How Britain’s waterways became a dirty joke – and why we should act now
Adam Vaughan explains why The Times has felt compelled to launch its Clean It Up campaign to address the country’s polluted waterways
‘I shouldn’t have to dedicate hours a week to trying to fight for the very fundamental right to clean water. But it’s hugely important,” said Ed Acteson, a 37-year-old marketer living in Whitstable. “It’s ridiculous: I’ve got a full-time job, my wife’s got a full-time job, we’ve got two young children.”
He formed the campaign group Whitstable SOS with other local swimmers in 2021 when Southern Water gave a “woefully inadequate” response on curbing sewage discharges at sea. The problem has not gone away: only last month a boatbuilder shared grim video footage of floating brown sewage in Chichester Harbour, also covered by Southern Water.
Acteson is just one of thousands of ordinary citizens across the country who have created groups to fight against water pollution of their rivers, lakes and beaches.
Last year was a high water mark for the issue. People protested over sewage pollution from the Thames to the Wye and Cornish beaches, Labour and the Tories used their party conferences to compete on talking tough about the water industry, and regulators threatened jail sentences.
Only 16 per cent of waters are considered close to their natural state, classified as good ecological status. The government has a target of reaching 75 per cent by 2027, but the number is unchanged from five years ago. The stall is partly due to the exacting “one-out-all-out” principle of the water quality directive, where failure to meet one of the many biological and habitat measures means the water fails to meet good status.
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Beyond stringent standards, there is a combination of factors that explain the worrying state of beaches and rivers now. Clean It Up — The Times campaign for clean water — will examine these, look at what is being done to improve the country’s waterways and demand faster action.
People are rightly angry about water pollution. But it’s worth taking a long view to consider the strides that have been made, says Mike Bowes, who leads the river water quality group at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, a research institute. “When we started urbanisation and the industrial revolution in the mid-1800s a lot of our urban rivers were in a shocking state. All the waste was getting discharged straight into our rivers,” he said.
The Victorian age’s chronic problem became an acute crisis with the Great Stink of the river Thames in 1858. Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s answer was pipes that took both sewage and rainwater away from Parliament, with emergency valves known as combined sewer overflows releasing them into waterways during heavy rainfall. The UK’s first sewage treatment works opened soon afterwards, at Beckton in east London, in 1864.
The following century, as more treatment works opened and deindustrialisation reduced the pollutants spewed by factories, brought gradual improvements in water quality. The next big shifts came from the UK both cleaving to the EU and moving away from it. On the one hand, England and Wales broke ranks with the rest of Europe by privatising the water industry in 1989 under Margaret Thatcher. On the other, key EU legislation was adopted.
The first was the 1976 Bathing Water Directive, which required monitoring at beaches and other popular swimming spots for bacteria that posed a threat to human health. The directive focused attention on sewage around the coast, particularly in the early 1990s, says Professor Jim Hall, of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford.
“So we saw a lot of investment by the recently privatised water utilities in sewage outfalls into the sea. There was a noticeable improvement,” said Hall, who advises the government via the National Infrastructure Commission. By the early 1990s, 28 per cent of bathing waters met the highest standards at the time. The figure is now 72 per cent.
Another milestone was the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive in 1991. It forced water companies to add a new treatment step at sewage works to tackle phosphorus, one of the two main types of nutrient pollution which cause algae blooms that kill fish and other river life. In 2000 came the Water Framework Directive, which set targets for the ecological status of water bodies, but whose fate is now in question due to the EU retained law bill.
In the Thames, which Bowes studies, phosphorus concentration dropped by 85 per cent between 1998 and 2010. “We saw sudden step reductions in phosphate concentration in the early 2000s, and it’s clearly due to the sewage improvements,” he said.
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This might sound like a story of water pollution being solved. But the reality today is far from that. “Almost all UK waters are polluted. There are very few water bodies that are genuinely in their natural state, and the higher the population density, the greater the water pollution,” said Professor Penny Johnes of the University of Bristol, who chairs the expert group advising the government on the water pollution targets it set in December.
There have been improvements on phosphorus, yet it remains a big problem: only 45 per cent of rivers meet good status for phosphorus. The other big cause of nutrient pollution, nitrogen, has increased as farmers embraced fertilisers over the 20th century. The world’s longest continuous record of water chemistry, taken from measurements in the Thames since 1868, shows a huge increase in nitrate concentrations for 140 years.
Bazalgette’s solution of combined sewer overflows was designed to spill into rivers at times of heavy rainfall when the untreated sewage is most diluted and river levels are highest. But Hall says ageing infrastructure means CSOs are discharging not only at times of extreme rainfall, “but all sorts of times”. A map launched this month by Thames Water makes that clear. The campaign group Surfers Against Sewage found that there were even 141 “dry spills”, when there was no rainfall, from October 2021 to September 2022.
The other big factor is agriculture. While water companies are responsible for 36 per cent of water bodies not meeting good status, agricultural pollution is the reason for 40 per cent not making the grade. The density of sheep and cattle on pasture has gone up in recent decades, along with a rise in intensive pig and chicken farming. In parallel, there has been an intensification of arable farming, which contributes to pollution via greater use of fertilisers and pesticides, and via soil erosion.
