Western Morning News (Saturday)
Ian Liddell-Grainger Water companies must clean up their act
Credit where credit is due and I am considerably cheered by the lengthy list of our intentions vis-a-vis the water industry and improving the quality of our rivers and other waterways.
Yet in my mind I still hear the sound of stable doors being slammed and the retreating clatter of galloping hooves. Because what I and a lot of others need to know is not merely how we have allowed environmental standards to fall so dramatically over the last 20 years or so, but what part a privatised water industry has played in that process.
To my way of thinking there can only be one answer to the last point: a very large one.
As my briefing paper puts it, none of us voted to allow water companies to pump sewage into our rivers. Far from it: we actually called for a package of measures to reduce harm from storm overflows.
Yet – partly, I believe, through a lack of early intervention by the Environment Agency – these highly damaging discharges have become more frequent and more deleterious to the embarrassing point in my case
Sent a list of the Government’s intentions under the new Environment Act, Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger tells Defra Secretary and Camborne and Redruth MP George Eustice in an open letter that voters will want to see action rather than more words
where I am gazing out across what is supposed to be an internationally protected wetland but one from where, if rapid action is not taken, that designation may well be withdrawn, so polluted and harmful to wildlife have some of the rivers and rhynes become.
I will undoubtedly get behind the Environment Act which promises all kinds of remedies from our current, shameful state of affairs but I want to see those water companies jumped on, and jumped on hard. No more second-chance, third-chance or fourth-chance approach.
The shareholders have done remarkably well out of their investments but the environment has paid a dreadful price to allow that to happen.
That has to stop, the lever has to be shoved firmly into reverse and we need to get the water companies collective noses to the grindstone to put right the results of their all-too-obvious failings.
I am, however, slightly perturbed by the reference to the pollution from farming run-off. That accounts for a relatively small proportion of the problem compared with the damaging effects of discharges from sewage treatment plants which have not been ungraded to cope with additional loads from new housing developments.
Only once that source is removed from the equation does the contribution from farming assume any significant dimension so let’s keep the whole thing in proportion.
I know the vast majority of farmers do what they can to control run-off and keep it to a minimum but circumstances often conspire against them – such as the ridiculous regulation summarily handed out about autumn muckspreading. And there has to be a sensible approach to the situation; it’s no good the Environment Agency marching in like the Spanish Inquisition and demanding the immediate installation of new slurry management systems if the cost of the work is such that the farmer’s only option is to sell the herd.
That – as someone has remarked recently – smacks of trying to scale back livestock farming through the back door, though you, I should imagine, would deny such a course of action could ever be contemplated.