Water Policy: The Drinking and Bathing Water Directives

Abstract

Having examined the three ‘big’ decisions, we now move down a level to the 8‘small’ decisions made in four areas of daily policy-making, namely water, biodiversity, air and environmental assessment. The 1972 Paris Summit identified water pollution as a pressing political priority in the aftermath of the Stockholm conference (see Chapter 2). In a flush of enthu-siasm, several EEC states signed international conventions (e.g., Paris, 1974; the Rhine, 1976) to protect shared rivers and the North Sea. But the Commission and the EP were the most instrumental in giving these inter-governmental agreements legal and political teeth by embedding them in EU water policy (Bungarten, 1978, p.166). This chapter analyses the history of two of the oldest and most important items of the water acquis, namely the Bathing and Drinking Water Directives. Today, the 1975 Bathing Water Directive (76/160/EC) is one of the most well-known EU environmental policies, but also one of the most poorly implemented. Long before it was finally amended in 1998, the 1980 Drinking Water Directive (80/779/EEC) was widely regarded as being scientifically outdated. Many states, including Britain, had struggled unsuccessfully for years to comply with the Commission’s demand for compliance to the letter of the law. Contrary to earlier expectations, both Directives misfitted massively with pre-existing national policies in Britain.