Alarm raised over water firm job of new environment secretary’s wife
Campaigners have raised concerns over a potential conflict of interest for the new UK environment secretary, Steve Barclay, whose wife is a senior executive at Anglian Water.
Barclay took on the environment role in Rishi Sunak’s cabinet reshuffle this week. His wife, Karen Barclay, holds a senior position at the water company, as head of major infrastructure (DCO) planning and stakeholder engagement.
As secretary of state, Barclay is responsible for overseeing the regulation of water companies. He is responsible for ensuring the water firms make improvements regarding sewage pollution via the government’s storm overflow reduction plan.
Anglian Water is one of six companies under investigation by the regulator Ofwat for potential illegal dumping of raw sewage. The Environment Agency is separately in the middle of a huge criminal investigation into illegal sewage dumping by water companies involving more than 2000 water treatment works.
Water companies are pressing government and the regulator Ofwat to approve £96bn investment in infrastructure improvements to fix leaks, stop sewage discharges and build more capacity at treatment plants, which they want customers to pay for via bill rises. Many critics say the public has already paid once for the investment, and should not be made to pay again for fixing problems which put the companies in breach of their legal duties.
Tim Farron, the rural spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, said: “Ministers’ spouses do of course have the right to their own careers, but I do worry about the possible conflict of interest
here for the man charged with forcing the water companies to clean up their act.
“We need to make sure the secretary of state is fully committed to doing everything in his power to stop the sewage scandal.”
This summer, Anglian Water pleaded guilty to allowing millions of litres of untreated sewage to overflow from a water recycling centre in Essex. It was fined £2.65m, the largest penalty imposed for environmental offences in the east of England region.
Ashley Smith, of Windrush Against Sewage Pollution, said there was a possible conflict of interest for the new secretary of state.
“It’s not just that the new environment secretary’s wife holds a senior post at Anglian Water, it is the fact that the water industry routinely operates outside the law, has misappropriated billions of bill payers’ money and now holds the country to ransom to hike bills to fix the mess it made and cannot be trusted to not make off with another windfall gifted by government,” said Smith.
A government spokesperson said: “All Defra ministers declare their interests in line with the ministerial code.“There is an established regime in place for the declaration and management of interests held by ministers. This ensures that steps are taken to avoid or mitigate any potential or perceived conflicts of interest.”
Craig Bennett, the chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts, who chairs Anglian Water’s independent challenge board, said: “It would prudent for him to make sure this has been declared publicly and that it is all out in the open. Then it is something that can be managed.”
Karen Barclay has been approached for a comment. Anglian Water did not comment.
upstream,” he told an audience of delegates from 58 countries, explaining that in order to slow the flowing river of plastic, we first need to narrow its source. “We can’t carry on [producing] at the rate we are. It’s overwhelming any ability to cope with it.”
He agrees with new calls among treaty negotiators to curb “unnecessary, avoidable or problematic” plastics, which could include the deluge of single-use items. “I mean, surely we want to buy the product, not the packaging it’s in,” Thompson says. “I think that’s a key place to start: the most important [type of plastic] accumulating in the oceans and escaping waste-management systems is packaging.”
But while items sheathed in Russian-doll-like layers of plastic are obvious candidates for cuts, certain plastics do bring legitimate value to our lives and are likely to remain with us, Thompson says. “I’m not saying we can carry on with business as usual. Reduce has to be the first action,” he stresses – but for the plastic that remains in use, he believes the challenge is to redesign it.
Just 10% of plastic is recycled globally, a staggeringly low figure that is partly due to the thousands of chemicals that give plastic its diverse qualities, colours and forms and make it almost impossible to remix.
“We do a really bad job of designing stuff for circularity. So when people say that it’s clearly failed because we’re only recycling 10%, I think the root cause of the error is at the design stage,” Thompson says.
“When I talk to product designers, they say they were asked to design a product that was attractive – they weren’t asked to consider end-of-life.”
Like some other scientists, he believes chemical additives need to be reduced in the plastic manufacturing process, with the bonus of making them safer to use. He cites PET bottles as a good example of how simpler construction makes it possible to recycle some products up to 10 times.
Redesign can also soften the impact of plastic during its lifecycle. Take the problem of polymer-rich fabrics that shed plastic microfibres into the sea. Several countries now require filters on washing machines to capture these threads.
Yet Thompson and his team have foundthat half the shedding happens, not during washing, but while people are wearing clothes. Redesigning fabric for longer wear reduces shedding by a striking 80%. “So the systemic answer would work for the planet,” he says. His latest work is examining other design challenges such as car tyres, a primary source of marine microplastics.
Growing scientific consensus on these and other issues could soon be crucial in guiding nations towards solutions, so as a scientist, Thompson is frustrated that there is no UN-level mechanism to communicate the most up-to-date plastics research to governments.
In its absence, he helped establish the Scientists Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, an independent, voluntary group of 200 multidisciplinary researchers from 40 countries who are filling the gap by providing scientific advice to treaty negotiators.
“Scientific evidence has brought us to this point. We’re going to need scientific evidence to go forward in the right way,” he says.
How did he feel in June witnessing nations come together to agree on the need to ban or regulate microplastics – knowing he was at least a part of the reason they were all there? Thompson takes a rare pause in our conversation. “That’s actually making me quite emotional to think about,” he says.
Weeks later, he elaborates. “A whole body of evidence brought us to where we are now with the UN treaty, and even the discussions about microplastics,” he says. “But it was quite a moving moment from a personal perspective, that I felt you could draw a line right back to that paper in 2004.”
Psychologists call it ‘techno-optimism’ … a big gadget in the Pacific gyre is going to mop it all up for us