The Environment Agency’s monitoring of rivers and sewer overflows has been described as “absolutely dreadful” by a retired water quality expert.
Peter Lloyd, who previously worked for the Environment Agency (EA), told the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) that the regulator lacked the expertise to understand and interpret data gathered from wastewater treatment works.
Speaking as an expert witness, Lloyd said event duration monitors (EDMs), which have been keeping track of overflows since 2016, are “a useful step” but said more needs to be done to scrutinise the impact of the discharges on river systems.
“It is not as simple as talking about the number of spills that have occurred,” he said. “It will all depend on the quantity, but EDMs don’t give information on the flows and quantity. Nor is it easy to predict the effect that any flow will have on any particular river. That is the point of monitoring.”
The system of random monitoring downstream from treatment works would not necessarily capture the relevant data or coincide with heavy rainfall.
The EAC, which was hearing evidence on water quality in rivers and the impact of combined sewer overflows (CSOs), heard that the EA does not gather data on faecal matter in rivers and instead focuses its checks on chemical content.
Lloyd said a lot of rivers would fail on microbiological content and it is important to measure that in certain circumstances: “I suspect the monitoring would show that all rivers have a certain amount of danger to public health if people submerge themselves in them. The agency gets around that by saying that they wouldn’t recommend people bathe in any river.”
He went on to call the chemical monitoring system, which has been prioritised over microbiological monitoring, “absolutely dreadful”.
“The whole of the chemical monitoring carried out by the agency is misleading, ineffective and a complete waste of money,” Lloyd said. He described the system as relying “almost exclusively” on taking random samples that do not take account of urban and agricultural runoff and so fail to give a complete picture of the ecological health of a river.
Lloyd said, despite these issues, a solution is available as continuous monitoring has been pioneered within the EA on an ad hoc basis for several years. He said it has not been adopted as a formal national monitoring system but could be introduced almost straight away.
He said institutional inertia and dismissal of the technique have prevented its implementation: “Certainly, the EA senior management are probably afraid of admitting they have been doing things badly for the past 20 years and of admitting mistakes,” Lloyd said. “I’ve heard people dismiss continuous monitoring as too expensive, but it isn’t. It’s very cost effective but it has to be used properly.”
Professor Peter Hammond, a retired professor of computational biology at University College London who has developed a machine learning programme to better interpret data, argued that data from monitoring should be publicly available. He said knowing the duration of spills was inadequate and companies should be forced to publish more data for analysis.
“EDMs are a start but how can we quantify the effect on the ecology of rivers without knowing how much is going in. Some works may be dribbling out, but because we don’t have a volume meter we don’t know.”
Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, who described the situation as “a shocking picture of an industry out of control”, queried the efficacy of regulators in their responsibility to set standards, monitor compliance and enforce permits.
Professor Rebecca Malby, co-founder of Ilkley Clean River Group, said as tax payers and consumers the public has been let down. She described coming up against a “can’t do” attitude from both regulators and companies.
“There is legislation in place now to stop this happening,” Malby argued. “The Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive is in our national legislation now post-Brexit. We weren’t complying with it in 2012 as a country so it isn’t all the regulators’ fault. The government was not pursuing legislation that was available to it to clean up rivers either. At every level there is a failure to the public of our natural resource.”
Recommendations
The panel was asked for suggestions to rectify the problem. Hammond advocated for publishing data on companies treating or spilling effluent and suggested volumetric metering to study the effects on rivers.
Malby supported longer-term planning and a view of what is required and how to achieve it. As well as properly using existing legislation, she said the consent levels should be raised for when CSOs can be used.
Meanwhile, Lloyd said continuous monitoring at treatment works, which some companies already employ, is essential and that the EA should move away from a reliance on spot checks.
An Environment Agency spokesperson responded to the session: “Water companies are required to report any breaches of their permits. That is their legal duty and responsibility. If we become aware of discharges operating outside the permit conditions, we will take enforcement action. That action will depend on the nature of the offence, up to and including prosecution.
“We have driven up monitoring to not only capture and better understand the performance of storm overflows, but to hold water companies to account and work with them to address their impact on the environment.”