River boards were authorities who controlled land drainage, fisheries and river pollution and had other functions relating to rivers, streams and inland waters in England and Wales between 1950 and 1965. [1]
Prior to the 1930s, land drainage in the United Kingdom was regulated by the Statute of Sewers, passed by King Henry VIII in 1531, and several further acts which built upon that foundation. However, the administrative bodies with responsibility for managing the drainage of low-lying areas did not have sufficient resources to do this effectively. Complaints to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries made during the 1920s by existing drainage boards and those who lived and worked in the areas they covered led to the government deciding that a thorough review of the situation should be carried out. [2]
A royal commission was set up, under the chairmanship of Lord Bledisloe, which produced a final report on 5 December 1927. [3] The report described the existing laws as "vague and ill-defined, full of anomalies, obscure, lacking in uniformity, and even chaotic." It recommended that any replacement should have powers to carry out the work necessary for efficient drainage, together with the provision of financial resources to enable them to carry out their duties. [4]
At the time there were 361 drainage authorities covering England and Wales, and the proposed solution was the creation of catchment boards responsible for each main river, with powers over the individual drainage boards within each catchment. [5] The report formed the basis for a subsequent bill, [6] which became the Land Drainage Act 1930 (20 & 21 Geo. 5. c. 44) when it became law on 1 August 1930. [7] It repealed most of the legislation that had preceded it, with 16 acts dating from 1531 to 1929 falling into this category, and another three were amended. [8] When the Act was published, however, it contained only 47 catchment areas of the original 100 suggested by the Royal Commission. [9]
River boards were established by the River Boards Act 1948, and replaced the catchment boards that had been created following the passing of the 1930 Act. [1] Although the Act proposed river board areas, the precise details were not included in the legislation, and a consultative committee was convened to resolve issues with the boundaries for the areas. This involved liaising with catchment boards, fishery boards, county councils and county boroughs.
By 19 May 1949, the borders of 17 areas had been settled, and a draft order to create the first river board, that for the River Severn, had been deposited before Parliament. [10] A total of 32 boards were eventually created, covering the whole of England and Wales, with responsibilities for land drainage, fisheries and river pollution. Where there were existing catchment boards, they inherited these powers, [11] and where there were not, they took over the duties of flood prevention on main rivers from local authorities. The provisions of the 1930 Act ceased to apply to the new river boards. The exceptions were the River Thames Catchment Board and the Lee Conservancy Catchment Board, which did not become river boards, and still operated under the older powers. [11] Each river board area had a board which was partly nominated by county councils and county borough corporations, and partly appointed by the government.
The Act allowed that "orders defining river board areas and establishing river boards may be made at different times for different areas". It was not until 1955 that all the boards had been established.[ citation needed ]
River board | Former catchment boards |
---|---|
Avon and Dorset | |
Bristol Avon | Avon (Bristol) |
Cheshire | Weaver |
Cornwall | |
Cumberland | Kent, Waver and Wampool |
Dee and Clwyd | Clwyd, Dee |
Devon | |
East Suffolk and Norfolk | East Norfolk Rivers (including the river Waveney), East Suffolk Rivers, North Norfolk Rivers |
East Sussex | Cuckmere, Old Haven (Pevensey) and Bulverhythe Stream, Ouse (Sussex) [1] |
Essex | Essex Rivers, Roding, Stour (Essex and Suffolk) |
Glamorgan | Thaw |
Great Ouse | Ouse (Great) |
Gwynedd | Anglesey Rivers, Conway, Dysynni, Prysor |
Hampshire | Avon and Stour |
Hull and East Yorkshire | Hull |
Isle of Wight | |
Kent | Medway, Romney and Denge Marsh Main Drains, Rother and Jury's Gut, [1] Stour (Kent) |
Lancashire | Crossens, Douglas, Lune, Wyre |
Lincolnshire | Ancholme and Winterton Beck, Witham and Steeping River |
Mersey | Alt, Mersey and Irwell |
Nene | Nene |
Northumberland and Tyneside | |
Severn | Severn |
Somerset | Somerset Rivers |
South West Wales | |
Trent | Trent |
Usk | |
Wear and Tees | |
Welland | Welland |
West Sussex | Adur, Arun |
Wye | Wye |
Yorkshire Ouse | Derwent, Ouse (Yorkshire) |
The powers of river boards were extended by the Land Drainage Act 1961, which allowed them to raise additional finance [12] and to act as an internal drainage board (IDB) where land drainage was necessary for the improvement of agricultural land, but no IDB existed. [13] The river boards were replaced by twenty-seven river authorities on 1 April 1965, under the Water Resources Act 1963. The new authorities comprised the area of one or two river boards. [1]
The River Ancholme is a river in Lincolnshire, England, and a tributary of the Humber. It rises at Ancholme Head, a spring just north of the village of Ingham and immediately west of the Roman Road, Ermine Street. It flows east and then north to Bishopbridge west of Market Rasen, where it is joined by the Rase. North of there it flows through the market town of Brigg before draining into the Humber at South Ferriby. It drains a large part of northern Lincolnshire between the Trent and the North Sea.
