From pails to pipes ....

I started with a simple question: in my village ‘when was the sewerage built? My village [‘one hour north from London’] being in rural England.

Local friends couldn’t remember about the coming of sewerage, not even the village ‘history society’ (why would they ever want to know?!), but I wanted to find the answer to understand something about long-term ‘effective societal demand*’ for sanitation in a country which has not benefited from external pressures, let alone concessional finance. The date of construction could then be linked to a measure of societal wealth, choosing to use the GDP per person number, but  updated to present day prices at ‘Purchasing Power Parity’. This might then lead to interesting comparisons to other countries, particularly lower-income countries as they face not only the ‘normal’ political choices as to which costs for what level of service might be shared between tariffs and tax revenues but also the international political choices being ‘imposed’ on them by NGOs, bilateral donors and multi-lateral banks.

The answer eventually found in an archive of Annual Medical Officer of Health Reports was 1963, when GDP per person was $16,750 (2020 Prices, USD PPP), the village having achieved ‘piped on premises’ water supply in 1937, at GDP per person $9,900.

Sanitation in the meantime having used ‘slop water drains and ditches’ to move the grey water away from the village, septic tanks for the newer homes with water flushed toilets, and a ‘Closet pail’ collection system for the poorest, unplumbed, houses – a twice-weekly collection system (subsequently weekly) ‘free at the point of collection’. That is no tariffs, the costs borne by a [very] local, and ‘progressive’ taxation system, based on house valuation. The service included ‘free’ annual septic tank emptying (de-sludging); one nearby friend commenting that since the free service ended in 1974 he had never needed to have his septic tank de-sludged – and he was telling me that fifty years later!

The end result of my questioning, having found the remarkable resource of annual MOH Reports, was to bring together 75 years of reporting for the 30 villages in the Ampthill Rural District which could be looked at individually or, the paper recently published (Abstract below) as the achievement of SDG 6.2 across the District. With special thanks to Paul Hutchings who gave the paper the Introduction, context and editing it so much needed.

*Effective demand’ – what people actually spend on various services over a reasonable time period, as opposed to declared willingness to pay – which can be very misleading. ‘Effective societal demand’ includes the concept of ongoing political choices as to where state (‘community as a whole’) resources might be directed based on aggregate demand, physical and political.

PS Living on the outskirts of the village referred to above, my home is yet to benefit from mains drainage, being still on a shared septic tank system 😊.

The role of container-based sanitation in achieving safely managed sanitation in an English rural district, 1900–1975, Richard Franceys; Paul Hutchings, Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development washdev2026182.

Abstract

This study examines the historical development of sanitation improvements in one English rural district, focusing on how service delivery evolved in relation to national economic growth, legislation and local municipal decisions. Using 75 years of Medical Officer of Health reports, the analysis shows that greywater drainage improvements preceded advances in human waste management. Between 1900 and 1950, the district transitioned from pit latrines to container-based sanitation (CBS). Initially, earth-treated pails were emptied onto gardens, but twice-weekly bucket-latrine collections soon became standard – a universal, free service prioritising the poorest villages. Sewerage first appeared in 1910 for a small number of settlements but only expanded widely after 1950, achieving near-universal coverage by the 1970s. We estimate that the district reached the SDG 6.2 benchmark of safely managed sanitation around 1950, based on extensive CBS use. This transition occurred alongside economic growth from a GDP per capita of $7,800 in 1900 to $11,700 in 1950 (2020 USD), with near-universal sewerage reached at $21,900 in 1975. The findings show that safely managed rural sanitation can be achieved through phased, long-term transitions and that CBS – now typically viewed as an urban service model – can play an important supportive role.