Water industry reacts angrily to minister
The bottled water industry has reacted angrily after environment minister Phil Woolas called the sector “daft” and said it bordered on being "morally unacceptable".
Speaking on tonight’s BBC’s Panorama programme, Woolas claims it is “daft” that six million litres of bottled water were drunk every day in Britain when safe tap water was cheaply and widely available.
Woolas’s comments have provoked an angry response from the industry which is worth approximately £1.7 billion annually and accounts for 15 per cent of soft drinks sales in the UK, according to Zenith International.
Jill Ardagh, director general of industry trade body, the Bottled Water Information Office, said: “We find it hard to believe that a government Minister has made such comments but if this is the case, Mr Woolas is clearly ill informed about bottled water and the role it has to play in society, either in this country or other parts of the world.
The minister also said it “borders on morally being unacceptable” to spend hundreds of millions of pounds when the UK has safe drinking water and when parts of the world have difficulty with their supply of water.
Ardagh added: “Mr Woolas is also forgetting the role bottled water plays in crises. He did not seem to think that bottled water was “morally unacceptable” when the Government was desperate for bottled water supplies during last year’s floods. The industry immediately responded with millions of bottles of water.”
Talking to mad.co.uk, Sally Stanley, marketing director at Highland Spring, called the minister’s comments “misguided, misleading and inaccurate”.
Juices and bottled water drinks are expected to increase significantly in the next three years. Marketing analysts Datamonitor recently said that sales will rise between five and six per cent by 2011, equatign to 46 per cent share of soft drink consumption.
To read Branwell Johnson's blog on this issue, visit madcomments.co.uk
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