Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Jonathan Guest and I am a rural surveyor with over 40 years’ experience. I am a fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and a director of Savills (UK) Ltd, based in the Perth office. I am also a farmer with land situated within the area that is drained by the Pow of Inchaffray. I have been the surveyor to the pow commission for 30 years and one of the six commissioners for over 20 years. I walk the pow every year and I am very familiar with its operation and the land that it benefits. My professional experience as a surveyor has included designing and organising land drainage schemes and building construction.
I refer committee members to the location plan, which is in your papers. Before the pow and its side ditches were constructed, the low-lying land between Dollerie and Methven Moss, which extends to approximately 1,930 acres, was a boggy marsh. If you look at the plan, you will see Methven Moss on the right-hand side. Immediately to the right of that, there is a number 3 on the minor road. I am afraid that the plan has been slightly clipped. It should be 38. That is the height in metres above sea level of the ground at that point.
If you look to the west, about halfway along the plan, along the blue dotted line, you will see Inchaffray abbey, which is where the Pow of Inchaffray gets its name from—of which, more later. A little bit further to the left, you will see Quarterbank. There is a bridge there called Auchlone bridge, and you will see another number: 39. Again, that is the height in metres above sea level. That tells us that, between Methven Moss and Auchlone bridge, the land is flat or even rises slightly.
If you follow the blue dotted line further along, you will see Tuchethill. The line goes across a road there, and that is Dollerie bridge. You will see another number there: 37. That is the height in metres above sea level there, so there is a 2m drop between Auchlone bridge and Dollerie bridge. If you follow the blue dotted line, you will see that it goes round and joins the River Earn. There is a contour there, just to the right, that is labelled 30m. The ground level where the pow joins the Earn is slightly lower than that, so there is a fall of more than 7m in the last short distance.
The drainage of the land, particularly down to Dollerie, is crucial from the point of view of the pow. The reason why there are such different gradients above and below Dollerie is that, at Dollerie, there is large area of hard sandstone bedrock, which in effect acts as a plug that prevents water from draining from the flat valley bottom upstream to Methven Moss.
In the middle of what was a boggy marsh was a small island of dry land on which the monks built Inchaffray abbey. The story goes that the abbot of Inchaffray blessed the troops before Bannockburn and, in recognition of that, Robert the Bruce enabled the monks to commence work to form the pow and drain the valley. With the dissolution of the monastery as a consequence of the reformation, operation of the pow fell to the local landowners. That was first regulated in the 1696 Act in favours of the Heritors adjacent to the Pow of Inchaffray, which I understand was one of the last acts passed by the Scottish Parliament before the Act of Union in 1707.
In the 1840s, the landowner proposed a significant further improvement to the pow. Once again, the scheme was based on lowering the level of the sandstone plug at Dollerie, so that drainage of the land upstream could be improved. The scheme’s high cost necessitated the introduction of an equitable means of sharing the cost between the owners of the benefiting land, hence the Pow of Inchaffray Drainage Act 1846.
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The central feature of the act was a detailed survey of the land that benefited from the pow. Alastair McKie has handed to members a photograph of the original plan, which is about 10 feet long and is a fairly fragile document belonging to Tony Murray, who used to lived at Dollerie. The survey was conducted before the improvements were carried out and then repeated on completion of the work after the 1846 act. The surveyors assessed the value of the resulting improvement to each field within the benefited land, and that 1846 valuation forms the basis of the annual assessment that each heritor—which is what the act calls anyone who owns land within the benefited area—has paid ever since.
The rateable values for United Kingdom business rates are revalued every five years; by comparison, the 1846 pow act made no provision for any revaluation, so the annual assessments that are levied by the commission today are still based on the 1846 valuation. Whereas the rate in the pound for business rates is 46.6p, the rate for the pow is £17.50. That means that the current assessments are 17.5 times the amount of the valuation, which in itself demonstrates the historical nature of the valuations that are still used. In 1846, there were no buildings on the benefited area. The 1846 improvements enabled the Perth to Crieff railway to be constructed—if members look at the map, they will see a dotted line saying “dismantled railway” that runs adjacent to the pow for a considerable distance. That could not have been built without the 1846 improvements.
At Balgowan, a station, and a limited number of houses associated with it, were built at that time. Since then, a few more houses have been built within the benefited area, but a revaluation, although desirable, could be achieved only by legislation. The commissioners have always had a policy of economical budgets and the very high cost of promoting a new act at Westminster, which we looked into 25 years ago, was way beyond the means of the commission, so the idea was dropped.
In the early 1990s, the Manor Kingdom development of an additional 54 houses at Balgowan increased the pressure for a revaluation and, opportunely, the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament meant that promoting a bill might just be within the means of the commission. Here we are.
All the residential properties rely on the pow and its tributaries for drainage of surface water and foul water. Many administrative features of the 1846 act have become out of date and impractical. The drafting of the new bill has been debated and discussed at great length by the commissioners and their legal advisers over the past three years. One recurring theme has been that the administration of the commission must be as simple and straightforward as possible, so that administrative costs continue to be kept to the minimum and the policy of economical budgets continues. The aim is that the proportion of the budget that is spent to maintain the pow is maximised, so as to give the heritors good value for their money.
The cost of introducing the bill has placed a huge strain on the commission’s finances, so that very limited work has been carried out on the pow for the past three years.
The 1696 act operated for 150 years and the 1846 act has operated for 170 years. It is hoped that, by having simple, future-proofed procedures, the pow can continue to be run economically and that the bill, if enacted, will provide to be as durable as its two predecessors.
I submit that the success of the bill is vital to all those who benefit from the Pow of Inchaffray. However, I suggest that the bill is of much more than just local interest. There are many pows and man-made arterial watercourses in Scotland and throughout the United Kingdom. With flooding a topic of national interest, the maintenance and administration of those watercourses is an important topic. The bill has the potential to influence the administration of other watercourses and to become a template where a statutory commission is appropriate in other situations.