With uncanny timing (following my post Tuesday last week), on Friday the Environment Agency forwarded to the River Tarrant Protection Society the adjudicatory report of their independent expert. (I’ve posted a copy at the foot of the page but have redacted a few personal details)
I received a lot of interested feedback from last week’s post. My intention had partly been to help inform other groups facing similar struggles in other parts of the Chalk, so I was very pleased that I seemed to have done that and to have catalysed a conversation about the uneven, David versus Goliath contests we face.
I’m uneasy about the EA’s approach to this case. Why take so long to respond? Why be so apparently reluctant to engage with the proactive, positive suggestions in the River Tarrant Protection Society (RTPS) report? Why not agree to a meeting? Why set out with an adjudicatory contest between models – which is almost bound to find in favour of the status quo – instead of addressing the full package of evidence?
A quick bit of background.
Please read my previous post for the fuller picture, but in short:
The River Tarrant is a chalk stream in Dorset where locals have long been concerned (50+ years) about the impact of abstraction.
It is a breeding stream for critically endangered Atlantic salmon.
The lower stream is drying far more frequently now than it did in the past. We don’t know for certain the flow patterns before the era of abstraction but there are no records of lower river drying before the 1950s (by contrast, there are records of natural upper river drying, for example in 1929) and there are five Domesday mill sites on the middle and lower river, which suggests the stream was reliably perennial.
As abstraction has increased from the 1970s to today the drying frequency has climbed from about once per decade (1976, 1989, 1995) to every year (2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025).
In 2018 Wessex Water was obligated to lower public water abstraction in the Bourne and Wylye catchments. To achieve this they constructed a grid to move water north from “under-utilised sources” in the Stour valley.
As part of this process the Environment Agency asked Wessex Water to produce an environmental impacts report into any possible impacts on the chalk streams of the Middle Stour, specifically the River Tarrant, the Pimperne Brook and the North Winterbourne.
The review concluded that:
only a single, small and long-running pump impacted flows in the Tarrant and by only a negligible amount.
a single, much larger pump had no impact on flows in the Pimperne winterbourne (nor the neighbouring Tarrant)
impacts on the North Winterbourne were negligible.
The grid went ahead, since when the Tarrant has dried every year.
In 2024 the River Tarrant Protection Society sent an independent report authored by John Lawson to the Environment Agency which questioned the Wessex Water assertion that the abstractions were having no impact on either the Tarrant or Pimperne. The report used the results of relatively simple “lumped parameter” modelling to show that there may indeed be an impact, and added a considerable weight of historical and recent empirical evidence to back up its claims
In the face of this uncertainty the RTPS has asked for more detailed investigations and has also proposed a scheme of abstraction realignment that would alleviate the drying in the Tarrant.
The Environment Agency has taken a long time to respond and thus far the terms of reference for their investigation have been very limited.
Independent review
Jane Dottridge, an expert hydrogeologist with Mott McDonald, was asked to compare the two modelling approaches: Wessex Water’s modelling (developed with the EA) compared with John Lawson’s modelling. To quote Christopher Greenwell, the EA Water Resources Lead, “I wanted to focus on the two modelling approaches first, since this formed one of the most fundamental challenges within the RTPS report … What Jane has done is not simply to consider John Lawson’s alternative approach but also to reassess the approach undertaken by Wessex Water during their investigation of the impacts of the Middle Stour sources.”
The RTPS was not consulted on the scope, terms of reference or the choice of reviewer.
Jane Dottridge previously reviewed the Wessex Water Middle Stour report in 2018. She has stated in her letter / report that she draws on her prior work as external reviewer to the Wessex Basin Model and her knowledge of that model.
More than that, Jane has encountered John’s work before, in another context. In preparation for a meeting convened by Affinity Water about the River Ivel in 2022, Jane was recommended to me as someone who might take an independent, helpfully critical view of John’s work and modelling approach. She sent some very useful notes of quite a technical nature. Arguably, her in-a-nutshell verdict was summed up in her statement: “My problem with this model is that it is very 1-d and doesn’t report any water balances. But it is a neat little model and much more satisfactory than some of the others I’ve seen recently.”
This we thought fair enough. John’s modelling wasn’t intended to rival, let alone replace the more complex 3-D modelling used by water companies and the Environment Agency. Instead it is proposed as a solid sense check, especially when the claims of water companies seem questionable, a tool for grass-roots organisations that can be used to usefully question unjustified certainties around these oft repeated claims of “no impact”.
In the meeting itself Jane was more critical of John’s modelling than she had been in our correspondence, describing it as a circular argument with a fitted-up recession to make calibration look right and “pop out some numbers”. It took Rob Soley to propose that the lumped parameter model had its value as a “first pass” to identify potential issues. Another hydrogeologist who we had spoken with before the meeting – Andy Binley – also defended John’s model for what it is, a simple, numerical model calibrated to predict flows, not all the other complexities of an aquifer system. Jane suggested the idea of a tiered approach to modelling – begin with simpler lumped parameter models, progressing to more complex physics-based models if simpler models don’t provide enough certainty.
Finally she added – and I have related this discussion not only because the roles of different complexities of modelling were not judged as mutually exclusive by Jane, Rob or Andy, but also because of Jane’s final point: she said that “models should be backed up by data and monitoring“.
