Dear Prime Minister

SUCCESSIVE UK governments have presided over a scandal that threatens not only public health but also our wildlife and water quality.

Shockingly, you and your successors have allowed this country to stake a new claim to be a new a contender, not as global leaders but as the “dirty man of Europe”.

Our rivers are a national disgrace. The water industry has been allowed to dump billions of litres of raw sewage into them. Not a single river in England is in “good” environmental health. Each and every single one is polluted.

In 2020 alone, water companies spent over 3.1 million hours on over 400,000 separate occasions dumping sewage into rivers – and it would appear this is just the tip of the proverbial sewage-berg.

The record is not much better in Wales, where sewage was pumped into rivers 100,000 times last year. As a result, our rivers and their wildlife are being slowly killed by a toxic cocktail of untreated sewage, farm pollution and road run-off.

Legislation to deal with this is already in place, yet the Environment Agency has been emasculated by incompetent management and a decade of cutbacks.

The measures in the Government’s Environment Bill are, with regret, not even worthy of the term sticking plaster. Water companies should not be merely required to reduce sewage spills, but to eliminate them altogether.

In 2012 the European Court of Justice ruled dumping sewage into our rivers illegal, except for “exceptional situations”. What, I ask, is exceptional about 3.1 million hours worth of sewage dumped on 400,000 occasions?

We do have an ageing sewage system yet, since privatisation, the water industry has paid out almost £60billion in dividends – money that should have spent on a new, efficient sewage system.

I come to this scandal as a lifelong angler, chairman of Amwell Magna Fishery on the river Lea in Hertfordshire. This is the oldest fishing club in England still using the same waters.

It is where Izaak Walton, on the 17th-century author of the angler’s bible, The Compleat Angler, cast his line.

It is also a chalk stream. And it gets polluted with sewage.

Britain is home to virtually all the world’s 225 chalk streams and yet not one is listed as in “high” overall environmental health.

We are hosting COP26 and lecturing the world on climate change, yet we have 85 per cent of the world’s rarest river habitats and not one of them is in a healthy condition. How hypocritical is that?

As Prime Minister you can do something about this. We need pollution laws properly enforced, the water industry to focus less on dividends to shareholders and more on modernising their infrastructure.

And we need your Government to send out a strong message that you will apply the “polluter pays” principle, which has recently become corrupted tp one of “it pays to pollute”.

And just one word of advice. Before you start wagging your finger at other countries about their environmental record, it might be wise to clean up your own backyard first.

Your, Feargal Sharkey