SHARING WATER

Evening Post, Volume CXVII, Issue 48, 26 February 1934, Page 8

SHARING WATER

AVinter. has not relieved, the water scarcity in Britain. Indeed, the dearth of.water now affects not only the small communities, but big cities with special costly supplies. Addenda to the cablegrams published last week show that Britain is considering the advisability of establishing regional committees, and even axentral authority, for control of water supplies. In this; as in- other administrative questions, opinion is apt to hover between the extremes of centralisation and of decentralisation. In New Zealand there is a bias towards local (sometimes very , local) authority, and therefore to local water supplies. Anyone discovering New Zealand for the first 1 time might form the anticipation that a regional committee could very well Itake in hand the Hutt River and adijacent 'streams for the. purpose of I organising a water supply system for I the communities (ultimately to be I welded into a city'of a million souls) I destined to spring up round the great harbour of Wellington..'. But everyone knows that this idea of community of water interests, based on the configuration of the country, has not worked out in practice, either before or since the Wellington Water Board era. In local government, including water government, New Zealand is still in the,excessive decentralisation frame of mind, and no local authority .yields a grain of its powers if it can possibly retain them. Still, it would be interesting to watch a regional committee experiment in water supply in Britain. The word "regional" here has been hitched to the town-planning car; which does not seem to move. A little real practical regionalism would be welcome.