grass roots The dog that didn’t bark. The Environment Agency and our polluted rivers

OR years now evidence has been piling up about the dire state of England’s rivers. The proportion of rivers achieving a good environmental state is a miserable 14% - well under one in five. The waterways of Wales are not quite as bad, but fewer than half of them are in good condition.

In England, it’s the job of the Environment Agency to monitor river pollution. However, the Agency’s role and impact has been steadily undermined by recent governments. Funding for the Agency’s operations has been cut by almost half in the dozen or so years since the Tories came into power, at first with the Lib Dems.

Evidence given to the Commons Environmental Audit Committee over a year ago suggests that the Agency has played an almost supine role in its own steep decline. Questioning witnesses, MPs wanted to know why the Agency had not been ringing loud alarm bells over most of the previous decade.

Some of the most telling answers came from a retired Agency official, Peter Lloyd. In his view, while the Agency goes through the motions of testing river quality, it is often asking the wrong questions. Lloyd worked at the EA for 40 years, during which time he found that the testing of river water was hopelessly muddled and almost guaranteed to fail.

He told the MPs that the monitoring of river water was “incredibly poor.” He went on, “The chemical monitoring of water quality in rivers and effluents was so poor, so inadequate and so misleading that I continually struggled to try to improve it.” Unfortunately, he said, he had little success.

Another witness spoke of a blighted stretch of the river Windrush in Oxfordshire. Professor Peter Hammond said that doing detailed analysis of the Windrush and its tributaries, he found that one stream had suffered a continuous spill of sewage into it lasting around half a year. He reckoned this would never have emerged from the kind of random testing, on say one day a month, routinely carried out by the Agency.

“For six months, that is six months without a break, it was spilling and breaking its permit. That is totally unacceptable. I believe that a six-month spill has completely wiped out the fish population in the brook and probably damaged other parts of the ecology.”

Much of the pollution that most alarms river users is human sewage, or the waste from farm livestock. But witnesses told the committee that the Environment Agency does no routine testing at all for faecal coliforms, the tell-tale biological markers of shit in our waterways.

A campaigner from Yorkshire who gave evidence had been horrified to learn this. Rebecca Malby is co-founder of Ilkley Clean River. Around the year 2020 this group were trying to force the Agency and Yorkshire Water to get polluted sections of the River Wharfe near Ilkley cleaned up.

“The only way we could get regular testing in Ilkley was to apply for bathing water status, because there was no other way of calling people here to test the river.”

MPs were told this was the first time a stretch of river rather than seaside beach had been declared safe for bathing. But Rebecca Malby and her group also learned another fact that is of vital concern for all river users in England.

“The Environment Agency does not measure faecal bacteria. It does not measure the E. coli and enterococci, the things that make humans and animals sick if they go near the river. The stuff that comes out of our toilets.”

The former Agency man, Pete Lloyd, was asked if he knew why the Environment Agency was not testing for faecal pollution.

“The simple answer is that it has never done it. The question is really that a lot of rivers have sewage effluent in them. A lot of rivers will fail any sort of standard for microbiological content. I suppose that has never been considered as particularly relevant or a matter of concern.”

So what, if anything, have the Environment Agency and its leadership done to highlight their situation? Not long ago, the EA chief executive, Sir James Bevan, slipped quietly into retirement. A look at press coverage suggests the most newsworthy action he took in recent years was to threaten Agency staff with the sack if they told the media of their fury over the curbing of Agency powers and over the catastrophic funding cutbacks. Bevan should feel ashamed. And the millions of people who love England’s waterways should hope that the next head of the Environment Agency is a person with more guts and backbone.

Julian O’Halloran