxious to protect itself could so treat or to prosecute. The river authority sets an upper mix its effluent that it became unrecognisable. limit to the discharge, Jmt this limit is kept In any case, a competitor wanting details of a secret. The river authority measures the dis rival's waste is more likely to row stealthily charge, but those figures are kept secret. T do upriver on a dark night, and take a sample for not suggest that the majority of river authori himself, than to rely on the meagre informa ties are anything but zealous and impartial, tion recorded jn a local authority's books. but I feel river quality could only benefit if Privately, even the CBI will admit that they were required to operate less furtively. secrecy cannot be justified on these grounds. Indeed, many pollution officers strongly The bigger chemical companies also recognise resent being forced to work in this hole-and-. this, and currently favour a policy of relative. corner way, and privately press their authori frankness. Shell, for example, "do not believe ties to find ways of evading the stranglehold that disclosure of the nature of our effluents 0561600 TOWOLDMONOQ59228 532 D.B. | I would give any useful information to our competitors". Clandestine pollution control benefits nobody but the polluters. Fortunately, there will be an opportunity to alter the present hush-hush situation in the very near future. The government is com mitted to replacing river authorities with 10 different regional water authorities (RWAs), which will control all aspects of pollution and water supply within their areas, including sewage treatment. This means that the RWAs will both operate sewage works and regulate river pollution; under present legis lation this would mean that they were policing themselves in total secret. Industry would be unlikely to tolerate this: it is already resentful at being painted as a major polluter, when in fact the worst culprits on most rivers are the sewage works. A bill to set up the RWAs, now being drafted at the Department of the Environment, will prob ably contain provisions requiring all consents registers to be open to the public, and insist ing that all effluents are regularly sampled at the point of discharge and the results made publicly available. Since the RWAs will, also control the release of trade effluents to sewers, the same procedure could easily be followed there. The atmosphere So much for water. What is the situation in the atmosphere? Somewhat paradoxically, while the river authorities tend to resent being legally gagged, the Alkali Inspectorate, which suffers from no such statutory con straints, voluntarily chooses to remain mute. The inspectorate deals with a long list of "scheduled" industries: those which are con sidered to emit especially dangerous forms of air pollution. In contrast to all the other acts dealing with pollution, the Alkali etc Works Regulation Act 1906 threatens the inspectors with no dire penalties if they disclose any trade secrets they pick up in the course of their work. The sole legal justification for the almost legendary tight lips of the Alkali Inspectorate is section 12 of the 1906 Act, which requires that "the owner of any (scheduled) work shall, on the demand of the chief inspector, furnish him within a reason able time with a sketch plan, to be kept secret, of those parts of such work in which any process causing the evolution of any noxious or offensive gas ... is carried on." The Act does not specify that disclosing such a secret sketch is an offence, nor does it mention secrecy with regard to any informa tion the inspector may pick up for himself, nor docs it require him to keep quiet about any samples he may analyse. The liberal nature of the 1906 Act, under which the Alkali Inspectorate still operates, is hard to square with its obsessive refusal to explain to the public what it is doing. Scheduled industries are required to use the "best practicable means" to prevent or mini mise the escape of harmful air pollutants. Sometimes the inspectorate makes known, in its annual report, the emission levels or the precise process which it considers constitutes the best practicable means. More often, New Scientist 9 March 1972 these faus arc not released to the public. After consulting privily with an individual polluter, and often with an industrial research association as well, the Alkali Inspectorate indicates to a company what it is prepared to accept as the best practicable means. Frequently, where a small or only marginally profitable firm is concerned, the inspectorate lays down a time limit within which a required standard must be reached. Again, these arc rarely allowed to become public knowledge. The most absurd situation regards monitor- ing. The inspectorate itself docs not have the funds to undertake this work very often, nor does it have the power to impose charges on industry to pay for it. So