So, why limit the scope of the review?
Christopher Greenwell stated that he wanted to focus on a review of the modelling approaches since “this formed one of the most fundamental challenges in the RTPS report”. RTPS weren’t given an opportunity to influence this decision, or to argue that John’s modelling outputs were part of a rounded package of evidence that included historic testimony, news reports and empirical observations.
We can see in Jane’s letter that the scope of the review did indeed focus solely on hydrogeology and groundwater modelling and that it excluded ecological, historical and qualitative evidence. This has the effect of narrowing the debate to something more like “which model is better” instead of addressing the more appropriate question: “what does the the sum of the various strands of evidence say about possible or probable abstraction impacts?”
Clearly, hydrogeology is an inexact science, is inherently uncertain. Groundwater systems — especially chalk — are structurally very complex and models of them are really only crude approximations of the living entity, no matter how much refinement is built in. They are dependent on assumptions and do not constitute primary evidence. Good scientific practice, therefore, should integrate the modelling with the other evidence. Which is exactly what the RTPS report did.
The EA’s approach – at least thus far – is a sort of backwards hydrogeology. It excludes archaeology, geomorphology, ecology, historical records, empirical evidence, testimony and conflates modelled output with evidence in the real world.
Besides, the RTPS model was never intended to win a modelling contest. It was intended to demonstrate that an alternative conceptual model can reproduce the observed behaviour of the stream and suggest that therefore the Wessex Water conclusions may be unsafe.
WFD rules
It is also worth pointing out that WFD assessment rules specifically state that decisions should be made on the weight of evidence, not a single line of analysis. If there is credible uncertainty, plausible mechanisms of impact and observational evidence consistent with impact – all very clearly set out in the RTPS report – then a regulator cannot safely conclude “no impact”.
The legitimate role of historical and qualitative evidence
The RTPS report uses various strands of evidence to try and establish:
the baseline condition of the stream
changes in the flow regime over time
the timing of the changes relative to the advent and then increases in abstraction.
For example:
The lower river dried rarely, if at all, before 1950 when abstraction began.
Between 1970 and 2000 the lower river dried about once per decade.
In the last decade, when abstraction has increased yet further, it has dried almost every year.
The exception of 2017 coincided with a long-term shutdown of Black Lane pumping station
This is very solid evidential reasoning, layering historical, hydrological, circumstantial and mechanistic evidence. The RTPS report advances a very legitimate scientific hypothesis, of which the modelling is just one part.
Thus far the Environment Agency’s approach:
Places too much reliance on model supremacy. The review as framed thus far implies that a model provides a more reliable basis for conclusions than any other strand of evidence. Models are inherently uncertain.
Fails to apply “weight of evidence”. The EA review evaluates the models but does not integrate them with the unarguable flow-regime changes, the ecological evidence, the historical evidence, the observed anomalies (2017).
Narrows the focus to short-term datasets. Historical evidence, for example Domesday mills and the presence of Atlantic salmon, provide a legitimate long-term context and capture a picture of the system behaviour before any monitoring record. This is really valuable information and should not be ignored. If you exclude these you bias analysis to short-term datasets that are all influenced by abstraction.
Misunderstands the RTPS objective. The RTPS model is criticised for its simplification of aquifer properties and structure and lack of conceptual detail. However, the RTPS model was not intended to outscore the Wessex Basin mode, rather to challenge and question its unjustified certainties.
Excludes the RTPS from dialogue. The RTPS sent their report 7-months ago and requested a meeting. Thus far the only meaningful engagement has been the receipt of this report.
By turning this into a modelling contest the EA – thus far – appears to have stacked the deck in favour of the status quo. The EA’s approach is at odds with the more inclusive way forward agreed in during the framing of the multi-lateral CaBA chalk streams restoration strategy. Recommendation 11 in the strategy advocated the importance of knowledge and model sharing and said it was important to “include stakeholders in the discussion and decision-making”.
**
In my next post I will take a look at the Wessex Basin Report, the RTPS report and Jane Dottridge’s adjudication and try to show why – even under the terms of the comparison – the RTPS case is strong and should not be dismissed.
The little River Tarrant is a beautiful chalk stream in Dorset, the site of five Domesday watermills and the home of spawning Atlantic salmon. The lower river has dried occasionally in the past but never before the era of groundwater abstraction. Now it dries every summer. Locals say this is down to increasing abstraction. Wessex Water says otherwise.
The March issue of The Field includes a feature by me on the poor little River Tarrant in Dorset. I first wrote about the unnatural drying of this stream 30 years ago after it vanished through its riverbed in August 1995, leaving 100s of trout dead in the caked mud.
The slide I took in 1995, the morning I went back to the Tarrant and found the river had vanished overnight
Back then, although abstraction had started to increase, the total loss of the lower river was relatively rare. Now, it dries in its lower reaches every single year. That and the fact that, in spite of this annual, unnatural drying, the river is assessed by the Environment Agency as “supports good ecological status” for flow brings into the spotlight the state of play in our work to mitigate and reverse abstraction’s impacts on chalk stream health.
The River Tarrant is a metaphor for the stasis in the regulatory system. The way this lovely chalk stream has been exploited and ignored over the decades is shameful.
