The Environment Agency failed to visit 90 per cent of toxic water spills last year, including more than 60 per cent of the most serious incidents, i can reveal.

Lucie Heath inews.co.uk

Freedom of Information data obtained by the charity WildFish, and shared with i, shows there has been a significant drop off in in-person inspections of water pollution since the Covid-19 pandemic, despite an increase in the total number of incidents being investigated by the watchdog.

Inspectors were rarely turning up in person to investigate incidents such as sewage discharges and pollution run-off from farms and motorways into England’s waterways.

Campaigners and politicians told i the environmental regulator was “toothless” and blamed the Government for overseeing the decline of Britain’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters.

They accused the Environment Agency of “pretending pollution isn’t there” and called for a complete overhaul of the regulatory process for water.

It comes as BBC Panorama claimed that one water company United Utilities wrongly downgraded the severity of more than 60 of its own pollution incidents last year in a move that saw the cases wiped from its official records.

The downgrades were reportedly signed off by the Environment Agency without inspectors attending any of the incidents. United Utilities denies the allegations.

Now i can reveal the extent to which the Environment Agency has scaled back in-person inspections of water pollution across the country since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Pollution incidents are divided into four categories from category one (most serious) to category four (little to no impact). Incidents are given an initial categorisation when reported, but these can be changed after inspection.

In 2022, Environment Agency inspectors attended just 2,060 (10.7 per cent) of the water pollution incidents reported to them that were initially classified in categories one to three.

This included 161 visits (35 per cent) to category one incidents, 861 (23 per cent) category two visits and 1,038 (7 per cent) category three visits.

Unsurprisingly, the number of Environment Agency visits to water pollution incidents dropped off significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the latest figures show that visits remained at this level in 2022 despite the ending of lockdowns.

In-person visits were down almost 50 per cent in 2022 compared to 2019, despite a 10 per cent increase in the number of incidents being investigated by the Environment Agency.

The figures also show that pollution spills caused by water companies were being visited at a rate below the average, with the Environment Agency visiting just 5 per cent of these cases in 2022, including 36 per cent for category one, 15 per cent for category two and three per cent for category three.

Guy Linley-Adams, Solicitor at WildFish, said: “Sadly, this just shows that the Environment Agency has continued the decline in its performance that began in the early 2000s. You can’t deal with pollution by just pretending it isn’t happening, refusing to see it.

“However, fault lies both with Agency managers, but also with politicians of both main parties, who have hamstrung the Agency with the Regulators’ Code and other such deregulatory nonsense over years, starved it of cash and refused to let it take on polluters to protect rivers, lakes and coastal waters. The very best you can say about the Agency is that it is now charged with presiding over the managed decline of the aquatic environment in England”.

It comes as water companies continue to come under scrutiny for the amount of sewage being dumped into Britain’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters, with water companies reporting over 384,000 discharges of raw sewage in 2022.

Water companies have been permitted to discharge untreated sewage into water bodies during exceptional circumstances when their pipes are at risk of becoming overwhelmed, but investigations have shown this has become common practice.

Stuart Singleton-White, head of campaigns at the Angling Trust, described the Environment Agency as “toothless”.

He said the regulation of the water sector is “completely broken” and that it was “time to sweep away the current system”.

Labour’s shadow Environment Secretary Steve Reed said the Government has “wilfully turned a blind eye to corruption at the heart of the water industry” and said his party will “strengthen regulation to make sure every single water outlet is monitored”.

Labour will table a motion in the House of Commons on Tuesday to call on the Government to give the water regulator Ofwat powers to ban the payment of bonuses to water bosses whose companies are found to cause pollution.

An Environment Agency spokesperson said: “We take our responsibility to protect the environment very seriously and will always pursue and prosecute companies that are deliberately obstructive or misleading.

“We assess and record every incident report we receive – between 70,000 and 100,000 a year. We respond to every incident and attend those where there is significant risk, and we are increasingly able to use off-site data checks and technology from a range of different monitoring sources to assess them.

“We are strengthening our regulation of the water industry by expanding our specialised workforce, increasing compliance checks and using new data and intelligence tools to inform our work. We will also soon have new powers to deliver civil penalties that are quicker and easier to enforce.”