Making a clean start

Mar 5 2009 Agenda

Peter Douglas Osborn says a new recycling plant is part of the tradition of public health advances.

The decision to approve a groundbreaking recycling plant in Tyseley arises directly from the fact that this country produces 750,000 tonnes of nappy waste per year, which at present finds its way into municipal and country landfill sites.

The project, to be run by a company called Knowaste, will provide 22 jobs and deal with 36,000 tonnes of local nappies a year, which will then be recycled into roof tiles and cladding.

It is hoped that methane resulting from the process, by being burnt in power generation equipment, will make the site self-sufficient and possibly contribute electricity to the National Grid.

The civic relevance is, in effect, a public health issue and our need to tackle that issue. Not since 1842 has this country decided to deal with the potential health problems arising from the non-treatment of human waste left in a static environment. The dangers of contamination, which can feed into the water table and in some places to the water supply, are obvious.

In those early days of Victorian welfare experimentation, one Thomas Chadwick was employed to deal with reducing the number of deaths arising from dreadful sanitary conditions.

The Chadwick Sanitary Report of 1844 addressed the frequent and, that year, calamitous outbreaks of Asian flu, cholera and typhus. Nearly ten per cent of Britain’s city population regularly fell ill as a result of these two diseases and, in a bad year, as many as eight per cent could die.

It was not limited to the poor and destitute. These diseases knew no class barriers, indeed the Queen’s Consort – Prince Albert - died of typhoid, probably from drinking contaminated water, in the last days of 1861.

However, when Parliament accepted the Chadwick report in 1848, the outcome was the first Public Health Act, and, for Birmingham, a consequent devolved public health committee, whose expenditure would be funded by a novel finance-raising power – the ‘rate.’

This was the origin of the local government that still exists today, where the population can be charged rates to administer their collective welfare.

The main features of the 1848 Public Health Act were the establishment of a Central Board of Health, then devolution of responsibility for water supplies and drainage to corporations, which allowed towns with corporation status to have a local board of health. As a further incentive, those towns where the death rate exceeded 2.3 per cent could have a local Board of Health imposed upon them.

However, the national Central Board of Health was not represented in the Cabinet by a minister, as it is today, so had limited power or funds. It was actively opposed in some areas and in those districts improvements were slow, hence the outbreaks as late as 1865.

Coupled with the fact that there were few qualifications in the subject and therefore less qualified staff to fulfil the obligations, the improvements were slow and under-funded until specific Corporation Acts, such as the Birmingham Corporation Act of 1875.

This enabled Joseph Chamberlain to introduce the Artisans Dwelling Act, enabling the compulsory purchase of the unsanitary and dilapidated buildings, or slums, that surrounded Birmingham’s Town Hall. This was his first great project that saw the health of the city improve and, in a spin-off benefit, provide space for the new Council House, municipal buildings and the building of a new street to be called Colmore Row.

Comment was made in the second reading of the Corporation Act that, although the Great Reform Bill of 1832 gave Parliamentary representation to the city, the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 did not democratise Birmingham. Councillors voted in by rate-payers could be out-voted by self-appointed Aldermen, who were not ratepayers.

Last month, the planning committee welcomed this new departure as both an improvement in taking up recycling, but also attending to the consequential health concerns, as a contribution to the sustainability of the city.

* Peter Douglas Osborn is chairman of Birmingham City Council’s planning committee.