To condense its story before I get into the techie stuff: the River Tarrant is a small chalk stream in Dorset, a tributary of the Stour. It is a slope-face stream, meaning it rises within the outcrop of the chalk downs which run north from Blandford towards Shaftesbury and flows south and east down the strike of the chalk slope. This makes it a classic, natural winterbourne in its upper reaches. The river length rises and falls as the groundwater in the unconfined, outcropping chalk aquifer rises and falls. It can dry, also naturally, in its lower reaches too, where there is a fault line in the chalk running perpendicular to the valley. As groundwater levels fall through the summer and especially in droughts, the lower river loses water to the ground.
However, the extent – by that I mean the physical and temporal extent – to which the Tarrant is a natural winterbourne is the subject of some debate. Historical evidence strongly suggests that the Tarrant is only a natural winterbourne in its upper reaches downslope as far as Tarrant Launceston, where old maps and LiDAR indicate that a meandering channel, suggestive of perennial flow conditions, begins.
Tarrant Launceston, where the valley opens out and there is evidence in the planform and floodplain of a perennial channel
Research by Dr David Solomon for a report recently commissioned by the River Tarrant Protection Society (more on that very comprehensive report, primarily authored by John Lawson, later in this post and a link at the end) has shown that the River Tarrant did occasionally dry further down the valley in the past, before groundwater abstraction was much developed, but so rarely as to make the local press when it did so.
It dried in Tarrant Monkton – a little further downstream than Launceston – in 1929 and 1933, both years of severe drought. There is no historical evidence of it regularly drying up in the lower reaches, however, albeit in 1970 Dr Stanton, a hydrologist, wrote: “In exceptionally dry years the river is dry just above the confluence with the Stour”. We know it dried in 1976 and it clearly shrank away to almost nothing in 1989 as noted by the National Rivers Authority, by which time the river was being more heavily abstracted.
The River Tarrant once supported several water-mills, at least five of which were Domesday mills. While the Domesday book did record “winter mills” molinum hiemale, none on the Tarrant are so described. All of the Tarrant mill sites are downstream of Tarrant Monkton, lending more weight to the idea that our ancestors preferred to construct mills where flows were reliable.
The mill site at Tarrant Crawford Abbey seems particularly anomalous to the modern-day ephemeral flow regime of the lower river. This was a substantial mill with a dedicated water-retaining structure and leat, sited very close to the confluence of the main Stour and another watermill – Keystone Mill – that would have been a better option and wholly reliable if the Tarrant had tended to dry.
Why build a pre-Domesday mill at St Mary and All Saints Abbey on the Tarrant if the flows there were ephemeral and a perennial mill existed only a few hundred yards away at Keyntson Mill on the main River Stour?
Meanwhile, Atlantic salmon persist in behaving as if the Tarrant is not a natural winterbourne. They are mentioned in 19th-century issues of The Field as regularly coming up the river to spawn, and there are numerous records of salmon in the river in recent years, including of salmon parr in the now all-too-frequent and necessary fish rescues. As is well known, salmon tend to spawn where they were themselves spawned: they imprint on the chemical signature of the water and stones in which they hatch. That genetic memory and behavioural fidelity – which goes back tens of thousands of years – ought to tell us something: salmon don’t spawn in natural winterbournes. Any salmon that chose natural winterbournes in the past will not long have succeeded in passing genes and progeny to the next generation.
A salmon parr from the Stour close to the Tarrant tributary
All of this and more – for example, the memory of ancient locals interviewed by my wife Vicky in 1995 – strongly suggest that the Tarrant is naturally a perennial chalk stream downstream of Tarrant Monkton, and that while it might naturally have diminished in its lower reaches in drought years, it didn’t tend to dry up. There is no documented record of the lower river drying before groundwater abstraction began.
So, how come it now dries in the lower reaches almost every year?
In 1995, when we rescued all those fish and failed to rescue so many more, the drying came as a shock: I had known the stream since 1987. It had dried in 1976— a drought comparable to 1929— but kept flowing for 99.9% of the next 19 years, with only the lowermost kilometre briefly drying in 1989. I fished it often in the early 1990s when two- to three-pound trout were not unusual. It was my best-kept secret. And yet, in eight of the past nine years, the lower river has been dry for between 46 and 120 days in the year.
The Tarrant, especially the lower Tarrant, has changed. Why?
The dried out lower Tarrant in 1995. It had dried before, in 1976, and 1989, all years of severe drought under an already heavy abstraction regime. Since 2017, it has dried every single summer.
“Just one more thing …”
The answer, I believe, lies in the telling fact that the one year— 2017— in the past decade when it didn’t dry in the lower reaches was the one year when Wessex Water shut down its Black Lane pumping station, which lies in the next valley over by the Pimperne Brook.
If Columbo were a natural history detective, he would at this point stop and say, “Just one more thing …” then ask how much it had rained in the preceding winter. Not much, is the answer. The spring of 2017 was a disaster for chalk streams: I was commissioned that year to take photos for WWF of all the chalk streams near London that were bone dry, also largely because of over-abstraction.
And yet, this one year of all years, the lower Tarrant kept flowing?
