CLOSING SESSION

AND REVIEW OF THE SYMPOSIUM

2.30 p.m., Thursday, 1 November, 1962

The President said that the task of trying to sum up the proceedings of the Symposium was a difficult one. If a man in the street, with no technical training or engineering experience, had attended the Symposium he would have to be forgiven for thinking that the water-supply industry of this country was in a pretty poor way. Actually, that was not the position. For over 100 years Britain had been in the forefront in the provision of public water supplies, and today something like 99% of the population had piped supplies of good potable water in adequate quantity. At the same time, industry, although it found much of its own water, had in general always been able to obtain from public supplies everything for which it had asked. Agriculture, on the other hand, with a demand which was extremely difficult to gauge, had recourse to public supplies only when the farmers could not get the water that they needed from their own resources, and that made the position very difficult.