When the world ends, for the human race at least, hopefully someone will have daubed on a wall or a rock somewhere – “It was the water – stupid” – in a timely parody of Bill Clinton’s famous campaign reminder to his team to remain focussed on what matters most. As an angler I’ve lived all my live in, on or beside water. The rivers, oceans, lakes and ponds that have been my passion and obsession for more than half a century are dying before our eyes. Either sucked dry by our relentless demand for more of this most precious natural resource or engulfed in a tidal wave of sewage and slurry and overlayed by short sighted stupidity which has been the hallmark of national water policy since before the Industrial Revolution. The current situation is little short of alarming:

• Only 14% of UK water bodies are now in good ecological condition

• In 2023 a total of 579,581 sewage spills recorded from storm overflows in England and Wales for a total duration of 4,608,495 hours

• Wastewater infrastructure replacement rate for pipes and main sewers is running at 0.05% of the network per annum – 10 times longer than the European average – requiring sewers with a 100 year life expectancy to last for 2,000 years.

• There has been an 88% global decline in freshwater species, including fish, since 1970.

• The Atlantic salmon is now officially classified as an endangered species in the UK

With a general election just a few weeks away the condition of our rivers and waterways is higher up the political agenda than it ever has been. This follows years of relentless pressure from energised campaign groups such as Surfers Against Sewage, Angling Trust & Fish Legal, The Rivers Trust, Wildfish, River Action and others, ably supported celebrity angling activists like Feargal Sharkey, James Murray and Paul Whitehouse. Whilst it’s pleasing for campaigners like myself to see our chosen cause front and centre of political debate what is less encouraging is the failure of all political parties to acknowledge the depth and scale of the problem or to apply any serious thinking as to what needs to be done.

Soundbites won’t fix our rivers and seas but here’s 12 things that would make a difference if we elect a government with guts to do what’s necessary.

1) Recognise that there is no such thing as cheap water

My local water company, Thames Water, provides my three-bedroomed, semi-detached house in Reading with clean, drinkable water for a little over £1 a day. Absurdly, I can also use this heavily treated liquid to water my garden, wash my body and my car and to flush my toilet. Speaking of which, my bodily wastes are also taken away and allegedly treated before being discharged as treated effluent back into the same river system from which they came. That same pound will scarcely buy a bottle of water in a supermarket, or a glass of the stuff with bubbles in it in a restaurant, yet people regularly hand over wads of cash without a second thought, even though what comes out of their taps costs almost nothing.

And water for almost nothing is no basis on which to build public policy about a basic resource on which all life depends – whether human, animal, bird or fish. Water needs to become as political in Britain as it is in other countries where living conditions are far harsher.

I very much doubt that the next World War will be fought about religion or some brutal autocrat’s desire to expand the boundaries of a reluctant and artificial empire. It’s far more likely to be about the water – stupid. Too much of it, causing sea levels to rise as we fail to heed the warnings of climate change and more of the earth’s surface becomes uninhabitable. And too little of it as warming temperatures turn once productive regions into searing dust bowls, causing millions of our fellow human beings to begin a giant migration in search of liveable land.

2) Tackle the investment backlog

Back in 2021 my organisation jointly published a report looking at the sheer scale of the investment backlog facing the water industry. It was entitled ‘Time to Fix our Broken Water Sector’ and exposed the ticking time bomb at the heart of the UK’s wastewater infrastructure which threatens the health of almost every river and stream in the land. The key finding were:

– A £10 billion investment funding gap over the last 10 years.

– The declining condition of rivers and streams due to increased sewage spills every year.

– The absurd expectation of a 2,000-year lifetime for sewage pipes and other infrastructure.

– Failure to build any new reservoirs in the south-east since 1976 despite a 3 million population increase and huge projected growth in house building.

– That lack of investment in water supply has seen excessive groundwater abstraction drying up some chalk streams altogether and damaging many other rivers.

– The impossibility of delivering commitments in the Government’s own 25 Year Environment Plan and our legal obligation under the Water Framework Directive.