Wessex Water claims that the Black Lane pumping station cannot impact flows in the Tarrant, not least because there is a hill in the way.
And yet, water companies are often the first to point out that subterranean catchment boundaries are not the same as surface watershed boundaries and are dynamic too, capable of naturally migrating as groundwater levels rise and fall. For example, the aquifer under the true Winterbourne in that area, the ephemeral stream that confluences with the Stour on the opposite side of the valley from the Tarrant, and tellingly called “Winterbourne,” is also connected to the Bere Stream in the neighbouring Piddle catchment. In numerous meetings, this natural phenomenon of dynamic groundwater boundaries has been spelled out to me, as water company hydrogeologists caution against the simplistic notion that reducing abstraction in a given valley will lead to restored flows in that valley.
As this image from the University of Wisconsin neatly shows, groundwater divides can very much be shifted by abstraction pressure
And yet, conversely, the same water companies have also argued for the existence of glass walls between one chalk valley and the next. The Lea, for example, is very heavily abstracted, but apparently, that impact simply can’t translate across to the neighbouring Ver or Mimram. The abstraction in the Beane simply can’t affect the Ivel, or vice versa, etc. Like those watershed boundaries, the argument is dynamic and tends to suit the point being made.
As John Lawson’s report shows, there are several abstraction pumps in and around the Tarrant, and groundwater abstraction has crept up slowly over the years. The one source within the physical, surface catchment – Stubhamptom – is relatively small and has been running since the late 1950s. But there are much bigger pumps at the aforementioned Black Lane (just over the catchment boundary), and Shapwick (close to the confluence with the Stour), and Sturminster Marshall (a little further down the Stour valley), as well as Corfe Mullen, which is slightly further afield.
The aggregated impact of just the former three climbed from about 5 ml/d in the early 1970s (by when Stanton observed that the lower river dried in exceptional droughts) to about 10 Ml/d in the early 1980s, and peaked at about 15 Ml/d in the 1990s, when I was forced to rescue those trout in the 1995 drought.
By the early 2000s, the aggregated abstraction of these three pumps had fallen back to between 5 and 10 Ml/d. Then in 2016 and 2017, abstraction was reduced to about 6 Ml/d and in 2017 for a short period, to almost zero. By the end of 2017, it had ramped back up steeply to about 15 Ml/d, as the Wessex Water grid came online and “underutilised” sources in the Stour valley were used to aid reductions in the more protected Avon catchment.
Since then, the Tarrant has dried every year.
Wessex Water maintains that their sophisticated tests and modelling show that the Black Lane and Shapwick pumps don’t affect flows in the Tarrant.
Their case rests on the analysis of what are called switch-off tests, when they shut down pumps and look for the rebounding impact on groundwater levels in the surrounding area. This helps to define the ‘zone of influence’ (a misnomer – see my argument below) or more accurately the ‘cone of depression’, a funnel-shaped depression in the water table: a bit like the vortex that descends to a plug hole.
The cones of depression of either Shapwick or Black Lane do not reach the Tarrant Valley. At least not enough to influence drying, Wessex Water says, adding that an impact is exceptionally unlikely because the chalk between the valleys is less ‘transmissive’ (i.e. the movement of water through the chalk is more restricted) than within the valleys.
Their findings have been accepted by the Environment Agency.
A map of the River Tarrant showing where the river is a natural winterbourne, where it loses water in the lower reaches, the location of pumping stations, and their so-called “zones of influence”
Bringing sticks to a gunfight.
As a community of campaigners, we have struggled to fight the over-abstraction of our chalk streams in no small part because we don’t easily understand the way groundwater drives river flows or the ways groundwater abstraction impacts river flows. As a perfect example, the idea of lessening abstraction in summer – which more or less every lay person still thinks is the right time to reduce abstraction (or the worst time to increase it) – made it all the way from being a collective NGO recommendation to becoming an Ofwat incentive, when it is generally the least effective time to limit groundwater abstraction, because the impact of the reduction is not generally felt at the time it is made.
We are easily baffled, firstly by the sometimes counter-intuitive ways in which groundwater and flows respond to abstraction and secondly by the sophisticated arguments of the water companies or their consultants. If we were universally better informed, we might do a better job of combating the radar chaff thrown in front of our heat-seeking ire.
I knew nothing about all this groundwater stuff this time in 1995. I just had a strong hunch that abstraction must be to blame because it is logical to conclude that if you take water out of a natural river system, it must impact flows from that system. That logic still holds, by the way. But there are complexities to this mephistophelean science, and it is best we try to understand them.
Ob-fudge-scation
Three decades ago, water companies, the river authorities, and their consultants generally tried to fudge the impact of abstraction on river flows. In systems as complex as spring-fed rivers, it was easy and too tempting to dissemble and deflect.
As just one example, in the 1990s, Atkins wrote a report on abstraction impacts in the River Kennet. They stated:
“There is no clear evidence that groundwater levels over the catchment have been affected by groundwater abstraction.”
“There is no strong evidence for any change in the distribution of minimum groundwater levels over the catchment…”
“Ongoing abstraction does not have a cumulative effect… Both groundwater levels and surface flows stabilise at a lower level…”
That last statement is particularly disingenuous, deliberately designed to confuse the lay reader. It allows for the stabilisation of groundwater at a lower level, having previously stated that there was no evidence this was occurring and then conflates the idea of ecological damage only with cumulative groundwater mining.
