The organisers of the March for Clean Water – that’s Feargal Sharkey and River Action, supported by organisations that range from Surfers Against Sewage to the RSPB to the Women’s Institute – make an excellent point: while it’s nice that the government will bring a water bill to parliament, the initiatives revealed so far “are not nearly extensive enough to address the scale of the UK’s water pollution crisis”.
You bet. None of the four “initial steps” announced by the environment secretary, Steve Reed, last month are likely to cause sleepless nights in any boardroom. The first, to ensure companies’ funding for infrastructure investment is ringfenced, read like a description of how the regulatory system in England and Wales was always supposed to work. One fears that the second, to add the protection of customers and the environment to companies’ articles of association, will be cosmetic; directors can always be fuzzy about how they interpret their fiduciary duties.
The third would create “powerful new customer panels” to “hold water bosses to account”. Really? Surely such panels’ powers can only ever be minor compared with regulators’. The fourth would double compensation for customers when basic water services are affected but is “subject to consultation” and seems aimed primarily at rare cases in which water doesn’t flow from the taps, as opposed to being targeted at pollution.
In Reed’s defence, he said his first steps were exactly that, and his “special measures” regime will contain more. The yet-to-emerge detail on chunkier stuff, including personal criminal liability for water bosses and new powers for Ofwat to block the payment of bonuses, may carry more weight.
Behind it all, though, sits the basic imperative to ensure environmental laws are enforced, not just on sewage discharges but also on agricultural runoff. That is rightly one of the campaigners’ core demands. It comes down to the government’s appetite – or not – to back regulatory reform and fund an effective enforcement regime.
Ofwat, as the economic regulator that took a decade-plus to wake up to the size of the companies’ dividend-extraction after the leveraged buyout boom of 2004-08, naturally tends to cop most of the heat for the industry’s failures. But the Environment Agency (EA), the body overseen by Reed’s department, deserves more attention.
The agency’s long decline was reported on in depth by this newspaper in June, and a few lowlights are worth recalling. Funding for environmental protection was cut by 80% between 2010 and 2021. Just 91 people out of a workforce of 13,400 were qualified to inspect sewage treatment plants, the EA’s new-ish chief executive, Philip Duffy, told parliament in April this year. “There was a withdrawal successively in 2009 and again in 2015 from regular investigations into compliance,” he said.
The last government gave the agency funding to recruit 500 new staff, and Duffy these days is in must-do-better mode (an improvement on his predecessor’s claim, as late as 2019, that the country’s water quality was “better than at any time since the Industrial Revolution”). There is a vague sense of a corner having been turned. The investigation into sewage treatment works by the EA and Ofwat, which last month led to the latter hitting three firms with provisional fines totalling £168m, was the largest ever.
Yet the EA still looks miles away from being a muscular enforcer that can move swiftly and create fear among polluters in the style of some of its US equivalents. Does the government have a vision for such a body? If it does, hard financial commitments are required for credibility. The march on 26 October – four days before the chancellor’s budget – is well timed.