The Lee Navigation is a canalised river incorporating the River Lea. It flows from Hertford Castle Weir to the River Thames at Bow Creek; its first lock is Hertford Lock and its last Bow Locks.
The Thames Conservancy was a body responsible for the management of that river in England. It was founded in 1857 to replace the jurisdiction of the City of London up to Staines. Nine years later it took on the whole river from Cricklade in Wiltshire to the sea at Yantlet Creek on the Isle of Grain. Its territory was reduced when the Tideway was transferred to the Port of London Authority in 1909.
The Water Act 1973 is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that reorganised the water, sewage and river management industry in England and Wales. Water supply and sewage disposal were removed from local authority control, and ten larger regional water authorities were set up, under state control based on the areas of super-sets of river authorities which were also subsumed into the new authorities. Each regional water authority consisted of members appointed by the Secretary of State for the Environment, and by the various local authorities in its area.
River authorities controlled land drainage, fisheries and river pollution in rivers, streams and inland waters in England and Wales between 1965 and 1973.
An internal drainage board (IDB) is a type of operating authority which is established in areas of special drainage need in England and Wales with permissive powers to undertake work to secure clean water drainage and water level management within drainage districts. The area of an IDB is not determined by county or metropolitan council boundaries, but by water catchment areas within a given region. IDBs are geographically concentrated in the Broads, Fens in East Anglia and Lincolnshire, Somerset Levels and Yorkshire.
The Middle Level Commissioners are a land drainage authority in eastern England. The body was formed in 1862, undertaking the main water level management function within the Middle Level following the breakup of the former Bedford Level Corporation.
A regional water authority, commonly known as a water board, was one of a group of public bodies that came into existence in England and Wales in April 1974, as a result of the Water Act 1973 coming into force. This brought together in ten regional units a diverse range of bodies involved in water treatment and supply, sewage disposal, land drainage, river pollution and fisheries. They lasted until 1989, when the water industry was privatised and the water supply and sewerage and sewage disposal parts became companies and the regulatory arm formed the National Rivers Authority. Regional water authorities were also part of the Scottish water industry when three bodies covering the North, West and East of Scotland were created in 1996, to take over responsibilities for water supply and sewage treatment from the regional councils, but they only lasted until 2002, when they were replaced by the publicly owned Scottish Water.
The Commissions of Sewers Act 1708, sometimes called the Commissioners of Sewers Act 1708, was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. It concerned the duties of boards of commissioners with responsibility for the maintenance of sea banks and other defences, which protected low-lying areas from inundation by the sea, and the removal of obstructions in streams and rivers caused by mills, weirs and gates. The word sewer had a much broader meaning than in modern usage, and referred generally to streams and watercourses.
The Land Drainage Act 1930 was an act of Parliament passed by the United Kingdom Government which provided a new set of administrative structures to ensure that drainage of low-lying land could be managed effectively. It followed the proposals of a royal commission which sat during 1927.
