Things I wish people would know/understand/accept about the state of our rivers
The current debate (and on occasions that is a very polite way of putting it) about the state of our rivers concerns me, as a veteran of over 50 years working in/on/around rivers. I worked for a water company for 26 years when I negotiated with Ofwat, the EA and other regulators, then a Rivers Trust, now a Trustee and Member of the key professional institution CIWEM (Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management); in between I was a member of the Regional Flood and Coastal Committee. I state these credentials not for applause but to give a sense that I claim to know what I am talking about and see things from several sides of several fences. What you are about to read is an opinion piece, not a research document, so I will not be splattering it with references, however I am confident that everything I am about to say can be substantiated.
What I see, hear and feel bothers me. For years, mostly the 10-15 after privatisation (we will come to that later) we made significant progress improving our rivers, most especially those in the post-industrial areas of the North where I work and live. That we have salmon returning to the River Don in Sheffield for the first time since the industrial revolution must say something. It is an establishable fact that this is largely due to investment by the water companies in improving sewage treatment, partly due to the need to meet standards agreed while we were members of the European Union.
On the River Aire, where I have spent most of my working life, sewage effluents are now normally treated to standards unimaginable in 1974 when I joined the then Yorkshire Water Authority as a Pollution Prevention Officer.
But what we read daily in the media is that our rivers are in a parlous state, worse than they ever have been, all due to the financial hegemony treating our water industry as a cash cow….
That our media are saying this is indisputable, that millions of people believe it is also true. But simple statements designed to get clicks and headlines rarely, if ever, carry the context and detail necessary to fully understand the situation. What I want to do in this piece is to offer some context, some detail and to provoke (yes, I use that word deliberately) a reasoned discussion about the causes of the current situation and potentially some ways forward.
So let me start with a list of 8 things I wish people would know/accept/understand. There are others, but let’s start here:
- Sewage pollution is far from the only cause of pollution in our rivers.
The House of Commons Environment Committee published a report a couple of years ago in which they identified sewage, agriculture and road runoff as causing roughly one third each of the problems on our rivers.
It was a broad brush statement, and the situation on your local river is likely to be different. The point is that OVERALL, there are significant contributions that have nothing to do with water companies. Unless we address these contributions with the same vigour as we are currently pursuing the water companies, our rivers will not recover. Let’s not shoot all our bullets at the easy target only to find we need them for more serious issues that emerge when we actively look for them! - Discharges from sewer overflows have existed since sewers were ‘invented’ in the Victorian era.They were designed to passively discharge diluted (by rainwater) sewage into rivers when it was raining, in order to prevent sewage flooding of streets and houses. The engineers doing this were doing the best they could and it substantially improved people’s lives by getting sewage away from their homes.
And, by the way, nobody to the best of my knowledge actively ‘dumps’ sewage in our rivers, it discharges passively because sewers are doing what they were designed to do. - Expectations change
What was common practice even 10 years ago is no longer acceptable. We used to encourage people to smoke ‘because it was good for your health!’; we encouraged people to eat hydrogenated fats (margarine) yet now we realise it had serious adverse health effects; we used to discharge dilute sewage into our rivers but now we realise the folly of that. - The problem with CSOs cannot be fixed overnight
Across the country there are tens of thousands of sewer overflows and most do not meet the standards now required. Fixing these is a major engineering effort requiring vast technical, engineering, design and construction resources – to say nothing of the tens of £billions it will cost and the major disruption to our cities as roads are dug up (most sewers run under roads or pavements). The water companies’ current programmes run into the next 15 years or so and accelerating this would cost even more and it’s doubtful if we have the resources needed to do so. - Nor by jailing a few senior executives
If jailing people worked then we would no longer have robbers, fraudsters or even murderers walking our streets. CEOs may well be complicit in doing as little as they can get away with and/or taking as much profit out of the companies as their owners desire – but that’s their job. Until a ‘public benefit duty’ is written into the water company licences to operate, the directors’ primary legal duty is to their shareholder/owners.
6. Standards and expectations change
When I first started, there were a couple of rules of thumb for sewage treatment, known as 30:20 and 6DWF; the first applied to treated sewage effluent, the second to discharges from sewer overflows. Nowadays, in most circumstances, those standards are laughably lax.You might remember that just a few years ago all of our rivers suddenly failed the required standards and we still have 100% failure against chemical standards. What most people do not know is that nothing actually changed – all that happened was a new analytical method found traces of substances (PFAS – ‘forever chemicals’) for which the EA had not previously analysed. If you live in the modern world, your house is full of them – non-stick frying pans, flameproofing on carpets, curtain, sofas, and waterproofing on your fancy rainproof coat.
When I was a kid playing in the sea at Bridlington or Scarborough, the last thing I or my parents thought about was whether or not there were unsuitable amounts of sewage present. Eventually the EU agreed Bathing Water standards and most (of the few originally designated) failed. So sewers that had piped untreated sewage out to sea via short outfalls (sometimes VERY short) were extended and that same sewage was discharged way below the lowest water mark and usually even further out than that. So the standards tightened again and more had to be done. All this time nobody was in the least worried about health risks from swimming in rivers!
7. Nationalisation is not the answer
Really? Yes, really.
Much of the neglect we are catching up with emerged during the last 100 years, during which the sewerage and sewage disposal systems were under the control firstly of Local Authorities and then from 1974 onwards the water authorities – both publicly owned and controlled. In Scotland and Wales, who have different versions of ‘public ownership’ even now, the situation is no better. Indeed, unlike England, Scotland does not even have 100% monitoring of its sewer overflows, so the situation could be even worse than in England!
In public ownership, we would be competing for funds with the NHS, pensions, roads, education etc – all those things that have higher priority in politician’s eyes than sewage. It would also be hostage to the five-year time horizons of most politicians. We got where we are because this is a subject where improvements are easy to kick into the deep grass. Well, the grass has just been cut and we realise that there is a lot to do.
8. Better regulation is imperative
There is an argument that we are where we are now because the primary regulators, the Environment Agency and Ofwat, failed in their public duty over the last 15-20 years.
Both were/are constrained in their activity by both funding and government directive. Ofwat’s ‘prime directive’ has always been to keep bills low, and the EA was emasculated by years of funding cuts, to such an extent that if you are a farmer, you might expect a compliance visit only once every 200 years and the staff inspecting sewage works were by and large done away with.
Even now, the companies are being asked to instal river quality monitors around overflows that rarely discharge (and when they do have insignificant impact) on the basis of a ‘knee jerk’ approach to regulation requiring 100% coverage even where that wastes money. And there are several cases where expenditure is driven by blanket standards without any reference to value for money. When we don’ have enough money to do everything, the regulators need to drive a much more rational approach to spending what we do have.
I could go on, but won’t because you may have other things to do. Perhaps suffice it to say, again, that this whole situation is a lot more complex that Twitter/X, Facebook, The Daily Mail and even The Times and Telegraph would have you believe.
MY challenge is to stimulate an informed discussion so that the huge amounts of money due to be spent in the coming years is spent wisely and not just on the basis of who shouts loudest or whose MP has the ear of the bosses.
Please do comment, challenge, question – politely please 😊