– Failure of both the Government and OFWAT to pay any heed to the promises in the 2011 water white paper or indeed the warnings from the National Infrastructure Commission and the National Audit Office about the pressing need for investment in water and sewerage systems to address the challenges of climate change and population growth.

– The prospect of severe drought events causing parts of southern England to run out of water within 20 years.

– That the consequences of failing to invest in water infrastructure will cost more in the long term – £40 billion versus £21 billion and thousands of jobs.

It’s a grim but necessary read and the full report can found here – https://anglingtrust.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/STC-AT-–-OFWAT-Report-final-draft.pdf

Much of this sorry state was triggered by the politicians wish to kick the can down the road rather than face to the looming water crisis we now face. And behind all of this has been the thoroughly useless regulator OFWAT whose former Chief Executive and previous water industry fat cat, Johnson Cox, promised in 2017 – ‘a decade of declining water bills.’ He did this at a time when OFWAT had neither engineering nor environmental expertise to make these judgements, unless of course you didn’t give a fig for the environmental consequences. As a result the price limits were set were so low that under-investment was inevitable, making a bad situation worse.

3) Abolish OFWAT

It was always patently absurd to have two regulators allegedly overseeing the water industry since privatisation. You can’t separate the consequences of economic regulation (OFWAT) from the impacts on the water environment (Environment Agency). And the consequences of the OFWAT investment road block are plain to see. Here are a few examples:

1) OFWAT directly cut planned investment in PR19 (between 2020-24) by £6.7 billion (or £1.34bn each year). They even boasted about the size of investment they had prohibited water companies from making.

2) OFWAT held down bills below inflation for over a decade, removing around £11bn from investment that should have been ring-fenced for improvements. Allowing bills to increase with inflation over the last decade would have provided £11bn more for investment, which could have been ring-fenced for the most urgent projects. This would have been the equivalent of sufficient funding for up to half a dozen reservoirs or meeting overflow targets five years earlier.  

3) OFWAT Decisions Overturned. Four companies successfully appealed their PR19 decisions to the the Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) who ruled as follows to:

– Restore £7m for Yorkshire Water to cut overflow spills and deliver wastewater upgrades and the protection of tens of thousands of properties in Hull against flooding.

– Restore £18.3m for Northumbrian Water to prevent 365,000 properties in Essex being cut off supply for a potentially extended period. 

– Protect £40m of investment in strategic water interconnection by Anglian Water, rejecting Ofwat’s decision that would have reduced the capacity of interconnection pipes. 

– Restore £5m for Anglian to increase its sludge capacity to minimise the operational resilience risk around their ability to deal with increased volumes.

OFWAT has clearly shown not to be fit for purpose. It should be abolished in favour of a publicly accountable single water regulator alongside a complete reform of the management and rebuilding of the UK’s water resources to deliver clean and plentiful water and wastewater infrastructure fit to meet the challenges of climate change and a growing population, without further damaging the environment.

4. Accept that Underfunding leads to Failure and Underperformance

OFWAT’s rejection of necessary investment has directly caused problems. For example:

The whole industry was denied sufficient funding for leakage improvements over more than a decade. They refused almost all of five English and Welsh companies’ climate resilience proposals to fund wastewater capacity upgrades, cutting the budget from £403m to £16.4m. This stopped £387m of investment that would have allowed a half-decade head-start on the storm overflows programme while also reducing sewer flooding.

Given the scale of both the environmental and economic challenge posed by a failing water sector with a crumbling infrastructure the next government has little choice but to introduce primary legislation to abolish the two regulator model and overhaul the entire regulatory oversight of the industry to put environmental needs front and centre in a complete sector reset.

5) End the Casino Economy in the water industry

When water was privatised in 1989 the new companies were able to acquire public assets that were completely debt free. Yet 35 years later companies like Thames Water are now a staggering £15bn in debt and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. A succession of private owners levered this debt mountain to strip out more than £7bn in dividends to shareholders whilst paying eye-watering bonuses to its top executives as a perverse reward for presiding over operational failure and turning a blind eye to financial sharp practice. Vampire owners like Macquarie should never have been allowed to mortgage their company’s balance sheets to fund excessive dividends. OFWAT could and should have prevented it.

