A Conservative minister repeatedly tried to stop England’s environment regulator from publishing data showing a sharp rise in recorded sewage spills into waterways, according to emails obtained by Unearthed.

The Environment Agency (EA) is obliged by law to publish annual statistics on how often overflow pipes released sewage into rivers and seas, and how long the spills lasted. The data is gathered using measuring devices called Event Duration Monitors (EDM).

In previous years the EA has published a spreadsheet of the data relating to individual overflow pipes, but this year it released an online portal mapping the spills and recording national figures.

The 2023 data showed 464,056 spills and 3,606,170 hours of spilling in 2023 – increases of 54% and 105% respectively on the previous year. This was largely blamed on unusually wet weather.

In March, ahead of the publication, then-Defra minister Robbie Moore ordered the agency to remove headline figures about the total number and duration of the spills from the portal.

This would be the first year in which every overflow pipe in England had an EDM fitted, the minister argued, meaning the total figure could not be accurately compared to the previous year’s data. His officials continued to argue this after the EA added figures on the average total spills per pipe.

However EA officials refused to remove the total figures, leading to a five-day disagreement that escalated to the agency’s senior leadership and continued until the night before the figures were due to be published.

The minister “has decided that the portal should be published tomorrow, but should NOT include total hours or total number of spills”, an official in Moore’s private office wrote.

Phillip Duffy, the EA’s chief executive, refused to comply, warning that this would be “highly counterproductive” since campaigners “will tot up the numbers and accuse us of trying to cover them up”.

“It will damage the EA and it will damage the government,” he added. The figures were also included in the agency’s press release, Duffy pointed out.

Read the whole sorry story.