Environment Agency calls on water sector to cut pollution

The Environment Agency has called on water companies to cut the amount of pollution incidents harming England’s waters and for penalties to made tougher.

As the public body published its State of the Environment: Water Quality report on Monday (19 February) it warned the sector is responsible for “too many” pollution incidents each year.

Although the overall number of serious incidents has fallen by almost two thirds since 2011, the report revealed 317 occurred in 2016.

Agriculture is now the largest sector responsible for water pollution, accounting for 31 per cent of incidents, followed by the water industry (28 per cent) and urban and transport (13 per cent).

The report said the number of serious incidents by water companies has remained at more than one a week or about 60 a year for the past decade.

Emma Howard Boyd, chair of the Environment Agency, said: “Water quality is better than at any time since the Industrial Revolution thanks to tougher regulation and years of hard work by the Environment Agency and others.

“But there are still far too many serious pollution incidents which damage the local environment, threaten wildlife and, in the worst cases, put the public at risk.

“I would like to see fines made proportionate to the turnover of the company and for the courts to apply these penalties consistently. Anything less is no deterrent.”

The report shows water quality has “improved markedly” over the last 30 years, following more of a century of “poorly regulated” industrial practices.

The Environment Agency acknowledged England has the cleanest bathing waters since records began and rivers that were biologically dead are reviving.

But it said there is more work to do to achieve its ambition of a “cleaner, healthier and better managed water environment”.

Over the past 20 years, the Environment Agency has taken more than 50 million samples to monitor water quality.

The report said in 2016, 76 per cent of the tests used to measure the health of rivers were rated good. However, only 14 per cent of rivers reached good ecological status overall. The Environment Agency said this is because the failure of one test means the whole water body fails to obtain good or better status.

The most common reason for rivers not achieving good status was phosphorus. More than half of rivers have been found to have unacceptable levels of phosphorus, caused by sewage effluent and pollutants from farmland.

The report also states groundwaters have been deteriorating in quality over the last 60 years with only 53 per cent achieving good chemical status in 2016.

Last year, Thames Water was hit with a record £20.3 million fine, for polluting the River Thames with 1.4 billion litres of raw sewage between 2012 and 2014.

A spokesperson for Water UK, said: “The water industry has put a huge amount of effort into protecting our environment. Since 2005 we have seen a drop in the number of serious pollution incidents, down to 57 from over 130. These figures mean that compliance for discharge at wastewater treatment works is currently at 99 per cent.”