Sir James Bevan warns companies to improve their pollution performance

Environment Agency (EA) Chief Executive Sir James Bevan has warned water companies to improve their pollution performance, saying: “If companies cannot operate without damaging the environment, they will rightly lose their social licence to operate.”  Bevan, in a speech at the Water Industry Forum in Birmingham, said the industry faces “three big challenges” – an operational challenge, a climate challenge and a political challenge – and that although companies’ overall performance is impressive, the sector will need to up its game if it is to survive in its present form. When the EA published its figures for 2017 last July, it showed that there had been 1,827 pollution incidents attributable to the English water and sewerage companies, down from 1,902 in 2016, while serious pollution incidents (category 1 and 2) fell from 57 to 52  …  www.wwtonline.co.uk

Investment failure & legal loopholes – Financial Times

FT ‘Critics blame insufficient capital expenditure since privatisation and a legal loophole that allows sewage to be dumped into waterways. Pollution is on the rise and it is not just raft races that are being cancelled. Only 14 per cent of rivers in England met the minimum “good status” standards according to an Environment Agency report in 2018 as defined by the EU Water Framework directive down from almost 25 per cent in 2009. Much of the pollution is caused by 17,684 licensed emergency sewer overflows, places where the agency has permitted water companies to allow untreated sewage to spill into rivers up and down the country  …’

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