I’m looking for help in this post, and beware because it might be controversial so some parts of our readership.
Basically, I’m getting increasingly fed up about the misrepresentation and lack of understanding about the state of our rivers and the water companies’ contribution to an undoubtedly unacceptable situation overall.
Let’s just have a look at some of the facts, opinions if you like but they are opinions based on 50 years working on improving our rivers.
1. There is no doubt that many of our rivers are polluted to an unacceptable degree, and even less doubt that a small number have been utterly trashed in recent years, a prominent example being the Wye where pollution from chicken farms has got out of control. However, other rivers, let’s just take the example of the West Yorkshire post-industrial rivers, have improved to such an extent that some of them have got salmon returning for the first time since the Industrial Revolution. I personally guarantee that the river Aire, on which I have been working for 50 years, has improved significantly since I started as a pollution prevention officer in July 1974. And that wasn’t due to my efforts, it was actually due to the efforts of the water company in massive investment in improving treated sewage discharges.
2. Recall about 3 years ago when the Environment Agency suddenly decided that all of the rivers in the country failed the quality standards? that was because they changed the rules, not because of any actual deterioration in river quality. The ‘one out all out’ rule (which means that if just one of a huge suite of analyses fails a standard by just a tiny amount the river fails despite the fact that many other analyses could have improved significantly – as happened) and the continued invention of analytical methods for an increasing list of chemicals leaves the classification of our rivers hostage to the ingenuity of analytical chemists (and, by the way, I am one of them).
3. The sewer overflow problem, which has quite rightly been highlighted over the last couple of years, is not new. I remember trying to persuade Defra, the EA and Ofwat to allow for investment in the problem 25 years ago. they chose instead to kick the can down the road rather than put bills up. So we are catching up on decades of under-investment some 25 years later than the problem was drawn to the attention of the regulators who could have done something about it!
4. There have been significant improvements in the quality of treated sewage effluents, largely driven by European Directives. this has allowed the sewer overflow problem to be more visible and quite rightly rise up the agenda. One might argue that this was a typical lack of foresight by government and regulators, none of whom seem to have a horizon of interest going further than five years into the future.
5. The sewage treatment processes we use today were invented over a century ago and were not designed to deal with some of the issues that are now faced. They were not designed to deal with wet wipes, nor pharmaceuticals, nor flea treatments, nor fireproofing chemicals from carpets and sofas… nor have the regulators created any sort of imperative to deal with these issues.
6. Assuming that we had the technology available to deal with some of the issues outlined above, and that’s a highly debatable assumption, we have to take account of three factors before we can fix them. Firstly the cost, secondly the availability of skilled people to both design and construct the solutions, and thirdly the time scale that these works would take.
6a. Costs – I guess that if I dug around the internet for long enough I could find various estimates of the costs of fixing the current problems ( a quick foray via ChatGPT suggests estimates up to £600billion). Dealing with sewage effluent alone is currently costing the English water companies between £30 and 40 billion a year, and that’s with programs that extend for the next 15 or 20 years. I don’t think even that will fix all of the problems that people are concerned about today. Dealing with trace organics and bacteriological problems is going to increase the cost by a factor of between 10 and 100 fold. Where does this money come from? And please don’t tell me it’s going to come from directors bonuses (a total of £114 million since 2014 – yes, a lot of money, but not when compared to the expenditure required) and by clawing back profits already distributed. The first is a pin prick in the scale of the problem and there is no legal mechanism for doing the second. Even if that second were possible it will again be fairly minor in the overall scheme of things. I totally understand that these issues bother people, but I want to get things into perspective and whilst I fundamentally disagree with paying bonuses to underperforming executives and with milking the water companies for excessive profits, I also recognize that the contribution those funds would make to the vast problems we face today is relatively insignificant.
6b. Let’s imagine, for a few minutes, that all the money could be found. What’s the next step? well that is to commission engineers to design and deliver all of the necessary schemes and projects. There aren’t enough engineers or construction people in the country to deliver this within any sense of a reasonable time scale, and most certainly not in the timescale suggested by those who want it to stop overnight.
6c. Yes, some people seem to think that the problem can be solved overnight! More reasonable critics talk about timescales of five to ten years. So let’s assume for the moment that we’ve got the money, we’ve got the manpower , we’d like to do it as soon as possible but then we come up against the fact that the sewers and overflows on which we want to work typically run underneath highways and I know of a few situated right underneath some city centres and other attractions. Do you really want your main roads and city centres dug up on a major scale for a few years!?
7. Maintenance. Any asset needs maintaining, the highly technical ones that will need installing to reduce organic and bacteria even more so. Strange then that the regulators have never allowed sufficient expenditure to maintain these assets properly.
8. If you have read this far then I probably don’t need to explain the complexities of financing the water industry. But with a regulator whose prime directive is to keep customer bills down, constrains the rate of return on capital, whose processes for the five yearly price reviews have got more and more complex the field is set for companies to game the rules. And, without going into the privatisation/nationalisation/someothermodel debate, I would point out that the Welsh and Scottish models have not dome that much better than the English one.
So far, I have elucidated some of the issues to do with river quality and the water companies’ undoubted contribution. If you only read the Daily Mail you might think that ‘fixing sewage’ would return our rivers to pristine condition. How wrong you would be.
Even the House of Commons Environment Cttee recognised that there are three significant contributors to the poor state of our rivers – sewage, agriculture and urban runoff (essentially untreated road runoff). How often does The Sun or The Grauniad or Surfers Against Sewage raise these issues?
Agriculture – the EA has been rightly criticised for not enforcing the Rules for Water that were introduced as statutory guidance as to how landowners and operators deal with farm waste etc. Even with the recent increase in the number of inspections, if you are a farmer you can rest comfortably knowing that you are unlikely to be inspected more than once every 4 or 5 decades!
Farms contribute to a wide range of problems in our rivers including bacteria, phosphates, nitrates, silt, herb/pesticides, runoff from fields spread with farm waste just before (or in my own experience DURING) rain, and more…
Those seeking bathing water quality in our rivers need to start looking at farms as well as sewage, and to look beyond E.Coli. E. coli is only a “faecal indicator organism” — signalling that water or soil has been contaminated with faeces, and might contain harmful pathogens, even if the E. coli themselves aren’t dangerous.
Urban Runoff – far and away the ‘poor cousin’ of the triple threat to our rivers. Disappointingly little research into the impact and/or approaches to remediation. Just imagine what is going to be in road runoff after a prolonged dry period – animal faeces, dead small animals and the result of decomposition of road kill, litter including cigarette tabs, brake dust, rubber from tyre wear, and who knows what else…
So my message is about misinformation, misunderstanding and proportionality. In the (perhaps erroneous) beleif that an informed dialogue is better than a biased debate, I would like your help to answer the questions:
“How do we encourage a more informed dialogue about the challenges faced by our rivers?”
Any suggestions welcome.