the inspectors often require a polluter to install monitoring equip ment, either on the chimney itself, or at ground level some distance away. As is the case in rivers, this equipment is the private property of the polluter--and so are the figures it produces. The polluter is on his honour not to cause pollution, and he supplies the information on which the inspectorate judges his performance. It is hardly surprising that recorded Infractions of the Alkali Acts are rare (25 irt:1970), and prosecutions are even rarer (2). The public has no means what ever of judging tfjow accurately these figure^ represent the trite situation. '\ Consider the Iitedon Brick Company, whose forest of chimneys between Bedford and the Ml emits sulphur dioxide, fluorine and a : singularly nasty smell. The fluorine is locally believed to be responsible for dead and dying trees and corroded metal window frames; some years ago the company bought up a number of local farms because the cattle were suffering from the bone-disease fluorosis. The inspectorate requires London Brick to carry out a monitoring programme, and the 1970 Alkali Report commented that "ground level concentrations of sulphur and fluorine compounds continue to be satisfactorily low". But how low does the Alkali Inspectorate consider satisfactory? The Bedfordshire County Council is denied access to the figures, and as county planning officer Geoffrey Cowley put it to me recently: "Glorious ignorance isn't much good to us". Essentially the same situation applies around the now notorious Rio Tinto-Zinc smelter at Avonmouth. Lead levels inside the plant are the concern of the Factory Inspec torate, about whose performance on this site it would be uncharitable to comment, but external emissions are the province of the Alakali Inspectorate. On 3 February, 1972, Peter Walker assured the Commons that there was no evidence health was being affected by base metal pollution of the atmosphere from RTZ. This reassuring conclusion was based on a monitoring programme*carried out by RTZ itself, and reported to a joint committee of the Alkali Inspectorate and ... RTZ. g Unlike London Brick, though, RTZ was -t willing to letthe local authorities in on the j* secret, so the City of Bristol also sits on the o committee. Originally invited--provided, of course, they promised not to publicise the facts--was the University of Bristol's Sabrina ' ! , ! 1 . : i | ) | : j j \ | 1 ! ' I , j ! 1 I TOWOLDMONOQ59229 New Scientist 9 March 1972 S33 project, which is studying the overall pollu Mr R. J. Williams, county secretary of the tion patterns of the Severn estuary. When Farmers' Union of Wales, has been trying for Sabrina started to publish results indicating months to get at the fallout figures. "I'm not that Bristol industry was somewhat dirtier suggesting the results arc phoney", he told than it need be, the City Fathers and RTZ be me, "but why are they afraid of disclosing came highly indignant and forced Sabrina off them?" Williams angrily contrasts the the committee. This turned out to be a mis aluminium situation with pollution control at take : six days after Peter Walker's statement, the nearby Wyddfa nuclear power station. two Sabrina scientists decided to report their There he sits on a local liaison committee, own studies of environmental lead, which which is supplied with the results of two were in marked contrast to the official line of independent monitoring programmes, carried the Alkali Inspectorate and RTZ. Elm leaves out by the CF.GB and the Ministry of Agri near the plant contained the startling level culture; members of the committee arc free 4 500 ppm of lead, compared with only 90 ppm to make public use of the figures. "/ can't six miles away. Sabrina was hurriedly invited understand all these curies and tritium--but back on to the RTZ committee, but it will still we've got experts who can. I'm quite happy not be free to publicise any figures it may on the Wyddfa: now I want the same attitude learn. as regards fluoride. Aluminium production is only 30 per cent at present. What happens Lead smelting inquiry when they reach full capacity?" As a result of the Avonmouth fiasco, an Williams is not the only man who is worried. urgent Department of the Environment probe In recent weeks Anglesey County Council is taking place around every lead smelter in committees have twice turned down, by the Britain. Nobody pretends that the results are chairman's casting vote alone, a proposal to reassuring, and there is a growing feeling in set up an independent monitoring scheme. Whitehall that the Alkali Inspectorate must Chief Inspector Ireland is not convinced. be strengthened--and made to publish more "What evidence have you got for public of its figures. The difficulty is that the inspec concern?" he asked me. "A lot of this trouble torate is an independent statutory body, is caused by one or two militants and agita i making