Advances in Water Treatment and Enviromental Management

44 WATER TREATMENTframework for controls and gives the Secretary of State for the Environmentthe power to issue orders giving instructions for the implementation of thelegislation. The orders are issued as commencement orders or ‘statutoryinstruments’. The procedure for changing laws in the UK is to repeal certainsections of existing legislation and to issue new legislation in Acts ofParliament. Thus some sections of the Public Health Act 1875 whichcontrolled discharges to surface waters are still in force whereas mostsections have been superseded by new Acts, the most important of whichare the Control of Pollution Act 1974 and the Water Act 1989. Similarly,although the control of discharges to sewers refers back to the Public HealthAct of 1936, most of the provisions in the Act have been superseded by theControl of Pollution Act 1974 and the Water Act 1989.The Control of Pollution Act 1974 strengthened the provisions for the controlof pollution, in particular the control of discharges to estuarine and coastalwaters. The consent conditions for discharges to surface waters and themonitoring data were made available for public scrutiny. The data can beused by the public to initiate prosecutions. Applications for new consentsneed to be advertised allowing objections to be raised to the consentconditions proposed.The Water Act 1989 set up the National Rivers Authority in England andWales which now has the responsibility for the monitoring of discharges tosurface waters, both those from the newly privatised water companies andindustry (previously the treatment of wastewaters and the monitoringfunctions were carried out in England and Wales by the same organisation,the Water Authorities). The Water Act 1989 also requires the National RiversAuthority to define statutory quality objectives for all surface waters. InScotland the treatment and monitoring functions have been separate since1951 with the Regional Councils being responsible for treatment and theRiver Purification Boards for the monitoring.The use-related EC directives, eg for the abstraction for drinking water (75/440/EEC) (CEC 1975), were implemented in the UK by administrative actionwhich involved the Department of the Environment (and/or the Welsh Officeand the Scottish Development Department) writing to the responsible bodies(at the time Water Authorities in England and Wales and River PurificationBoards in Scotland) advising them on the contents of the directives and theactions necessary to comply with them. In Northern Ireland, the Departmentof Environment for Northern Ireland is itself the responsible body.As the Dangerous Substances Directive (CEC 1976) is essentially an enablingdirective, no immediate requirements to comply were needed. However,following the publication of several ‘daughter’ directives for individualsubstances and the setting of environmental quality standards (EQSs) inthe UK for several List II substances, the Department of the Environmentand the Welsh Office published in 1985 a circular (DoE 1985) which advised