Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Jump hard on water firms, less on farmers
Government plans for cleaning up the country’s polluted rivers leave him less than impressed, Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger tells Defra Secretary George Eustice
DEAR George, Things having been a little less frantic for a day or two I have had a chance to study your latest pronouncements about river pollution and how we are going to go about tackling the unholy mess that has been created by – among other things – nutrient-rich discharges from sewage plants.
That we should be having to embark on quite a major exercise to clean up our water industry as well as our inland waters is a matter of regret. But I’m afraid a combination of insufficient monitoring (though the Environment Agency will doubtless point to sustained reductions in its budget as the reason) and, frankly, a cavalier attitude on the part of some water companies has brought us to the current, highly unsatisfactory situation.
And I’m afraid those of my colleagues who have welcomed your proposals as though you had brought them down from the mountain engraved on tablets of stone have failed woefully to appreciate the severity of the situation.
What I cannot understand is why no one has cracked down more ruthlessly on the offending companies which have both blatantly disregarded the law relating to illegal sewage discharges and carried on piping nutrient-rich effluent from sewage works into rivers in the full knowledge of the inevitable outcome.
Even when they have been prosecuted it appears they have gaily scribbled a cheque drawn on the consumers’ account to cover the fine and carried on as before.
I don’t care if the penalties were – as you put it – the largest in history to be inflicted on the water industry. The fact remains that there has been no true accountability for directors or senior management yet here, surely, is a case for putting them and not merely the companies in the
dock. After all, the many decisions to flout the law have been consciously taken by real people – people who should have been dragged into court to face the consequences personally rather than sending some handwringing brief in to grovel for leniency.
Defra’s plans are, I see, to jump hard on farmers with 4,000 inspections a year from 2023 to make sure they have all possible anti-pollution measures are in place and I have no doubt that any actual or potential breaches will be dealt with firmly.
But water companies – the major source of nutrient pollution – have been given no less than eight years to effect a clean-up and achieve (in
your words) the highest technically achievable standards for discharges.
I may be wrong but I suspect the eight-year timescale may have been suggested by the water companies themselves. Doubtless some progress will be made before then but setting a deadline eight years off is a huge mistake. It suggests there is no urgency about the situation when there clearly is.
The cumulative effect of nutrients being piped into rivers over a period of many years is abundantly clear to the point where environmentally important areas such as the Somerset Levels risk losing their internationally protected status because of the damage wildlife has suffered.
This degradation is going to continue for some time to come until the water companies finally get round to upgrading their infrastructure and there is nothing in your proposals, as far as I can see, which will provide even a partial remedy now for the devastation that has been caused.
Such is the extent of that damage and so irrefutable the evidence linking it to sewage effluent that I firmly believe there is a case for imposing ongoing daily fines on the offending water companies until such time as they have put corrective measures in place. It might just concentrate minds a little more.
Yours ever, Ian