Every piece of this scandal took place right under the nose of OFWAT whose senior directors see no contradiction in taking highly paid jobs in the same companies they are supposed to be regulating only the month before.

The next government needs a new Water Industry Act to either create entirely new community interest entities to operate the water infrastructure or, at the very least, to correct the gaping loopholes in the current legislation that allow public assets and and vital public resource to traded like Bitcoin irrespective of the looming threats to both the economy and the environment.

6) Give the Environment Agency the power and the resources to do its job

The EA has been systematically hollowed out by a 57% cutback in its resources since 2010 turning it from the bulldog it could be into the ineffective lapdog it’s now become. Enforcement rarely occurs and when it does it can takes years to bring polluters to court. Only a minority of reported fish kills will even trigger a visit from Agency staff who are now simply spread too thin to be effective. The organisation has suffered from poor leadership and is massively risk averse at a time when environmental stakeholders and the public at large are looking to it to take tough action in defence of our rivers and waterways.

7) Treat water as national infrastructure priority

Part of any new deal for water must involve getting serious about planning and building control and most importantly treating water as national infrastructure priority. How crazy is it that planning for capital projects is squeezed into a five year time frame? Something the nuclear industry, for example, would consider laughable. Reservoirs take years to plan, years to build and a long time to fill. We need long term investment planning if we are to be anyway serious about resolving the challenges posed by declining water quality, climate change and population growth.

Here are some much needed reforms that the new Environment Secretary should bring in immediately:  

A) The National Infrastructure Commission should be instructed set out the funding needed to:

(i) adapt to climate change

(ii) restore infrastructure to a decent standard (e.g. by setting a target to match European average replacement rates by 2030)

(iii) eliminate ecological harm

(iv) eliminate all serious pollution incidents.

OFWAT (or its successor) should be required to deliver consent to match that level of funding or explain to Parliament why it hasn’t.

B) The new government should replace the clunky and little heeded Strategic Policy Statement for Water – currently the only way ministers can seek to influence the ‘independent’ regulator – with an Outcomes Direction to force them to take decisions in line with the priorities above.

While a new Water Act is necessary in the the next Parliament these immediate measures would not require legislation. The current Water Industry Act just says that government should provide high-level guidance to the regulator. The problem is that it doesn’t.

8) New legislation to reduce abstraction and improve water security.

With 85% of the the world’s chalkstreams located in England our stewardship of these precious assets in little short of shameful. These globally recognised, iconic ecosystems should be exemplars of a pristine aquatic environment. Instead some are now used as open sewers and others are sucked dry through over abstraction caused by shocking levels leakage and the failure to build sufficient reservoirs and other storage capability. The Hertfordshire Chalkstreams such as the Rib, Beane and Ver have been reduced to a shadow of their former selves and now are often completely dewatered in stretches that were once home to a thriving population of brown trout and coarse fish. Water companies like Affinity find it easier and cheaper to suck the chalk aquifers dry rather than invest in the storage of winter rainfall.

A basic tenent of any water policy must be to collect surplus in times of plenty to guard against economic and environmental damage in times of scarcity. A new Water Act must enshrine this principle into law.

It should also do the following:

– Streamline the planning process for water resources projects so that small projects that interlink are approved as one project.

– Amend Development Consent Order legislation so that non-potable water schemes are eligible. This is crucial for speeding up delivery of water transfers in and between regions.

– Set a clear target for drought resilience standards as legal minimums (currently they are advisory).

– Reform building regulations to ensure proper water efficient homes (including appliance labelling and minimum efficiency standards).

– End the developers automatic right to connect into the local sewerage system if it lacks sufficient capacity to treat the effluent to standard. Force developers to pay for local upgrades required by their proposals.

9) Re-use wastewater

The U.K. is well behind other countries in using waste water sensibly. For example in Spain it’s a requirement to use treated wastewater on golf courses rather than abstracting fresh drinking water from the public supply.