Notice the phrasing, the refrain of “no strong evidence” as a caveat? We could characterise this as systemic minimisation and an insistence on evidential uncertainty. It is designed to disable the protest. People had noticed the drying up of chalk streams, but countering this kind of specious guff was very challenging unless you had a PhD in hydrogeology and didn’t work for a water company, the agencies or one of their consultants. Which is no one with a PhD in hydrogeology.
In fact, the NGO movement has been turning up at gunfights armed with sticks for several decades. Only John Lawson – who started out battling that exact same Atkins report and the unsustainable abstraction of the River Kennet where he lives – has made a really effective stand here on behalf of the NGOs. He deserves a sainthood, let alone a knighthood. One of the cleverest people I know and a very good, highly qualified engineer, he and his work are routinely dismissed and patronised by the hydrogeological cabal.
Computer says “we don’t know”
While the socio-economic benefits are still just as real today as in the 1990s, water companies no longer fudge the theoretical case quite so brazenly. In practice, however, and on a case-by-case basis, they argue the toss every single time. They have very strong economic motivations to do so. And they manage quite successfully too, because as our knowledge of these systems has become more sophisticated, the ability to hide action behind uncertainty has increased.
Our understanding of the chalk aquifer has developed over recent decades, so that what was once seen as three basic strata is now understood as many different strata comprising different chalks of varying age, hardness and structure, intersected by layers of less transmissive horizons, riven through with karstic flow-ways. About this infinitely complex underworld, the more we know, the less we know for sure.
Groundwater modelling has also become much more high-tech over recent years. We now have conceptualised, computerised aquifers, with gazillions of cells imitating the aquifer properties, which can run numerous scenarios and impacts. And yet – so it seems – we can never know enough to state anything for certain. Thus we have replaced the fudging with an insistence on preceding any action with full knowledge, attained only via immensely sophisticated modelling that is privy to water companies and the Environment Agency, the two players who are motivated to maintain the status quo.
There’s too much money at stake for water companies. Too much work at stake for consultants. The socio-economic value of groundwater renders the precautionary principle a pipe dream. eNGOs and protesters are still impotent and hobbled by their relative lack of expertise and resources.
And thus every chalk stream in which the abstraction pumps run is a new arena for endless investigation.
So, it is with the Tarrant. The complexity allows the can to be kicked. Again and again and again.
Newsflash!
The River Tarrant Protection Society commissioned John Lawson to write his report well over a year ago. It contains a very cogent case for casting doubt on the joint Wessex Water and Environment Agency conclusion that the river Tarrant is unaffected by local groundwater abstraction. It includes a pragmatic proposal for how to relieve pressure on the River Tarrant and asks, at the very least, for the Tarrant to be properly included in the next round of AMP investigations.
There is a great deal of historical and anecdotal evidence in the report, but the bulk of the report covers John’s analysis of the formal modelling and his own, simpler, but empirically accurate modelling methodology (which hydrogeologists tend to dismiss). This shows that the recent actual flows only fit the modelled outputs when the pressure on the regional groundwater table, including that exerted by the pumps at Shapwick and Black Lane, is taken into account.
John’s conceptual model – I will try to unpack it below – underpinning his numerical model is based on the idea of the aquifer as a regional entity, that allows for the inclusion of neighbouring catchments. In theory, this inclusion could radiate as far as the boundaries of the aquifer. In practice, John does limit it to keep the data input manageable. John’s conceptual aquifer is – I will argue – theoretically accurate, but hotly denied by any water company that encounters John’s work.
John shared his report with Wessex Water and with the Environment Agency last September. Christopher Greenwell, the EA’s water resources strategic lead, replied a few weeks later, promising a detailed review of the report and a meeting to discuss, with an update by the 12th December 2025.
The update never came and had to be chased. The EA replied in mid-January to say that the groundwater team was reviewing the report. In March this year, Christopher Greenwell replied, saying that his groundwater colleagues would commission a review (so had they been reviewing the reports in January or not?) and a comparison of John’s groundwater approach, as well as the methodology used in the Wessex Water / EA chalk basin model, “to be carried out by an external party to avoid bias and give greater confidence to all parties”. Asked for a bit of clarification, Christopher confirmed that the review would not concern itself with anything in the report other than a comparison of the conceptual models.
So, John’s David to the Wessex Water / Environment Agency Goliath then? With the review conducted by a third party who is fully objective? We shall see.
In the meantime, back to the complexity … and those conceptual models.
Groundwater for Dummies
It really isn’t that complex. Or rather, any complexity that exists overlies a basic, unarguable simplicity. Groundwater abstraction from a spring-fed system will lower stream flows from that system. There’s no real, honest debate over whether it does, or even by how much it does (over time, by the same amount as the abstraction). The debate, such as it exists, is over where the impact is felt and more challengingly, when it is felt.
This provides all the wriggle room needed, however.
Time
The role of time can be difficult to get your head around, but – at first – let’s imagine the underground aquifer as a large surface lake, with many streams and rills running into it from the surrounding hills, but only one river draining it. Loch Tay, for example. If we eliminate evaporation, and any loss of water through the lake bed, the amount of water flowing out of the lake must equal the amount coming in.
