In the space of just over 15 years, the organization of the water industry in England and Wales has undergone two major structural revolutions. The same period has also seen what amounts to a transformation of British water pollution law, again following two critical cycles, represented in national legislation by the Control of Pollution Act 1974 and, most recently, the Water Act 1989. Long familiar legal approaches to the control of pollution in the United Kingdom no longer hold true, and the coming decade will be a fascinating period during which the true effectiveness and implications of the new controls will be tested.

The Water Act 1973 was focused on the creation of large, regionalized public sector bodies. The new regional water authorities in England and Wales took on combined utility and regulatory functions, and became responsible for nearly all aspects of the water cycle, from water abstraction, water supply, sewerage treatment and land drainage, to pollution control and fisheries management. In formal terms, these arrangements represented what amounted to the most integrated form of water management seen in the world. A year later, the Control of Pollution Act 1974 restructured the system of water pollution controls, building upon the existing system of consenting industrial and sewage discharges but introducing a number of important changes. In institutional terms, the most significant of these concerned the provision of public rights to access to information via public registers maintained by the authorities and to involvement in decision-making on individual applications for consents. The opening up of what had previously been, in legal terms, very much a “closed” regulatory system was a radical departure for British pollution control practice, and one that has only recently begun to be followed in other areas such as the control of industrial air emissions.

William Howarth’s Water Pollution Law presents a picture of the system shortly before the passing of the Water Act 1989, which saw the most recent revolution of British water administration and law. At the time when he wrote the book, no Bill had been published, but a sufficient number of Government consultation papers had been released to allow Howarth to make accurate predictions on the general shape of changes on the horizon. His book, though, is not fundamentally a critical analysis of institutional or policy themes, but aims to provide a comprehensive account of the complex web of legal provisions concerning water pollution. The style and manner of presentation, frequently based on a section-by-section summary of relevant legislation, and including in the Appendix lengthy extracts from relevant statutory provisions, makes such a work especially vulnerable to becoming outdated. In this respect the Water Act 1989 has made large portions of the book redundant as a contemporary guide. To be fair to Howarth, he covers other areas of law not affected by these changes, such as the common law of nuisance and the regulation of oil pollution at sea, but the heart of the book now requires re-working. This is a pity, because Water Pollution Law as a whole is attractively produced, well indexed, and performs a valuable function in gathering together much disparate material into a reasonably compact form.

The provisions in the Control of Pollution Act 1974 concerning water pollution incorporated significant departures from previous practice, but in one important respect, which is reflected in Howarth’s book, a more familiar British approach to legislative drafting prevailed. While the Act contained detailed and complex procedural requirements concerning