its own annual report to parliament, tors. The general public doesn't give a damn and not subject to any direct departmental about figures." control. So far, it has shown itself in public Unlike external emissions, pollution inside a stubbornly insensitive to all criticism, and as plant is controlled by the Factory Inspectorate. a result, has suffered a growing and regret As with the river authorities, factory inspec table loss of public confidence. tors are severely hampered by legal prohibi Too often the inspectorate manoeuvres tions. Unjler section 78 of the Factories Act itself into the position of defending the big 1961, an inspector is empowered to take polluters, behaving more like a firm of hired samples of dust or air, but he is forbidden to consulting engineers than a government disclose the result to anyone unless he is regulating agency. The unfortunate results of bringing a prosecution. While an employer this approach are apparent in Anglesey, where who deliberately bolts his doors and refuses a vast new aluminium smelter was opened to allow a factory inspector inside his plant last year. (Oddly enough, the Anglesey can only be fined 20 (section 147), an inspec Aluminium Co is owned by RTZ: perhaps they tor can be gaoled for three months (section are trying to corner the market in pollution 154) if he discloses any information about a as well as hi national parks?) Aluminium manufacturing process or trade secret. In smelting emits fluorine, and at the Alkali other words, if an inspector tips off a trades Inspectorate's request RTZ has been regularly union official about a dangerous situation he sampling the local vegetation for fluorides. can be prosecuted for it. Unusually, the inspectorate has initiated its In practice, this is not a serious loophole, if own monitoring programme as well. The only because factory inspectors do not sec results of both schemes, needless to say, are liaison with shop stewards as part of their secret. functions. Like their alkaline cousins, they I The Chief Alkali Inspector, F. E. Ireland, sometimes appear to act more as management confirmed to me last week that this was consultants than as public servants. At least, indeed the case. "I am a great believer in though, they have in the last few years informing the public", he added, "but not in introduced the dastardly and un-English giving them figures they can't interpret. You practice of arriving unexpectedly and looking would get amateur environment experts and round the plant unannounced. They used university scientists playing around with to come by appointment only, which is still them. People can become scared of figures, the normal procedure for Alkali Inspectors. they can get the wind up." In order to rule Housewives around the infamous Carbon out such a possibility the latest (1970) Alkali Black factory in Swansea, until a blockade Report carefully avoids numbers: "the aver forced the company to install something age basic level of fluoride is low, but some markedly better than the best practicable high levels were obtained, especially in winter means (see New Scientist, vol 51, p 151), used and spring." Could it be that the inspectorate to claim that the only time their washing is getting its halogens muddled up, and re wasn't filthy with smoke was when the Alkali placing fluorides with bromides? Inspectorate was due for a visit. The main risk from airborne fluoride is to A factory inspector's report goes to man livestock feeding on polluted grass, so not agement alone: the idea that it should be surprisingly Anglesey farmers are worried. shown to the workers who are at risk is 0561802 TOWOLDMONOQ59230 $34 D.B. f -- New Scientist 9 March 1972 regarded by the Department of Employment as somewhat preposterous. "It would be like going to the police, and asking what they had found out about Joe Bloggs when they inter viewed him," a spokesman told me sternly. "Reports and samples are a matter between the inspector and management." Albert Blyton, legal secretary of the T & G, doesn't see it quite like that. "We want full consul tation, and we've never had it. Shop stewards and convenors know the inspector has been in the plant, but they never sec him." Public servants gagged This mania for preserving industrial secrecy, at the expense of public participation and at the risk of public safety, runs right through British pollution law and procedure. Section 26 of the Clean Air Act 1956 and section 59 of the Offices, Shops and Railway Premises Act 1963, for instance, both threaten local authority inspectors with three months' imprisonment for unauthorised disclosure of information. Of course, some such safeguard is clearly necessary, but it is intolerable that it should be so phased as to gag a public servant from reporting to the public about genuine hazards of indoor and outdoor pollu tion. Last week I described a related situation in British procedures