Weekend press: Health check of England’s waters faces six-year wait

In our latest round-up of the weekend’s national news coverage, the government is under pressure to accelerate a nationwide health check of England’s waters after admitting that it could take six years to carry out the check which used to be done annually. Elsewhere, one of the world’s biggest engineering and defence companies, KBR, has made a potential $5 billion (£4 billion) takeover approach for the business that decommissions nuclear waste at Sellafield and is helping to build the Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor in Somerset.

Fury as national health check of England’s waters faces six-year wait

A nationwide annual health check of England’s water bodies which used to take place annually, will now take six years to complete, prompting anger from campaigners and politicians, as public alarm grows over the state of the nation’s rivers and coasts.

The assessments, undertaken by the Environment Agency, look at the ecological and chemical condition of rivers, lakes, groundwater, and transitional and coastal waters, and are required under the Water Framework Directive (WFD).

In 2019, the last time the full assessments took place, just 14% of rivers were in good ecological health and none met standards for good chemical health. Before 2016 the tests were done annually, but the government has now opted not to deliver a complete update until 2025, the latest permissible under the WFD.

Clean water advocates accused the government of trying to hide the data.

Rivers activist Feargal Sharkey said: “The future of England’s rivers has been sacrificed in a cynical act of self preservation by the very same failed government agency set up to protect them.”

The Green party peer Natalie Bennett said the government “clearly recognised the huge public anger about the parlous state of our waterways, but instead of taking action to clean them up, it is instead trying to hide the data”.

She added that the “stench of pollution, the choking of our waters with sewage, plastics and farm runoff is evident to all”, and that the Green party wanted to see a return to more frequent publication of the river health statistics. “Democracy demands transparency, and that’s one more thing this government is not delivering.”

The Guardian and Watershed Investigations, working with the Wildlife Trusts, found that partial results – about 21% of the total assessments delivered in 2019 (20,424 compared with 94,952) – were published this month but not flagged in the usual places on the Environment Agency or Defra’s website. No chemical assessments have been made, fewer ecological tests have been taken, and no canals, coasts, transitional waters or aquifers have been tested.

The incomplete dataset makes it difficult to ascertain an accurate nationwide picture of improvement or deterioration against the previous assessments.

Although the reduction in testing frequency is in line with WFD guidelines, it has disappointed campaigners.

Ali Morse, water policy manager at the Wildlife Trusts, said having “up-to-date data on the state of our waters is crucial to help us target action to protect and restore them.

“Waters are predicted to remain polluted until 2063 because of long-lasting chemicals found at every site checked, but that doesn’t mean we should now stop looking – we need to take action to tackle the pollutants that we can do something about, to monitor to make sure that those aren’t getting worse, and to identify any newly emerging chemicals so that we can put measures in place to prevent their further release.”

Morse said the new data that exists shows that the pressures facing water bodies are not going away. “The combination of issues like abstraction and pollution from farms, sewage works and urban areas, mean that few rivers are healthy. In one of the worst affected areas, the Thames river basin, 95% of the sites with new data don’t meet ‘good’ status, and the figures are similar for the Severn and Anglian river basins too.”

The Liberal Democrats’ environment spokesperson, Tim Farron, commented: “This is yet more evidence of a shocking lack of transparency about the health of our rivers. The government is letting profiteering water companies get away with sewage leaks, while toxic chemicals are finding their way into our rivers. We have no idea just how much pollution is in our rivers and on our beaches. The Liberal Democrats have repeatedly called for the Conservatives to take action, yet instead of doing so they seem to be trying to hide the problem.”

Under the WFD, all water bodies were meant to meet ‘good’ status by 2015. The deadline has been extended to 2027 but it has been known for some time that England’s rivers would miss the extended target date. In 2017, former Environment Agency chair Sir James Bevan told a government select committee that it would not be possible to meet the 2027 date.

Bevan has called for an overhaul of the way the WFD assessments are made, saying it should be less stringent so that more rivers could be given a clean bill of health. He argued that the “one-out-all-out rule”, under which if a water body fails on just one of a number of elements, the whole river fails, masks any improvements that may have been achieved across other parameters.

In the meantime, Defra has set itself a less well defined new target of getting rivers back to close to their natural state as soon as is practicable.

A spokesperson for Defra said the Environment Agency was legally obliged to publish a full set of data for every water body in England every six years. “The last full set was in 2019, with the next in 2025. However, to help with our work, and that of our partners, in the interim we have recently published a limited dataset that was collected between 2019 and 2021.

“We have deliberately targeted most of our sampling at water bodies with suspected problems so that we can get the evidence for investment (for example, from water companies and partners) where it is most needed. We haven’t included chemical or groundwater status which means not all water bodies have been updated.”

A Defra spokesperson said: “It is completely untrue to suggest that the water body data required to be published has been delayed.

“The Environment Agency have just this month published another set of sampling results under the water framework directive – going further than legal requirements. This sampling was focussed at water bodies with suspected problems so that the government and the EA can get the evidence for investment where it is most needed.”

The Guardian

US bidder in £4bn nuclear takeover tilt

One of the world’s biggest engineering and defence companies, KBR, has made a potential $5 billion (£4 billion) takeover approach for the giant business that decommissions nuclear waste at Sellafield and is helping to build the Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor in Somerset.

KBR, formerly Kellogg Brown & Root, has expressed an interest in bidding for Critical Mission Solutions, an arm of the $16 billion engineer Jacobs. CMS employs thousands of people across the UK, both in nuclear infrastructure and projects such as procuring equipment for the armed forces.

