Critics have once again raised questions about the case for the £4.2 billion Thames Tideway Tunnel as part of an ongoing campaign to bring about an end to the project.

The Thames Blue Green Economy (TBGE) campaign group has published a critique of Thames Water’s Thames Tideway Tunnel (TTT), and is calling on the Government and Thames Water to halt preliminary works and to set up an inquiry into the financing and institutional arrangements behind the project.

In 2005, a team chaired by Professor Chris Binnie recommended upgrading Thames Water’s existing Sewage Treatment Works (STWs), constructing the Lee Tunnel and the Thames Tideway Tunnel to comply with the requirements of the 1991 EU Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive(UWWTD).

TBGE is a coalition of experts from the water industry, engineers, academics, politicians and environmentalists who support the use of Integrated Water Resource Management for the Thames Tideway and reject the case for what they describe as “the needless, hugely expensive Tunnel.”

A new report  published today by the group ‘The Case Against the Thames Tideway Tunnel’ has set out the case against the TTT on a number of grounds, including:

• The TTT is not needed to maintain Tideway water quality in line with European legal standards
• The TTT is hugely expensive, with construction costs alone estimated at £4.2 billion (2011 prices) and there are much cheaper and more effective alternatives to cope with occasional run-off issues
• The costs of the TTT will be paid for by a new utility charge on the bills of customers across the whole of Thames Water’s region even though the Tunnel will only cope with occasional storm run-off from Inner London
• The special-purpose TTT “IP”, the company, now known as Bazalgette Tunnel or Tideway, set up to build and operate the Tunnel for Thames Water, under license from the regulator Ofwat, is “uncompetitive” under government regulations with only two bidders; therefore breaching normal competitive tendering standards for public service contracts. 
• The Government has had to provide guarantees to investors and lenders to get the funding committed and the Tunnel built.

The Report states:

“Technologies for collecting, storing and managing water outflows have changed dramatically. Effective and cheaper options - e.g. real time in-sewer controls, Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS), the use of permeable materials, distributed storage, rainwater harvesting and other components of an Integrated Water Resource Management approach are now available to manage flows and maintain or improve water quality.”

“Meanwhile, some £1.4 billion has been spent on the upgrades at the Tideway STWs (at Mogden and Beckton) and the recently completed £635 million Lee Tunnel. Overall, these measures, already undertaken by Thames Water, effectively meet the requirement of the EU UWWTD in respect of storm overflow volumes.”

“TTT is a very special infrastructure project – not just in its grandiose construction, but also in its financing and control. It is supposed to be a wholly funded private sector venture, yet it has been sponsored and underpinned by Government, which is using public money to remove any financial risk from TW and its corporate shareholders.”

The Group believes that an official review of how the licences and contracts for the Tunnel were bid and awarded is also necessary. The report says there are a "wide range of serious and unresolved questions about the financing of the project, and its viability over the long-term."

The report has also raised separate questions around the shareholders and ownership of Thames Water itself.  

The Thames Blue Green Economy (TBGE) group has the support of Lord Berkeley, a long-time opponent of the Tunnel, who is writing separately to MPs in constituencies in Thames Water’s operating region urging them to read the report.

The report  concludes that the project is “simply too risky, too expensive and superfluous to need.”

Overall, in the view of TBGE, the Integrated Water Resources Management approach offers a much wider range of environmental, economic, financial and social benefits than proceeding with the TTT. However, if the TTT proceeds, “it is almost certain that these other sustainable alternatives will be jettisoned, for lack of investment as much as anything else”, the report says.

Click here to download the report  ‘The Case Against the Thames Tideway Tunnel’