for approving pesticides ("The Vapona dossier", New Scientist, vol 53, page 489), and the same problem exists to some extent with drugs and food additives. A product can be passed for general sale on the basis of secret submissions by manufacturers. These facts are not published, and are there fore immune from the judgement and criti cism of the scientific community. River pollution, air pollution, factories, pesticides: what all these various procedures have in common is a contempt for the good sense of ordinary people, and the rooted dis like of administrators for submitting their decisions to the scrutiny of informed public opinion. If we were talking of something so relatively unimportant as the design of post age stamps or the route of a footpath, this paternalistic > arrogance would perhaps not matter. But mistakes and errors of judgement in pollution control threaten the health and well-being of us all. The Avonmouth disaster, where over 100 workers were found with dangerously high blood lead levels, might never have happened if Alkali and Factory Inspectorate data had been made available to the Sabrina project. The Skeffington report urged that our planning laws and procedures should be overhauled to encourage public participation: some drastic changes in pollu tion control are equally urgent. Without such reforms, there is a serious danger of a withdrawal of public confidence from the statutory authorities, the Alkali Inspectorate in particular. Indeed, there are disturbing signs that this has already begun to take place. Older amenity organisations such as the National Society for Clean Air remain strong supporters of the inspectorate, but they tend to reflect the attitudes and enthusiasms of a decade ago. The new eco groups which are springing up all over the country, especially in the universities, are no longer convinced by the bland reassurances of the alkali, river and factory inspectors. As Friends of the Earth director Graham Searlc puts it: "Everyone says they're very good, but how can we tell if they don't publish any figures?" The Conservation Society, the Friends of the Earth and other young eco-action clubs tend to start from the assumption that, as has proved to be the case in the USA, government ' pollution agencies are normally incompetent and hand-in-glove with industry. Personally, I 1 believe this is far from the truth in the UK, but the behaviour of the Alkali Inspectorate in particular could not be better calculated to lend conviction to this transatlantic stereo type. Pressure for change is also coming increas ingly from the scientific community, especially from those whose research into pollution problems has been handicapped by official secrecy. Dr Norman Leigh of Manchester University, who has been leading a multi disciplinary probe into pollution in the north west, told a recent ASLIB conference that he doubted if confidentiality was necessary to its present extent, and Dr' Kenneth Mellanby of Monks Wood told me: "all of these things would be better if everyone came clean." Professor D^vid Dineley, head of Bristol's Sabrina project? *ut it more strongly. "A few of us have had: experience in the US, where all data gathered by public servants is pub- \ licly available. The need for secrecy is grossly overplayed herd^.and I can't see that any great harm would be done by disclosure, Some people's faces might be red, though." . As one pollution crisis has succeeded another, Whitehall sympathy for red faces has been evaporating rather fast. An intriguing solution now being considered at the highest level is the technical audit, a scheme sug gested by Sir Frederick Warner, chairman of a committee of the Council of Scientific and Technical Institutes. All plants would have to issue an annual pollution report, detailing the precise levels of emissions to both air and water, as well as describing what happened to all the firm's waste. The attraction of Warner's scheme is that it would need only one parliamentary bill, while tightening the whole gamut of pollution law would involve amending-dozens of existing acts. The tech nical audit would be signed by a firm of con sulting engineers, who would have to certify that the best practicable means were being used to reduce pollution. The Prime Minister has made many speeches about open government. The Secre tary of State for the Environment has pledged himself to clean up our air, rivers, land and seas. If Heath and Walker mean what they say, let them freely invite the support and criticism of the scientific community, the voluntary amenity societies and the general public. Let them sweep away the system of schoolgirl honour which forces our pollution officials to behave like hired PR men of the polluters. The quality of the environment is not the private concern of government and industry, to be bargained away behind dosed doors. Nanny does not always know best. i TOWOLDMONOQ59231