“There’s nearly ten million cattle, there’s nearly 33 million sheep in the UK, including Northern Ireland, but being produced on a diminishing area of land. So you’ve got stocking densities that are too high, you’re losing grass cover, you’ve got huge amounts of slurry to manage in the landscape, you’ve got lots of urine and manure being voided directly. And none of that’s going to a sewage treatment works,” said Johnes. The problem is epitomised by the poultry sector’s effect on the River Wye. Concern is so high that the Welsh government has indicated it may “call in” a planning decision for a 100,000-chicken farm near a town in Powys.
Some farmers are clearly trying to curb their impact. Ally McGregor, an arable farmer near Coventry, has worked with the local water firm Severn Trent to build a structure that minimises pesticide and fertiliser from a spraying machine reaching the nearby River Leam. “We all want to do our bit for the environment, and that includes water quality,” he said.
Nonetheless, the collective impact of the 100,000 farms in England is considerable. The Environment Agency inspects water pollution from farms and works on an advice-led basis, rather than leaning on the stick of sanctions. Yet the regulator simply does not have capacity. A 2018 government review found that inspecting every farm in the country for possible breaches of water pollution rules would take 200 years. Capacity has increased, from about 2,000 inspections in 2020 to about 4,000 now. Yet the agency’s new chairman, Alan Lovell, said farmers were “hard to reach” and admitted that the agency was “still not fully staffed-up” for inspections.
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Lovell is clear his other focus will be the nine major water companies responsible for treating sewage that flows from our homes and offices. Over three decades of privatisation, £170 billion has been invested. “What is certainly true is that there was an increase in investment,” said Lovell, of the initial years after the change of ownership. But one senior water sector source said early successes were followed by complacency that has led to today’s environmental problems. “Objectively they got really good stuff done. But I think industry then got really complacent then, because they drank their own Kool Aid about how great they were,” they said.
Sir Dieter Helm, professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford, says water was one of the most unpopular privatisations. But it went ahead because the Conservative Party thought private was good and public water bodies were grossly inefficient, and because the Treasury could see that EU laws meant big expenditure was coming. Helm thinks that three decades later there is no obvious difference between public and private ownership. “At the 2019 election, when Jeremy Corbyn was promising to nationalise, there is no evidence that the British companies are more or less efficient than the European companies, all of whom are in the public sector,” he said.
Debate continues about whether water companies have managed to extract too much profit and pass on too many billions of pounds in dividends. The companies have also borrowed heavily and now have £56 billion in net debt, leading Ofwat, the regulator, to warn that rising interest rates put firms at risk of collapse.
Helm says it’s easy to blame the companies, but he believes the big failings have been on regulation. Water companies, like energy networks, are regulated monopolies. There is the economic regulator, Ofwat, which determines how much companies can spend over five-year periods, balancing investment against household bills. Helm said Ofwat should have insisted on more investment but was too concerned that water bills — which have stayed roughly flat for a decade — didn’t go up.
Then there is the Environment Agency for England and Natural Resources Wales, which provide technical advice to Ofwat and can take enforcement action over egregious water pollution incidents. The EA has been hit hard by austerity. Its government grant for environmental protection, including sewage spills, fell from £120 million in 2010 to £40 million in 2020. Water quality testing by the agency has “declined drastically” over the past five years, Bowes said, with many rivers that were sampled monthly now only checked quarterly.
Public outrage had been mounting before the arrival of Covid-19. But pandemic restrictions meant that many people turned to their local waterways, for walking, fishing, swimming, paddleboarding and more, turbocharging interest in water quality. “I saw that in Oxford, with hundreds of people in the river. So you’ve got a combination of chronic issues getting worse, and raised public awareness,” Hall said.
Raised awareness has led to an army of ordinary people turning into water pollution campaigners. River Action UK, a charity, says there are now at least 300 such groups across the country. Many have shot to national prominence, such as Whitstable SOS in Kent and Windrush Against Sewage Pollution, named after a Thames tributary. Feargal Sharkey, the former Undertones singer and environmental activist who is today backing The Times Clean It Up campaign, has risen to become the movement’s unofficial figurehead.
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The clamour for tougher action is growing. Last summer Emma Howard-Boyd, the chairwoman of the Environment Agency at the time, called for prison sentences for water chief executives and board members whose firms are responsible for the most serious pollution incidents, after what she branded a “shocking” year for sewage spills. Weeks later, firms faced public anger after heavy rain led to sewage alerts across dozens of beaches, including Seaford in East Sussex, where the water turned murky.
Political and public anger, and the decades-long infrastructure needed, mean tackling water pollution will be a huge issue for years. The Liberal Democrats are already putting river clean-up leaflets through doors in a bid to woo Tory voters in swing seats in southern England. “It’s a really major, major issue,” said Charles Watson, chairman of River Action UK. In the last general election, parties fought to outbid each other on tree-planting pledges. With another election looming, our rivers and beaches are set to be the new environmental battleground.
The Times is demanding faster action to improve the country’s waterways. Find out more about the Clean It Up campaign.
