Are you a Chadwick, a Bazalgette or a Bazalwick?

Issue 558: 14 December 2023

What should we be putting down our pipe(s)?

If you were going to design a sewage system from scratch today it is probable that you wouldn’t build the one we have. After all it seems that not a week goes by without the media reporting sewage outflows into rivers. Pollution levels that seem unstoppable, pre-dates 1989’s privatisation and has its roots as far back as 1856.

Britain’s approach to what goes down our pipes was set in stone over a 160 years ago - simply put, in most urban areas, when you flush the lav the water (and everything else) goes down the sewer and soon co-mingles with the water from your bath, the content of your mums washing up bowl, the water from your neighbours washing machine, the rain collected in the roadside drains on the motorway and the water collected on roof on the bungalow across the road.

In 2023 most of Britain’s sewers are a combined sewage system of “grey water” and sewage all intermingled into a single pipe.

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This isn’t a “bug” in the system.

It’s how it was designed and, although it’s not an issue most of the time, when it rains heavily the system is often overwhelmed and results in combined sewage overflows - the system literally spits out sewage through outlet points into our rivers or the sea.

If you were going to design a sewage system from scratch would you pick a one pipe solution with the probability of sewage outflows polluting our rivers and seas or opt for two pipes - one for sewage and one for rainwater / grey water?

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1856: Decision Time

If a different decision had been made in 1856 it might have been all different.

In 1856 Victorian London experienced “The Great Sink” - the advent of the water closet had had the perverse effect of dramatically increasing the amount of “liquid” that was flowing through the very primitive sewage system of the day.

The situation had been getting worse for a number of years with a seres of cholera outbreaks, most notably an epidemic in 1848 that resulted in thousands of deaths.

In effect the primitive sewage system flushed sewage into the Thames and its tributaries. As the sewage dumped in the Thames continued to increase the stink increased and people got sick as they extracted their drinking water from the same river.

London’s authorities convened a series of inquiries. The first of which was led by social reformer Sir Edwin Chadwick who called for a system where sewage would go down one pipe and rainwater went down another. Sir Edwin was not alone in his advocacy for dual pipes but, in the end, the authorities chose a different option - a single pipe sewage system designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette.

The Great Stink of 1858 even led to the business of the Houses of Parliament being suspended so, having been appointed as Chief Engineer for the Metropolitan Board of Works, Bazalgette’s combined system was built and London’s sewage and rainwater empties into a series of sewers running along the Embankment next to the Thames.

From the embankment in our capital city, the waste flowed east, was collected then emptied into a falling tide into the North Sea.

Bazalgette's decision, to choose the combined system and ignore the challenges of people like Chadwick, literally changed the world forever - for better and worse!

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One pipe or two?

The Victorian sewers are, of course, an extraordinary creation, they prevented cholera outbreaks and saved many lives but was Bazalgette’s design the right one or should Sir Chadwick’s dual pipe sewage system have been chosen?

On one hand a system designed for a 1850’s London population of around two million and, over a 160 years later, processing the sewage produced by nearly nine million people has to be considered a success but with the outflows in our rivers and seas occurring on more than 60 days a year (just in London) it feels like London chose the wrong solution.

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The connection between sewage and payments?

Bazalgette’s marvel laying below the Embankment is often used an example of the resilient, scaleable and expanding attributes of a payments infrastructure - particularly the UK’s planned New Payments Architecture (NPA).

On one hand Bazalgette’s foresight to double the capacity originally sized for London in anticipation of the future needs is a great pointer to be aspirational in scaling the NPA - after all after over 15 years of Faster Payments volumes continue to enjoy double digit growth.

However, seven years after the Payment Strategy Forum delivered its blueprint, six years after Pay.UK was created, the scope of the NPA deviating from its original design, with a NPA vendor yet to be announced despite a long procurement period and the Future of Payments Review calling for a NPA programme reset perhaps now is the time to consider a fundamental change in the design of the NPA?

The HM Treasury commissioned Future of Payments Review referenced aspects of the NPA programme:

• “…..the design assumptions made in 2017 do not reflect current trends and are less likely to do so in 2026 {the planned deployment date}.

• 58% of respondents to the review mentioned the NPA and of these mentions, 36% were positive, 24% were neutral and 40% were negative.

• At interview contributors were more forthright, with verbatims across a wide diversity of stakeholders describing progress in emotive terms.

• The review observed that confidence in a timely and successful delivery of NPA appears variable at best.

It’s important to recognise that the report stated that there was a strong desire for infrastructure innovation and renewal, and much energy to help NPA (or perhaps a new npa?) succeed.

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Are you a Chadwick, a Bazalgette or a Bazalwick?

The HM Treasury led debate on a national payments vision and strategy will encompass resetting the NPA so, perhaps, now is the time to embrace the Chadwick approach and split true Real Time payments (Faster Payments 2.0) and Batch (mostly Direct Debit 3.0) payments into two “pipes” with a single approach to settlement.

Where are you on payment rails?

Are you a Bazalgette (one set of rails), a Chadwick (two sets of rails) or Bazalwick (two sets of rails with a single settlement approach)?