But the correlation between inflow and outflow is not continuously simultaneous. When it rains it will take time for the water in the lake to rise and force more flow to leave the lake. And when it stops raining and the lake level is high, it will take time for the lake level to fall and the outflow to diminish, until it once again balances the inflow.
The system is in a state of dynamic stability and equilibrium. Inflows, lake level and outflows all vary all the time, as rain comes and goes, but ultimately inflows equal outflows over time.
Once that is grasped, it only takes a bit of imagination to increase the size of this mind’s-eye lake and appreciate that time will lag to a greater and greater degree between the impact of inflow on lake level and outflow as the lake gets bigger. A headwater stream in flood rushing into Lake Windermere (6 square miles) will force up the level of the lake and the outflow more quickly than it would rushing into Loch Neagh (150 square miles).
If we now add another form of outflow (let’s say we drill a great big pipeline through the hill and divert a large proportion of the lake’s recharge into a neighbouring valley), the former outflow (the river draining the lake) will have to go down.
However – this is key – it will take time for the new outflow to drain the lake down to the point where it captures that former outflow.
But capture it, it will.
How long it takes depends on the relative size of the new outflow and the size of the lake. But, no matter the size of the new outflow, there must eventually be an impact on the former natural outflows that exactly equals the new outflows, and the mechanism for that impact is the lowering of the lake level. Even if the abstraction is small, maybe only 5% of the former discharge, and the new outflow is a long way away from the natural outflow, it will be felt, in time, once the lake has lowered by the commensurate amount.
That surface system is fairly easy to get your head around.
Going underground
The complexity comes when you turn the surface system into a groundwater system. The fundamental concept of the water balance remains exactly the same, however, meaning that you can’t add an extra form of discharge (abstraction) without lowering the former natural discharge.
Historically, water companies have argued that you can and have used obtuse arguments to say as much. Setting the precedent for this, in the mid-19th century, the London Water Company started to abstract water from the River Gade, a chalk stream still bedevilled by abstraction. When the millers on the Gade complained, the London Water Company recruited scientists to argue that their abstraction didn’t and couldn’t lower the river flows. They were taking water, so the Victorian boffins argued, from a limitless well so deep underground that it wasn’t connected to the surface system, something the millers were able to show was nonsense. The courts found in the millers’ favour but kicked any reparation into the long grass of the future, a debate and conclusion which is eerily familiar in the Chilterns to this day.
Knowing therefore that when the lake becomes an aquifer, the impact of the abstraction remains non-negotiable, the components of when and where do become harder to pin down.
When and where
We have already seen in the lake analogy that the timing of the arrival of impact at the outflow varies according to the size of the lake because the new outflow must reduce the water level in the lake in order to have an impact on the former outflow.
This is the same with an aquifer. A groundwater abstraction must first lower the water level in the aquifer in order to then capture former natural flow from the stream. Thus, in the first instance, an abstraction – depending on where it is sited – may have an almost undetectable influence on former stream flows while it takes water from the volume stored in the aquifer. Eventually, however, the abstraction will reduce the storage and lower the groundwater levels enough to establish a new dynamic balance in the level of the aquifer, after which ALL of the abstraction is captured from the former natural flow. This split over time between water taken from storage and then water taken from flow is illustrated in the diagram below.
The key idea is this:
The means by which groundwater abstraction captures stream flows is by a reduction in the storage of the aquifer and a lowering of groundwater levels to establish a new dynamic balance.
This lowering of the water table changes the hydraulic head across the entire aquifer, which is what lowers the natural flow.
This basic and inalienable truth was defined by Theis in 1940, but is befuddled all the time by water companies as they smudge the issue of whether any particular abstraction is having an impact on any particular stream.
Wessex Water, for example, argues that relatively short-duration switch-off tests (mentioned earlier) define the boundaries of the cones of depression in their analysis of abstraction impacts around the Tarrant and then misleadingly conflate these boundaries (partly by now renaming the ‘cones of depression’ as ‘zones of influence’) with the limit of the influence of the particular, individual abstractions.
They argue this, in spite of the fact that the impact of any given abstraction extends – in theory – infinitely from the location of the abstraction, its only real boundary being time. The cone of depression is simply the measurable drawdown around a pumping well, forming a gradient that drives water to the wellhead. The edge of the cone is not a physical boundary at all, it is a detection threshold where the drawdown is less than any possible measurement error.
This diagram tries to show that the radiating impact of an abstraction in a uniform, infinite aquifer is – in theory – bounded only by time.The cone of depression is only the limit of the measurable drawdown.
In short, the use of the cone of depression is a water resources construct to help simplify modelling and analysis. In reality, the system actually responds as a continuous, radiating field of change in hydraulic head.
How groundwater abstraction actually affects natural systems.
The so-called zone of influence is actually only the measurable depression, one that is imposed on a much more widespread reduction in the dynamic level of the water table, that reduction exactly equating, over time, to the reduction in head needed to capture former natural discharge and establish a new dynamic balance. Groundwater abstraction alters the natural distribution of hydraulic head everywhere in the system.
