Ineffectual EA presides over the death of England's rivers

England’s rivers are in a dire state, but the Environment Agency, supposed guardian of our natural environment, is threatening to make a bad situation worse.   

Earlier in August the EA’s chief executive, Sir James Bevan, proposed reforming the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD), the lodestone legislation that sets the standards for water quality in the UK.  Sir James suggested that the WFD core principle of one out, all out should be set aside. The ‘good’ status of a river or other body of water is met if all parameters are qualified as good. Missing one single parameter is sufficient to downgrade all of them. But Sir James believes that needs to change.

Currently, just 14% of our rivers meet good water quality standards. If Sir James got his way, rivers categorised as ‘good’ would increase to 79% at the stroke of a pen. Is this the action of a genuine environmental steward?

Sadly, and under his watch, our rivers are being badly damaged, primarily by water companies, who abstract them to supply drinking water, and then discharge sewage back into the river (after treatment at the sewage works). Agricultural practices also damage rivers, for example by pesticides or slurry entering rivers through land run off.  But recently our river water quality has become much, much worse.

To give you a sense of the problem, a Guardian investigation (i) found that water companies discharged raw, untreated sewage into English rivers on 200,000 separate occasions in 2019. Put another way, human shit and other nasties were dumped in our rivers for more than 1.5million hours last year.  

The EA is responsible for making sure water companies fulfil their legal obligations to treat sewage before releasing it into waterways. Under EU law, untreated sewage may only be allowed into rivers in exceptional circumstances, such as very heavy rain, and all the combined sewer overflows (CSOs) where the sewage enters the river should be monitored. The Guardian found that 30% of overflows owned by the water companies had no monitoring installed, at all, so it’s certain that 1.5 million hours – bad enough on its own - is an underestimate. 

In West London, where I live, I’m alerted to raw sewage discharges by @ThamesCSOAlerts on Twitter. And these alerts happen a lot …. In fact, just about every time it rains. At least the outfalls are monitored so we know when the river is going to be full of crap. But the Guardian data underlined that much of the sewage entering our rivers is unmonitored, and goes unpunished.

In 2017 the EA bought just 16 prosecutions against water companies. In 2019 an EA spokesperson told Unearthed: “We’ve carried out 40 successful prosecutions against the water and sewerage companies in the last four years resulting in fines totalling about ￡33 million. (ii) 

That sounds a lot, but consider the dividend payouts made by those companies to their shareholders, most of whom are foreign investment banks, pension funds and alternative asset managers. Overall, water companies have paid out more than ￡2bn a year on average to shareholders since they were privatised three decades ago, and ￡13bn in dividends during the last decade alone. The fines are small change. 

Meanwhile the EA’s chief executive thinks it’s a great idea to water down quality standards. EA staff do an incredible job in the face of government budget cuts, competing spending priorities, political and public indifference and rampant pollution by water companies and farmers, but they are badly served by their senior management.  

If James Bevan cared about our riverine environment, he and his fellow board members would surely resign on principle in order to draw attention to the parlous state of our waterways. 

But he is a silent presence, seldom engaging in public debate, shielded by the badge of office and choosing instead to offer platitudes in response to the unfolding disaster.  Bevan’s laughable response to the Guardian story? “River quality is better now in many rivers than during the industrial revolution.”  The industrial revolution finished in 1840, 180 years ago. 

Fortunately, people who love our rivers, including the tremendous Feargal Sharkey, organisations such as the Wild Trout Trust, The Rivers’ Trust, Surfers against Sewage and many others refuse to take the EA’s ineffectual handwringing lying down. These groups need our help and support.

Our rivers, especially our world famous chalkstreams (iii) are England’s equivalent of the Amazon Rainforest. Sadly, water companies, aided by our so-called environmental policeman, have become the UK’s equivalent of logging companies, bleeding our rivers dry in the pursuit of profit, filling them full of sewage, and reserving their profits for dividend payouts and eye-watering salaries, when they should be investing in reservoirs and improved treatment works.  

To borrow from Mr Sharkey: “And the EA does what, exactly?    

(i)                      https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/01/water-firms-raw-sewage-england-rivers

(ii)                     https://www.ft.com/content/8fbcef46-841e-11e8-a29d-73e3d454535d

(iii)                   There are approximately 200 chalkstreams in the world, and England is home to most of them. They rise in the chalk bedrock. The chalk acts like a giant sponge, filtering out impurities and releasing gin clear water at a constant flow and constant temperature.