Bevan: Funding must be restored to protect rivers

The health of England’s waterbodies is flatlining according to the chief executive of the Environment Agency who blamed its inability to properly monitor regulated companies on lack of funding.

Speaking to the Environmental Audit Committee on river health, alongside chief executives of Ofwat – David Black – and Highways England – Nick Harris, James Bevan said the agency would need to return to the level of funding it received in 2010 to be able to carry out its work.

The agency’s budget has been slashed from £120 million 11 years ago to just £40 million this year which, Bevan said had restricted the monitoring, inspection, prosecution and other work it could carry out.

“I would like to see grants restored and get back to where we were 10 years ago,” Bevan told the EAC. “That would make a massive difference in terms of the number of people we could have and in terms of hardware. We need to invest in better and more modern monitoring. We spend a lot of the money we do have on improving water quality, I’d like to do more of that and to do more surveillance of the water companies.”

The EA’s latest assessment of water bodies in England showed that only 14 per cent were classified as “good” ecological standard, despite overall performance of water companies improving, according to Bevan.

He told MPs the annual Environmental Performance Assessment (EPA) due to be published later this year will show the “lowest number of serious pollution incidents ever recorded” with more water companies achieving the highest level of performance for key requirements to protect water bodies.

The EAC grilled Bevan on the monitoring and reporting work undertaken by the Agency and the decline in river health. He admitted that there were insufficient staff to properly monitor waterways with dedicated staff numbering in the “low hundreds”.

“Given the length of river systems in this country, having only few hundred people to oversee it is a pretty tall ask,” Bevan said and explained that 9000 sampling visits are carried out each year by EA staff.

Water companies have installed event duration monitors (EDMs) on c.12,000 of the c.15,000 combined sewer overflows in operation with remainder on track to have an EDM installed by 2023.

Bevan said that without definitive data the EA could not confirm that the use of CSOs has become routine rather than exceptional. “We think that’s likely to be happening because of more people, more developments, more sewage, climate change causing heavier rainfall events. We are sure that when the data is in, we will see evidence of more spillages but do not yet have the data.”

Interim Ofwat chief executive David Black admitted that storm overflows have been overlooked because of lack of data but said with better information they now will get more attention in future price reviews. He added that work must be done in other areas to improve river health.

A previous EAC hearing was told by ex-EA staff that monitoring was “absolutely dreadful” and the agency lacked expertise to understand and interpret data from wastewater treatment works. Despite other monitoring options being available, witnesses told MPs the EA had failed to implement adequate techniques due to “institutional inertia”.