Although the system’s boundaries are – in theory – only limited by time, in practice they may effectively be defined by other factors (and Wessex water contends that these factors are relevant). These could include:
impermeable layers – for example thick layers of clays and flints between layers of chalk.
aquifer boundaries – the chalk aquifer obviously ends where the chalk ends. Although it may well connect with other aquifers, the boundary of the chalk may mark an effective boundary for the purpose of analysis.
recharge boundaries – large rivers or lakes / wetlands can supply the water being demanded by the abstraction and therefore limit the effective growth of the water-table reduction. It’s possible the River Stour floodplain is a recharge boundary in the case of the Tarrant.
changes in transmissivity – this is what Wessex Water rests much of its case on, especially the transmissivity under the catchment boundary.
Those effective, possible limits notwithstanding, groundwater abstraction is actually a time-dependent redistribution. As I have shown, it can take a long time for abstraction to capture former natural flows.
Stage 1. Duration – days, weeks or months.
The water demanded by the pump comes almost entirely from storage. The impacts are localised and at this point they are indeed mostly felt within the cone of depression.
Stage 2. Duration – months to years.
The abstraction begins to impact nearby streams and wetlands. This is when the abstraction starts to impact hydraulic gradients in an ever-widening orbit, taking less and less water from storage and increasingly more from changes in the boundary flows.
Stage 3. Duration – long-term new equilibrium, years to decades.
This is the stage beyond which the groundwater abstraction must, according to immutable laws of physics, take its water from the capture of former natural discharge. Most of this will be a reduction in the former groundwater discharge to the chalk streams. Some will also come from “induced recharge”, driving leakage from the stream bed (this is absolutely what is happening in the lower Tarrant), and from lowered evapotranspiration (because the water table is lowered).
Over time, the depletion from former natural discharge approaches the pumping rate, until almost all is taken from the stream system.
Just as it can take a long time for abstraction to lower groundwater levels and capture former natural outflows, it must therefore take a long time for a reduction in abstraction to lead to fully recovered groundwater levels and a full restoration of former natural flows.
Switch-off tests lasting only a few days, weeks, or even months will do nothing more than allow the cone of depression to refill and so help define its boundary. This is not the same thing as the limit of the boundary of impact.
The important point to underline in the case of the Tarrant is that groundwater divides are based on hydraulic head and that divide can move with abstraction pressure. Abstraction can also steepen the gradient of the hydraulic head on one side of the divide relative to the other, causing water to flow towards the pump, relative to the natural system
This means that theoretically, it doesn’t necessarily matter if the Black Lane abstraction is in the neighbouring valley, or that there is a hill in the way, or even that the chalk is marginally less transmissive under the hill. These pumps can very much impact flows in the Tarrant by altering the hydraulic boundaries a long distance from the pump in ways that might not easily be detectable except as diminished stream flow.
Short duration switch-off trials
The switch-off trials that were used to define the boundaries of the cones of depression around the Tarrant lasted only several weeks.
The Black Lane pump was shut down between 9th June and the 15th August 2016. Continuous pumping at a high rate then followed for the next month until September 15th. Both the recovery of groundwater levels and the ensuing drawdown and second recovery were analysed by Wessex Water and used to infer that the so-called zone of influence didn’t extend to the Tarrant. Adding to the weight of evidence was an analysis of groundwater gradient undertaken in 1985 which showed steep groundwater contours under the Pimperne – Tarrant interfluve, suggesting that the chalk here is of lower transmissivity.
The Shapwick pumps were shut off for only eight days in July 2017. They studied groundwater responses around Shapwick and up to and in the Tarrant valley. There was a visible rebound near the pump, but no discernible rebound on the Tarrant interfluve, or the Tarrant valley. Wessex concluded that the river gravels in the Stour valley supply most of the water to the Shapwick pump.
In both cases, a midsummer switch-off of nine weeks, let alone of only eight days, cannot reasonably be deemed long enough to allow regional groundwater levels to recover, when true recovery would need one or two years or longer.
It seems to me that Wessex Water and EA’s logical reasoning is flawed.
The degree to which other limitations – such as lower transmissivity under the interfluve, or a possible recharge boundary in the Stour gravels – have a controlling impact is debatable on a case-by-case basis, but one needs to get the evidence and reasonable conclusions in the correct order.
In other words, it is not sustainable to:
subject a natural system to abstraction
observe a subsequent change in flows in the River Tarrant
confidently attribute that change to some other as yet unknown cause (Wessex Water posits a more leaky river bed than in the past)
confidently state that the impact cannot be caused by abstraction because
the boundaries of a measurable zone of drawdown do not reach the Tarrant
and short-term switch-off tests do not show a recovery in borehole levels that are some distance from the pump
This is confirmation-bias reasoning.
What do we KNOW in theory?
We know for certain that abstraction must – eventually – cause a commensurate reduction in former natural discharge, mostly stream flows.
We know that it can take a long time (months to years) for abstraction to remove storage and lower water-table levels to the extent that it captures those stream flows.
We know – vice versa – that it can take a long time (months to years) for the cessation of abstraction to lead to a full recovery of water-table levels and former stream flows.
We know that there is no theoretical limit to the distance over which an abstraction’s impact may be felt.