We need to quickly follow what is already happening in Europe by using treated wastewater for agricultural irrigation and businesses. This would reduce nutrient loading into rivers, reduce demand and abstraction and could make a significant difference to river health thereby improving the environment for invertebrates and fish.

10) Overhaul the Environmental Permitting Regime

If having a combined rainwater and foul water sewerage system complete with storm overflows delivers ‘pollution by design’ the anomalies in the current permitting system create ‘pollution by permission’. The whole system needs a complete overhaul focussing on the health of the rivers and seas rather than treating them as dumping grounds of last resort when the system fails or trigger points are reached.

A particularly absurd anomaly sees water companies measured on what they keep in the pipe not what spills out of it. And the counting of storm overflow spills makes little sense as currently a five minute spill is counted the same as one that last 12 hours. We need to move to assessed volumetric measures. It’s the volume of shit that needs counting not the length of time a pipe might be dribbling.

It is also ridiculous that pipes at the same sewage treatment site are individually permitted rather than permitting all the combined output with an incentive to maximise the treated flow.

11) Worry more about major system failure

The headline figures on sewage pollution are primarily around storm overflows but just wait until the rising mains start crumbling as is already happening in the Thames Water region. That’s when we see get total wipe out – when a problem becomes an environmental catastrophe. By 2050, in many of our water companies a majority of their rising mains will be over 100 years old and well past their sell by dates. In a few cases we are still relying on the brilliance of Victorian engineers to keep untreated sewage out of the rivers. This is clearly not sustainable.

Of course storm discharges are unacceptable, they are horrible and stink, but do a lot less damage than a fractured rising main sewer. Investment priorities need to be focussed on reducing the most harm and this should include getting ammonia and phosphorus levels down in small streams in dry weather where the harm caused to fish and invertebrates is acute.

12) Embrace citizen science and involve stakeholders in the management of rivers

Anglers and local river groups invest millions of hours of volunteer time every year into the maintenance and improvement of water environments by clearing litter, restoring habitats and monitoring and fighting pollution. They see what is happening and are often ‘the canaries in the coal mine’. Currently the EA does nothing about discharges from septic tanks or from the growing army of live-aboard boaters. Local intelligence can help plug these gaps.

In 2022, in response to record levels of sewage discharges and the continued failure of the Environment Agency to properly monitor the threats to our rivers, the Angling Trust established a national Water Quality Monitoring Network of citizen volunteers to collect and analyse water samples in their areas. It has now engaged over 784 anglers from 278 clubs operating on 202 rivers across 68 catchments collecting around 5,600 individual samples. The results are alarming with 44% of samples exceeding recommended phosphate and nitrate levels, 200 incidents of algae blooms and 300 pollution incidents were observed.

Citizen science clearly has a big role to play as we need much better data to make proper decisions but currently the EA won’t accept their results. This is absurd and we need government to intervene an ensure a role for citizen volunteers alongside an accreditation scheme with independent verification.

Summary

The privatisation of our water industry has been a disaster and I doubt if any of the politicians likely to be in the hot seats in DEFRA have any real comprehension of the extent and scale of the problems they are about to inherit. But let’s not get too starry eyed about the record of the sector in public ownership for there really was no ‘golden era’ when the rivers flowed bright and clear and the taps kept running. In the 1950’s the tidal Thames in London was declared ‘biologically dead’ and river further upstream around Staines, where I grew up, there were signs advising us not to bathe in its polluted waters.

There are now many rivers and streams that have been brought back from the brink primarily thanks to European legislation like the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive as well as tougher domestic controls. But rules and regulation require properly funded and empowered regulators with a clear sense of purpose that put the environment first. They also require an industry that is accountable and an infrastructure that it fit for purpose rather than the ‘creaking and leaking’ time bomb that is about to land on the desk of the new Secretary of State for the Environment.

By all means play around with different ownership models that deliver proper accountability for this most vital of our public assets – but please, please don’t forget to fix the pipes.