Mike Blackmore, senior project officer with the Wessex Rivers Trust, knows what he’s talking about when it comes to river conservation. No one could question either his motivations or knowledge. Or, in fact, his bravery. Mike has dared to articulate on his Twitter / X account, that there is an urgent need to divorce the social justice and environmental action components of the debate around the sewage scandal.

I couldn’t put his case any better than to simply quote it in full. Mike says:

“We REALLY need to separate out the social justice and environmental action elements of sewage campaigning.

Yes, it’s unjust for water companies to profit from bad practice, and maybe the responsible execs/shareholders do need locking up.

But that alone WON’T FIX OUR RIVERS

As a population we have almost zero understanding of how sewage treatment works (or doesn’t).

The bits that do work are a scientific marvel, but other bits were designed to pollute, built at a time when almost nobody cared.

The problem is bigger than anyone wants to admit.

Nobody is pressing a “dump button”. These systems pollute all by themselves whenever they’re overloaded, which is sadly nearly all the time.

The causes for overloading are diverse. Some simple, some complex, some criminal, some legal, some actually caused by legislation.

Underinvestment, negligence, neglect, and dishonesty have played a major role. This culture can be changed, but the damage cannot be instantly corrected. It will take a depressingly long time and eye-watering sums of money to fix.

However, the regulation is even more broken.

Rules on how water companies invest, commission/decommission, repair etc. often prevent a lot of improvements. It’s archaic, unworkable, and opaque. Arguably this has suited some venture capitalist “investors” fine, but not WC staff who want to improve things.

Public understanding is poor, as is understanding of water quality in general. CSO spills are disgusting, but fix them all tomorrow and we still have major problems with final “treated” effluent, pharmaceuticals, household chemicals, microplastics; a plethora of pollutants.

Combined (fowl and stormwater) sewers were a terrible solution, but nobody cared back then and fixing it now means widespread infrastructure replacement. Even then, with separate systems there are millions of household misconnections sending fowl water straight to our rivers.

We need honesty and transparency regarding both the technical and legal machinery of the sewage system, and also honesty from campaigners regarding what they actually hope to achieve.

I don’t want justice for murdered rivers, I want life support installed to save them now.

There are people working hard to design and deliver solutions to make a real difference right now. To intercept rain before it reaches the network, to create nature-based treatment systems, to restore natural pollution resilience in rivers.

Campaigns rarely mention them …

Social justice is important. Environmental criminals shouldn’t get away with it.

But solutions are MORE important.

You can’t fix massive infrastructure problems just with noise.

More energy needs to go into proposing solutions.

I suppose I’m asking for clarity of purpose; unity on the actions we want to see.

Privatised or nationalised, we need more short-term action. We can’t wait for long-term change.

Solutions-focused campaigning might actually achieve something.”

As well as a few comments supporting what Mike wrote, there were a few questioning his argument, most notably perhaps from the Windrush WASP account. Windrush WASP – founded in 2018 – has done tons to highlight the scandal of sewage pollution and its various causes, regulatory, financial etc. Windrush WASP commented to the effect that resolving the social justice issues “will at least make the rest worth doing – take away the motivation to pollute for profit. Those elements are entwined whether you like it or not.”

Mike replied that albeit the issues might be entwined, they are not equally important.

To which Windrush WASP replied “profit has to be taken out of pollution or the rest of it is just a series of sticking plasters on an open wound. The biggest solution is ‘simply’ end pollution, isn’t it.”

That’s a really interesting thing to say. And it’s worth quoting the exchange because here we have two people, both knowledgeable and passionate, and ultimately wanting the same thing: healthy rivers. But with apparently different ideas about the interdependence and weighting of social justice and environmental impact in the sewage debate.

My view – and the reason I find the WASP comment so pivotal – is that you can’t take the profit out of pollution, any more than you can take the profit out of profit. Pollution is profit.

