Image description: A water pipe flowing into a river. Photo by Jacob Antony on Unsplash

Internal documents and data shared with BBC News have highlighted that the Environment Agency (EA) has been struggling to monitor incidents of serious pollution.

An internal EA document from this year states that all potentially serious incidents should be attended by staff.

However, in 2024, the EA didn’t go to almost a third of nearly 100 water industry incidents that were eventually ruled to have posed a serious threat to nature or human health. The EA only sent investigators to a small fraction of reported incidents last year and often relied on water companies, who may be responsible for the pollution, for updates. In July the BBC revealed that staff shortages had led to the EA cancelling thousands of water quality tests at its main laboratory in Devon.

The agency also downgraded the environmental impact of more than 1,000 incidents that it initially decided were potentially serious without sending anyone to take a look.

EA says it has other methods of assessing pollution

The EA says it does “respond” to all incidents but has ways to assess pollution that don’t involve going in person. It says when reports come in it is “careful not to underestimate the seriousness of an incident report”.

But the EA source who provided the BBC with the data was critical of the agency. “What not attending means is that you are you are basically only dealing with water company evidence. And it’s very rare that their own evidence is very damning,” the insider said.

Among the incident reports shared with the BBC were an occasion when a chemical spilled into a reservoir killing all its fish and which the EA did not attend. Another time, sewage bubbled up into a garden for more than 24 hours with no deployment from the EA.

The data show that overall the agency went to just 13% of all the pollution incidents, serious and more limited, that were reported to it in 2024.

What next?

As part of the government’s landmark review of water industry regulation it has promised to end “self reporting” of incidents by water companies.

Plans are being drawn up to merge the regulators which oversee different parts of the water industry, including the EA, into just one.

The EA says in the next year it’s aiming to more than double the number of water company inspections it carries out. To do that the agency says it’s in the process of recruiting five hundred more staff and improving the way it handles data.