News of the expected takeover offer comes as British defence giant BAE Systems finalises a £4.4 billion purchase of the space tech company Ball Aerospace.

In May, Jacobs declared its intent to spin off CMS from its infrastructure engineering business, which has had a hand in projects from HS2 to Crossrail and the Palace of Westminster. Soon after this, KBR approached Jacobs to signal its interest in buying the division, which City bankers estimate to be worth £4 billion.

After Jacobs announced the spin-off plans, Whitehall officials expressed concerns about the lack of certainty for CMS’s many strategically significant UK contracts.

At Jacobs’s third quarter results earlier this month, chief executive Bob Pragada hinted that the company had been approached about CMS. “There has been positive interest from multiple outside parties,” Pragada said.

Jacobs and KBR both hold big contracts with the British government, having pursued a flurry of UK-centred takeovers in the past decade.

Last year, KBR bought the Bristol-based digital defence business Vima Group for £75 million, and in 2021 it acquired Babcock’s consultancy arm, Frazer-Nash, for $400 million.

KBR’s contracts with the UK government last year generated about 9 per cent of its revenues — some £460 million from deals with the likes of the Ministry of Defence and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

It was thrust into the limelight during the Iraq war because it was awarded billions of dollars’ worth of federal contracts related to the conflict. Critics noted that it was formerly a subsidiary of Halliburton, once run by Dick Cheney, vice-president to George W Bush.

Jacobs employs about 10,000 workers in the UK. Last year, its multinational CMS arm generated profits of some £330 million. Jacobs acquired much of its defence and nuclear capabilities through a series of acquisitions, most notably of the nuclear business of Britain’s Wood Group in 2020, and of America’s CH2M, the Panama canal engineer, in 2017.

The company also used to hold a 25 per cent stake in the management of the Atomic Weapons Establishment facility before it was renationalised in 2021.

A spokesperson for Jacobs said: “We continue to make progress on activities associated with the intended separation, but do not comment on speculation.”

The Times

A social tariff could bring a warm glow to UK energy policy

Nearly a decade ago, former Labour leader Ed Miliband sowed the seeds of the energy price cap, vowing to protect households from unfair tariffs by freezing their energy bills. But even though a cap has been in place since 2018, bills today can be far from affordable, even when they are fair.

On Friday, industry regulator Ofgem will set its new limit on how much suppliers can charge per unit of gas and electricity. Analysts at Cornwall Insight expect it to lower the energy price cap from £2,074 a year for the typical household to £1,823, which would be its lowest level since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

But householders shouldn’t expect to feel better off, fuel poverty campaigners have warned. This winter the price cap will remain almost double the levels seen before the war triggered a global energy crisis.

This is because the measure was designed to reflect the underlying cost of supplying gas and electricity to households – and as these costs rise, so does the cap. Households are assured that the amounts they are being asked to pay are fair, but this is cold comfort for those left struggling.

More than 6m households are living in fuel poverty and unable to cover their bills; millions more are expected to suffer financial pain as energy costs continue to fuel inflation across the economy. Now many are asking whether a price cap is the right tool for a market in crisis.

Jonathan Brearley, Ofgem’s chief executive, has urged ministers to reflect on whether this “very broad and crude” price control should be replaced by “a more rigorous framework of providing support for customers”.

Meanwhile, voices across the energy industry are calling on the government to establish a “social energy tariff”, offering vulnerable households discounts on their bills.

Almost 100 charities and non-profit organisations have written to ministers urging them to move quickly to bring the idea into legislation. The plans also have industry backing. Unlike the price cap, this measure could go beyond making sure that bills are “fair” by ensuring that they are affordable for the most vulnerable in society too.

The Guardian’s analysis of bill support continues here.

Snorkeler highlights poor river water quality in East of England

A conservationist has been posting images of rivers as part of a campaign to tackle “very sad” water quality.

Nicola Crockford works for the RSPB but spends her spare time snorkelling in the East of England.

She said pollution in England was “affecting our quality of life and international reputation”.

Water companies face legally binding targets to cut sewage discharges into the UK’s rivers, under plans announced by the government.

Official figures show an average of 825 sewage spills per day into England’s waterways in the last year.

Ms Crockford, who lives in west Suffolk, said: “Water in our rivers should be safe to drink from and swim in and it’s not. We’re the dirty man of Europe. It’s very sad.”

She has been snorkelling about once a week since the start of the pandemic in rivers including the Nar and Heacham in Norfolk.

In a social media post on Thursday, she highlighted near-zero visibility under water in the River Cam near Cambridge, describing it as “one of the most disappointing swims”.

“Should’ve been divine on this gorgeous summer evening, snorkelling 500m up from Braseley Bridge to Byron’s Pool. But shockingly, visibility almost nil,” she wrote.

A murky view underwater in the River Cam, just outside Cambridge. Visibility is low.

An Anglian Water spokesperson blamed the river’s colour on algae and could “confidently say this is not due to a sewage discharge”.

But Ms Crockford said the algae thrived on unnaturally high nutrient levels and called for tougher laws on the agricultural use of rivers.

“The poor visibility is also likely due to unnatural sediment loads due to agriculture and run-off from roads etc. You can see the sediment in the photographs, where there should be none,” she said.

A Defra spokesperson said: “We have been clear that volume of sewage being discharged into our waters is utterly unacceptable.

“That is why our Plan for Water sets out increased investment, tougher enforcement and tighter regulation to tackle every source of river and sea pollution.”

BBC

Utility Week’s weekend press round-up is a curation of articles in the national newspapers relating to the energy and water sector. The views expressed are not those of Utility Week or Faversham House.