No mercy ever shown to small farmers

IF the football didn’t give people anything to shout about then there was no small amount of jubilation taking place this week over the £90 million fine handed down by the courts for Southern Water’s flagrant breaches of the law in dumping raw sewage in the sea.

Not that “flagrant” really does the situation justice. We are talking about 6,971 illegal releases from 17 sites in Hampshire, Kent and West Sussex between 2010 and 2015. That amounts to serial offending by any measure.

Southern Water’s chief executive was good enough to turn up at court and put on a convincing display of contrition, apologising for the company’s actions.

He was, he said, “deeply sorry”. He was, I should imagine, equally mightily relieved not to have found himself in the dock carrying the can for his company’s shortcomings.

But that’s the way of the world. The bigger you are, the more bomb-proof you become.

It will be the company’s shareholders, apparently, who will be taking the £90 million hit rather than its customers – or its well-paid executives.

Though if I were a Southern Water customer I should be examining my bills very carefully for the next few quarters.

But let’s get this straight.

This was not a series of accidental discharges. They were ordered. Someone gave the instruction; someone threw the switch; someone else opened the valve to commit thousands of criminal acts. And yet no individuals are prosecuted? No directors charged?

Extraordinary.

Let’s compare the gentle treatment of Southern Water staff with what happens when a farmer is found guilty of polluting the environment. I can bring two cases to mind.

In the first instance a farmer entrusted slurry-spreading to a contractor who was not familiar with the need to avoid field margins because of the likelihood of polluting ditches. In the second a rat had chewed an undetectable hole in the bottom of the slurry pit, causing a leak.

Neither spillage was deliberate. Yet no mercy was shown. Each farmer was handed a massive fine and extensively named and shamed, earning the opprobrium of colleagues and members of their local communities.

The message is clear: if you’re a small-scale operator you can expect to feel the full wrath of the law – in the way all the smaller farmers in Wales are about to be hit with £100,000 costs for complying with the new NVZ (nitrate vulnerable zones) regulations.

If you’re big enough you can continue to sit at your desk and rake in your huge salary because although you are handsomely paid for running a large company you don’t, apparently, carry any legal responsibility for whatever it does.

Think back a few years and it was clearly the decision of a group of individuals to stop dredging the Somerset Levels – a decision which ultimately led to hundreds of millions of pounds’ damage being caused to land, properties, homes and businesses.

No one was ever prosecuted for this criminally reckless act, either. And obviously nothing has changed in the intervening time.

That’s the way of the world – the bigger you are, the more bombproof you become