Feargal Sharkey comments on National Audit Office (NAO) Report on water regulators:

The @NAOorguk‘s damming report into the water industry and regulation is out today (25 April) “The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and water regulators have failed”.

At the current rate of progress it’s going to take 700 years just to fix the leaky pipes, we’re going to need another 5 billion litres of water, which we don’t have, by 2050 and last year WCs spent 4.7 million hours dumping sewage into the environment. 

Govt’s response, regurgitate a 30 year old bit of legislation. 

See: Pollution and Sewage – Have Devon Tories, including David Reed MP, given up? Where the LibDems tried to strengthen the legislation and the “local” Tories turned their backs.

Bald summary of NAO findings

Will the threat of prison time be enough to stop polluting water bosses?

Read this extract from Richard Vaughan in the i paper

…As the indefatigable punk rocker-cum-rivers campaigner Feargal Sharkey has pointed out, the power to imprison water bosses for impeding investigations into sewage spills has been in existence since 1995.

Government officials strongly refute this, however, insisting that the new powers will for the first time give regulators the ability to pursue, investigate and convict the worst offending water company executives, and goes much further than the measures included in the Environment Act 1995. 

Crucially, it will be the water companies that will have to pay for the investigations carried out into their illegal sewage dumping, handing the Environment Agency the much needed resources to bring polluters to justice. 

But ministers may find that to finally turn doubters into believers when it comes to fixing the sewage crisis, they will have to put words into action and finally throw polluting water bosses behind bars.

Might Susan Davy be first in line?

Owl wonders if her new PR “Whizz Kid”, Simon Jupp, has a “Get Out of Jail Free” card tucked in his back pocket?