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and fifty houses in Lcwisham Parish; thus the area directly benefitted is
distinct from the area drained: the former is exempt from charge, and the
whole burden thrown upon the latter.
2nd.—That the construction by the Commissioners of Sewers of two
Main Sewers for the drainage of one area, viz: the Ravensbourne and Lee
Green, and the Ravensbourne and Sydenham Sewers, which, for a considerable
length, run parallel, and at a short distance from each other, is an
acknowledged mistake in engineering, involving the utter waste of an
immense sum of money, by the expenditure of which no benefit whatever
is anywhere derived.
That should the foregoing considerations fail to satisfy your Board of the
propriety of transferring the cost of the Ravensbourne and Sydenham
Sewer to the Metropolis at large, your memorialists submit that the entire
area (within the limits of the Metropolis) capable of being drained, although
not at present actually draining into such sewer, should be charged to the
cost of its construction; and that as the drainage of Penge must eventually
be connected with the Ravensbourne and Sydenham Sewer, that Hamlet
should have been charged with a proportionate part of the cost of the
Sewer. And your memorialists submit that, in order to the efficient drainage
of Penge, it is of the highest importance to provide for including in the
Metropolitan area, the portion of the Parish of Beckenham which intervenes
between Penge and Lewisham, and which solely prevents the construction
of a junction Sewer between the Sewers already constructed in Penge and
the Ravensbourne and Sydenham Sewer, and thereby connect Penge with
the Main Drainage system.
Your memorialists further submit that the difficulty experienced in many
districts in localizing expenditure on Sewerage works, which deterred your
Board from opening the question of the re-apportionment of the debts of
the Commissioners of Sewers as regards any debts antecedent to the Rock
Loan, does not apply to the Greenwich and Ravensbourne separate Sewerage
districts. These districts were formed so recently as the year 1849,
and with respect to them, therefore, one uniform principle of charge may
and ought to be adopted.
Thus the injustice may be avoided which would otherwise arise from the
principle hitherto prevailing, whereby nearly the whole of the money raised
in Lewisham has been expended on Sewerage works for the drainage of the
adjoining Parish of Lee, while under the proposed altered principle and reapportionment,
such Parish would be freed from charge in respect of the
Sewerage works executed in Lewisham, the cost of which has been defrayed
out of the Rock Loan.
That your memorialists have learned, although the fact is not stated by
your Committee, that the cost of Sewers, the benefit of which is derived by
more than one Parish, has been apportioned between the several Parishes
charged, not upon the universal principle of the annual value of the area
drained, but upon the basis of the acreage of such area. Thus the charge
upon land used for agricultural purposes is equal to that upon land covered
with houses. And your memorialists submit that such a basis is not only
unprecedented and contrary to all existing modes of rating, but, having
regard to the exemption of land from Sewers rates, it involves the anomalous
injustice that the portion of the area charged, upon which there are the