ELLIE HARRISON
Only one UK river has bathing-water status – how can we clean up the rest?
Every Friday I’m fortunate to get to wild swim with interesting women in a spring-fed lake. “Wild swimming? Don’t you mean ‘swimming’”? someone once jibed. Yes, I suppose so, but I was raised with the kind that accompanied flesh-coloured plasters, vending machines and the smell of chips, so the trees and silt do feel like an experience that warrants a new title. Some irony in my snobbery about leisure centres that turn out to be more hygienic than almost all our wild rivers.
It’s only when humans enter the water that the game changes. For all other life forms, we write a promise that we will try our best so long as budgets allow and no one’s looking. Until this year, there wasn’t a single river in the UK that had been given bathing-water status. For comparison, France has 573. Now, the River Wharfe in Ilkley is the first, following huge effort from local campaigners who had to provide proof that the river was being regularly used for bathing, plus results of a testing regime run by retired scientists that uncovered the scale of sewage dumping that was not only happening regularly but legally, and with the approval of the Environment Agency (EA). Following the victory, the EA is now required to test throughout the year for faecal pollution.
Ilkley amplifies the story nationally about untreated sewage being discharged into our watercourses. According to regulation, it’s only allowed after extreme weather conditions, but in reality it’s happening much more frequently. Figures vary because there is no monitoring of how much is being released or how often. But in a WWF report, one water company said 14% of its overflows were spilling at least once per week.
Even with the overspills, our rivers are in better health than they were. In the 1950s, otters – at the top of the food chain – were on the edge of extinction in Britain. It wasn’t until the 1990s that agricultural and industrial chemicals were banned from rivers and, soon after, the EU Water Framework Directive was introduced, with the aim of improving quality for the health of wildlife and habitats. Things have improved since then. But with only 14% of our rivers rated as “good” in 2018, there is clearly a lot of work to be done.
It’s not just raw human faeces. There are invasive species, litter, street and agricultural run-off in the mix. DIY-related domestic misconnections – where water from toilets, sinks and washing machines are incorrectly plumbed – ultimately end up in rivers and on beaches.
But will it take swimmers across the country to force the hard improvements on behalf of all aquatic life? It’s both a money question and a transparency question. There have been fines for water companies responsible for major pollution events but many penalties are incredibly modest by corporate standards and, depressingly, often inflated by legal fees. What we’re yet to see is an effective ‘polluter pays’ principle to cover the true costs on the environment. Modernising sewage infrastructure on the other hand has an eyewatering price tag for water companies that have stacked up huge debts since being privatised. Many question the conflict between captive market customers, the need for profit and public duty.
There is obvious conflict, too, in handing responsibility for monitoring pollution to large water and sewage companies in England. Particularly after a legal case during which one tried to argue they should be exempt from disclosing information on their sewage releases on the grounds they were a private business. That’s not in the spirit of things. They lost that case and, since 2016, all have to publish that data. It takes determined individuals to stand up to the might of large companies with entire legal departments. No matter which way it goes, it’s exhausting, bruising and manageable about once per lifetime. So, here’s to those who take it on, for no personal gain but the good of us all. A toast with this water, from the cleanest river we have.