South Holland IDB is an English internal drainage board set up under the terms of the Land Drainage Act 1930. It has responsibility for the land drainage of 148.43 square miles (384.4 km2) of low-lying land in South Lincolnshire. It is unusual as its catchment area is the same as the area of the drainage district, and so it does not have to deal with water flowing into the area from surrounding higher ground. No major rivers flow through the area, although the district is bounded by the River Welland to the west and the River Nene to the east.
The Land Drainage Act 1961 was an Act of Parliament passed by the United Kingdom Government which provided mechanisms for river boards to raise additional finance to fund their obligations. It built upon the provisions of the Land Drainage Act 1930 and the River Boards Act 1948.
Holderness Drain is the main feature of a Land Drainage scheme for the area of Holderness to the east of the River Hull in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. Construction began in 1764, and several notable civil engineers were involved with the scheme over the years. Despite the high costs of the initial scheme, it was not particularly successful, because of the refusal of the ship owners of Hull to allow an outlet at Marfleet. They insisted that the water be discharged into the River Hull to keep the channel free of silt. Following a period of agricultural depression and the building of new docks in the early 1800s, an outlet at Marfleet was finally authorised in 1832. A high level system still fed upland water to the Hull, but the low level system discharged into the Humber, where levels were considerably lower. Following the success of steam pumping on the Beverley and Barmston Drain, the trustees looked at such a possibility for the Holderness Drain, but the development of the Alexandra Dock in the 1880s and then the King George V Dock in 1913 provided a solution, as the docks were topped up with water pumped from the drain, to lessen the ingress of silt-laden water.
The Water Resources Act 1963 is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that continued the process of creating an integrated management structure for water, which had begun with the passing of the Land Drainage Act 1930. It created river authorities and a Water Resources Board. River authorities were responsible for conservation, re-distribution and augmentation of water resources in their area, for ensuring that water resources were used properly in their area, or were transferred to the area of another river authority. The river authorities covered the areas of one or more of the river boards created under the River Boards Act 1948, and inherited their duties and responsibilities, including those concerned with fisheries, the prevention of pollution, and the gauging of rivers. It did not integrate the provision of public water supply into the overall management of water resources, but it introduced a system of charges and licenses for water abstraction, which enabled the river authorities to allocate water to potential users. This included the water supply agencies, who now needed their supplies to be licensed.
The Water Act 1989 is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that reorganised the bodies responsible for all aspects of water within England and Wales. Whereas previous legislation, particularly the Water Act 1973, had focused on providing a single unifying body with responsibility for all water-related functions within a river basin or series of river basins, this legislation divided those functions up again, with water supply, sewerage and sewage disposal being controlled by private companies, and the river management, land drainage and pollution functions becoming the responsibility of the National Rivers Authority.
The Beverley and Barmston Drain is the main feature of a land drainage scheme authorised in 1798 to the west of the River Hull in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. The area consisted of salt marshes to the south and carrs to the north, fed with water from the higher wolds which lay to the north, and from inundation by tidal water passing up the river from the Humber. Some attempts to reduce the flooding by building embankments had been made by the fourteenth century, and windpumps appeared in the seventeenth century. The Holderness Drainage scheme, which protected the area to the east of the river, was completed in 1772, and attention was then given to resolving flooding of the carrs.
The River Boards Act 1948 was an Act of Parliament passed by the United Kingdom Government which provided constitutional, financial and general administrative structures for river boards, which were responsible for the management of river board areas, and superseded the catchment boards that had been set up under the Land Drainage Act 1930.
The Upper Witham IDB is an English Internal Drainage Board responsible for land drainage and the management of flood risk for an area to the west of the Lincolnshire city of Lincoln, broadly following the valleys of the upper River Witham, the River Till and the course of the Fossdyke Navigation.
The Rivers of the County of Essex, England have been managed and controlled by a number of statutory bodies since 1931. These have variously aimed to ensure the effective drainage of water courses; ascertain accurate flowrates; manage, measure and control pollution; regulate the abstraction and impounding of water; manage the treatment and supply of water; and manage sewage treatment and disposal.
Romney Marshes Area internal drainage board is the successor to a long line on organisations who have managed land drainage and flood defence on Romney Marsh in the counties of Kent and East Sussex in the south-east of England.