Every single river in the country is polluted, new Environment Secretary warns
Every single river in the country is polluted, the Environment Secretary has said as he warned that water companies have been covering up the true scale of sewage spills.
Steve Reed said he is “not surprised” that people are worried about swimming in the sea, lakes and rivers around the country as there is no “guarantee” that the water is not contaminated.
In his first interview since taking up office, he told The Sunday Telegraph: “Every single River in England today is polluted...The public quite rightly are furious that they have to worry about letting their kids splashing about in the river, for fear of what they might catch, because it’s polluted.”
Mr Reed said he will introduce a new system monitoring sewage spills, which involves independent scrutiny of the data, to stop water companies from “massaging the figures”.
The Environment Agency is currently conducting the largest ever criminal investigation into potential law breaking by water and sewerage companies at thousands of sewage treatment works.
Sewage was spilt 464,056 times last year, totalling more than 3.6 million hours, a record high since monitoring began, according to the latest data published by the Environment Agency.
Water companies are permitted to release sewage into rivers and seas during exceptional circumstances, such as extreme wet weather, to stop it backing up into people’s homes.
But the regularity of spills has led to criticism that the industry has failed to invest in infrastructure to cope with changing weather and increasing population.
A cost of doing business
Under the current regime, water companies are fined by the regulator for sewage spills, but Mr Reed said the financial penalties are so low that bosses just price it in.
“Currently, the fines are so low that the company treats it as a cost of doing business,” he said. “It’s cheaper for them to pollute Windermere than it is to fix the sewage pipes that are pumping that filth into the most iconic lake in our country – that cannot be allowed to continue.
“It’s cheaper for them to pay the fine than to invest in fixing the broken infrastructure. That creates a perverse incentive for them not to fix what’s gone wrong.”
He said his department’s new Water Bill will ensure that the companies face “automatic and severe fines for illegal pollution incidents”.
Mr Reed said he will introduce further laws aimed at “fundamentally transforming” the water industry.
This will include setting up a “partnership” between the government and water sector aimed at raising billions of pounds of private sector investment and encouraging water companies to make long-term plans for investment in their infrastructure.
Steve Reed is in good spirits as he reminisces about how he spent his childhood holidays splashing around by the seaside. But the new Environment Secretary’s fond memories quickly turn to anger as explains that this is no longer the experience of families seeking a retreat on the British coast.
“When I was younger, we’d go to the beach and I’d go in the sea and no one worried about it,” Steve Reed recalls. “We’d go to a lake somewhere and I’d go swimming. No one had to think about it twice – you just assumed the water was clean enough to go in and it was.”
He went on to describe how this care-free approach is a far cry from the attitude of families in modern-day Britain.
“Today parents worry about letting their kids in the water for fear of what they might catch. I want to get back to a position where you don’t have to think about that, you just know that the water is clean,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.
“I want kids today, grandkids – I want them to splash about in the water just like I could. I think there’s a huge sense of loss for parents and grandparents to think that their kids can’t do what they could do because there’s too much sewage in our waterways.”
It is not just the sea that Mr Reed is worried about, it is also rivers and lakes across the country.
“I’ve been up and down the country during the recent election campaign,” he said. “I’ve got friends who have experienced the same thing. Either they’ve gone swimming or they’ve put their kids in the water and people have got sick.
“You can’t guarantee that the water you’re going into isn’t contaminated because the Conservative government failed to properly regulate the water companies. They let them get away with this for 14 years. So my job is to turn that around.
“What we’ve inherited from the previous government is a situation where every single river in the country is polluted to some extent.”
Earlier this month, the water regulator Ofwat announced that it was investigating 11 water and sewage companies in England and Wales for potentially illegal sewage pollution.
While water companies are allowed to release sewage during exceptional circumstances to stop it backing up into people’s homes, campaigners say the frequency of spills is evidence that they are acting outside regulations. Last year, water companies released sewage more than 477,000 times, which was a 58 per cent rise on the previous year.
Illegal releases of sewage
The Environment Agency is carrying out a parallel criminal investigation into companies’ compliance with environmental permits.
But the regulator has been criticised in the past for failing to act strongly enough to stop suspected illegal releases of sewage into rivers and seas by water companies.
Part of the problem, according to Mr Reed, has been a regulator that has not had enough powers to keep the water companies in check. One of the new laws announced in the King’s Speech was the Water Bill, which will give Ofwat new powers to ensure water bosses face personal criminal liability for lawbreaking.
It will also allow Ofwat to ban the payment of bonuses to water company chiefs if environmental standards are not met, and it will give the regulator the ability to levy automatic and “severe” fines.
The Bill, which will be brought to parliament in September with a view to getting it on the statute books by Christmas, will also require water companies to install “real-time monitors” at every sewage outlet, with data that can be independently scrutinised by water regulators.
Mr Reed also wants water companies to foot the bill for much higher levels of compensation payments when water supplies are contaminated.
“We’ve had contamination incidents, like the one in Brixham earlier this year,” he said. “The drinking water was contaminated and people were very upset because levels or compensation were very, very low, given the damage that was being done.
“And businesses didn’t get any compensation at all. So we’re looking at how we can increase levels of compensation. I’d like to see it doubled and I’d like to see businesses bought in scope as well.”
Last month South West Water said it would automatically apply a £50 credit to customer bills to offset any cost associated with the contamination issues, after 100 people caught a water parasite disease in the Brixham area of Devon.
Mr Reed pointed out that those in the hospitality sector – such as restaurants, pubs and hotels – were impacted by the contamination but were not eligible for any compensation.
“The water company is responsible for causing this harm – they should be compensating people who are damaged by it and I do strongly believe in the polluter pays principle.”
During the election campaign, the Conservative party repeatedly attacked Labour over their rural policies, claiming that if elected they would “wage war” on rural communities.
Pointing to Labour manifesto pledges to ban trail hunting, end the culling of badgers, and hike charges for gun owners, the Tories claimed that Sir Keir Starmer was treating countryside voters with “contempt”.
Nothing to worry about
Since coming to power, Labour has set out their proposals to overhaul the planning rules to help it meet its promise of building 1.5 million new homes. Under their plans, developers will be allowed to build on the green belt if necessary by taking a “more strategic approach to green belt land designation and release to build more homes in the right places”.
But Mr Reed said that rural communities – who may be concerned that this will result in the countryside being paved over by developers – do not have “anything to worry about”.
He insisted that it will not be the green belt that is built on per se, but rather the grey belt – land technically in the green belt but not of a particularly high landscape value.
“We’re not going to build on the green-belt, we’re going to focus on the grey belt, which is designated green belt but it isn’t. It’s things like car parks, petrol stations – nobody would think of that as green and pleasant,” Mr Reed said.
“So we’ll focus on the grey belt. We’ll focus on brownfield first as part of our approach to planning. But also where areas have got their own local plan in place, then those posts will be respected. If people have got a local plan, if areas have got their local plan in place, which is a statutory framework plan, then it will not be overwritten.
“So no one’s got anything to worry about.”