By this I mean that there are rafts of human activity that have the potential to pollute: how we treat sewage, how we farm, how we manufacture things, how we move about in various modes of transport, how we pack products, what we do with that packaging, how we heat our homes, how we wash the dishes, how we clean the loo and even how we wipe our bums. The potential for pollution is collateral to all these activities all the time. And thus, in all of these areas of activity there is the potential to pollute quite carelessly or to perform the activity in some way that consciously limits the pollution or to not pollute at all. And without exception – regulation and fines notwithstanding – it is always cheaper, or less effort (which amounts to the same thing) to pollute carelessly, than to limit pollution or not pollute at all.

(In fact, there is a really good case for arguing that it isn’t actually cheaper in the long run not to pollute, if you take in a wider range of considerations such as the value of nature to mental and physical health etc. But seeing stuff at that scale is not something humans are very good at.)

Therefore, in terms of how things actually pan out that underlying, albeit short-termist and blinkered truth applies regardless of whether the potentially polluting activity is state-run or privately run.

Of course, lack of regulation, fines and an absence of genuine legal jeopardy also makes pollution profitable. Regulation through the courts is also entwined with what I set out below. I have written about it HERE: the losing battle between riparianism and utilitarianism which sets out, in my view, why the mantra “just enforce the law” hasn’t ever worked and won’t ever work.

But, let’s say we did have a state-owned water industry and in that respect at least the “profit had been taken out of pollution”. Keeping the infrastructure up to date will still cost money. Year to year, it will always be cheaper not to upgrade than to upgrade. Chancellors faced with competing calls on the public purse will likely put the alleviation of pollution of water quite far down the list, relative to the NHS, defence, the police, schools etc. In other words it would still be profitable to pollute. The financial structures and activity / asset ownerships might be subtly or significantly different, but the cost of not polluting versus the saving of costs derived from polluting will be exactly the same.

On the nationalised versus privatised debate I try to be agnostic. If a nationalised industry could be shown to bring about a transformative uplift in the health of our rivers, well great. But while I try to be agnostic, history suggests to me that relatively unaccountable state-run institutions are more impervious to criticism than private and regulated ones (albeit, we all agree regulation has been wanting). Don’t those who advocate for state-run solutions also reserve a fair chunk of their frustrations for the state-run institutions supposed to regulate this area? When the implications for reducing abstraction, say, or reducing pollution would be to increase the cost of water (as they are), I don’t think we’d get anywhere at all with a government not absolutely at the gun-point of public opinion on the matter. And like it or not, the clarity of a chalk stream in the House Counties is not something the mass of the electorate much cares about.

Whereas in reality, we are actually getting somewhere with this flawed, and iffily regulated private industry. There is plenty of good scientific evidence to show that water quality in our rivers is generally better now than in the mid-1980s. I’ll write more on that in the next post.

Whether the activity is state-owned or privately owned, if the cost to the consumer doesn’t reflect the cost of production PLUS the cost of the associated environmental protection, then of course the environment picks up the tab for that difference. That is exactly what happens all the time, with everything: whether its milk production, or water treatment. Nature picks up the bill. The public purse is protected. Pollution is rendered, essentially, profitable.

Taking a longer view at the arc of history and the dawning of environmentalism in the West, it is more or less historically inevitable that we are where we are with the environment. Still bad, but getting better. No nation on Earth, evolving through industrialisation to a point of relative affluence (in global terms) as we have, was ever going to trim the wings of that economic advancement and then recovery from two world-wars by taking extreme care not to screw the environment up on the way. State-run activity. Private activity. It makes no difference. The 1950s to 1980s saw state-funded vandalism of our rivers on a truly epic scale, through dredging, as great a brake on their ecological recovery now as water pollution. All those abstraction licences? That was the state licensing itself.

However, we are now arguably at a point in history where we can and should afford to take more care of the environment, where we can see that it might even be more cost-effective in the long term to do so. We are at the point where we need ideas for how to do that, correlated to specific, practical and evidentially reliable cause-and-effect environmental outcomes.

In short, I agree with Mike, the social justice debate should not be conflated with or overshadow the discussion about how we address the myriad of stresses affecting our rivers, many of which have nothing to do with water-company activity.