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Drinking Water Quality in Scotland 2002
1. Executive Summary
The drinking water quality results reported by Scottish Water for 2002 show that there were fewer drinking water quality failures in 2002 than in 2001. 148,349 tests were carried out on samples taken from customers' taps during 2002 and 1,076 (0.72%) of the tests failed to meet the relevant standard. This compares with 1,405 failures (0.81%) during 2001 from 172,755 tests.
Figure S1 Overall number of all water tests on tap samples not meeting relevant standards
The result for the key microbiological parameters show that there were more failures of the microbiological standards in 2002 compared with 2001. The 204 failures of the coliform standard at customers' taps in 2002 compares with 158 in 2001. The number of faecal coliform failures also rose from 23 in 2001 to 30 in 2002. The results from 1991 are shown in Figures S2 and S3 to allow historical comparisons to be drawn and trends to be identified.
Figure S2 shows that the number of coliform tests not meeting the standards at customers' taps in 2002 was less than 13% of that recorded in 1991, which was the first full year of the present Regulations' operation. This statistic suggests that significant improvements have been made to the quality of drinking water in Scotland through the operation of the 1990 Regulations, although there is clearly still room for improvement.
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