We know that factors such as transmissivity may create an effective limit to that distance.
What do we KNOW in practice?
We know that aggregate groundwater abstraction in and around the valley has climbed steadily since the 1970s.
We know that before 2017 the lower River Tarrant dried in 1976, and in 1989/90 and 1995 (all severe droughts).
We know that since 2015 the lower River Tarrant has dried every summer except one (none of which were severe droughts).
We know that the recent drying outside droughts has coincided with the highest aggregate abstraction rates from the three pumps in and close to the valley, over 10Ml/d from Stubhampton, Black Lane and Shapwick, and over 20Ml/d when including Sturmister Marshall.
We know that the one year in the last decade when the lower Tarrant did not dry – 2017 – was both a very dry year AND the one year when the Black Lane pump was switched off for several months and the aggregate abstraction rate fell right back only a few Ml/d .
We know that there is no documentary evidence that the lower Tarrant regularly dried before the era of groundwater abstraction, although there is such evidence for drying in the upper river, which one would expect to dry naturally from time to time.
We know that there is evidence to suggest the lower river flows were reliable before the era of groundwater abstraction.
Occam’s Razor …
states that when faced with competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions is probably the best.
The River Tarrant Protection Society’s hypothesis is that the drying of the lower Tarrant is caused by the local groundwater abstraction, especially its increasing rate since 2017.
Wessex Water’s hypothesis is that abstraction cannot impact flows in the Tarrant because the chalk under Tarrant Pimperne interfluve appears to be less transmissive and because short-term shut-off tests show that the measurable cones of depression do not reach the Tarrant valley, even though we know that cones of depression do not mark the limit of potential influence. They posit that the drying of the lower Tarrant may be caused by an unexplained and un-evidenced increase in the leakiness of the riverbed and that the lack of drying in 2017 is explained by some heavy rainfall in the late summer.
I truly hope that the review commissioned by the Environment Agency proves to be genuinely independent.
Wessex Water* is not objective. Their regional water plans and the use of Stour sources to relieve abstraction pressure in the highly protected Avon SAC are upset by the idea that abstraction should also be reduced in and around the River Tarrant.
But the Tarrant is a chalk stream and a nursery stream for critically endangered Atlantic salmon. The Environment Agency would not be doing its job properly if it ignored clear evidence that abstraction was damaging salmon spawning and nursery habitat.
The River Tarrant Protection Association is asking that the abstraction impact on the River Tarrant be properly investigated, not dismissed, or filibustered and that their pragmatic proposal for a solution to the problem be considered.
*I feel it would only be fair to add neither am I! The Wessex Water team – though we disagree on this important issue – are decent and fair. WW has a statutory duty to supply water to customers and for every abstraction they give up, they must find water elsewhere. This is no easy task. But at the same time we have environmental laws in the WFD and elsewhere that define the limits of impact that statutory duty can cause. It’s up the regulators to adjudicate.
Above: the Hogmsill chalk stream in south London spilling sewage in a light shower in 2007
Repatriation of ownership, public listing, long-term funding, transparency & accountability, independent regulation. It’s not rocket science.
Below is a three-minute summary of how that might work — and why the solution may lie somewhere between privatisation and nationalisation. Read beyond that for the full article.
The Water Industry Debate: A Short Version
Public anger over Britain’s polluted rivers has surged and campaigners are calling for the water industry to be nationalised. After decades of sewage spills and dividends flowing to investors, bringing water back into state control feels like justice.
But nationalisation alone will not necessarily clean our rivers. In the UK, pollution in Scotland and Northern Ireland—where water is publicly owned—are comparable to England and Wales. Across Europe, excellent water systems exist under a variety of ownership models. What the good versions share are long-term investment, governance, and strong regulation.
Britain’s sewage crisis is too deeply embedded to be sorted with a change of clothes. We inherited Victorian sewers that mix rainwater and wastewater, meaning rain regularly overwhelms the system and forces discharges into rivers. Add chronic under-investment (by government and private industry) going back 50+ years, population growth, urban paving, and patterns of heavier rainfall, and the pressure has only increased.
The other part of the failure is financial and regulatory. Water infrastructure requires large capital investment upfront that must be repaid slowly through bills. This should produce a stable, low-risk utility attractive to long-term investors. Instead opaque ownership and weak regulation allowed debt to balloon while infrastructure investment stagnated. Shareholder capital injections have been minimal, with most spending effectively directly funded by customers through their bills. Regulators focused solely on keeping prices low while environmental oversight weakened.
Nationalisation risks recreating the same problems. Two of the institutions that failed most visibly—Ofwat and the Environment Agency—are already public bodies. State ownership does not automatically deliver stronger accountability or better environmental outcomes. The lesson from countries with world-class water systems, such as the Netherlands, is that success depends on transparent governance, specialist institutions, stable long-term funding, and democratic accountability.
Rather than treating nationalisation as the only answer, we should focus on the structural weaknesses that allowed the crisis to develop. Reform could look something like this:
1. Compulsory public listing.
2. A re-patratration of ownership: 75% minimum domestic shareholders.
3. Clarity of corporate ownership / governance.
4. A financial and policy environment that encourages long-term, stable funding from sources that are sensitive to public opinion
5. A simple and easily comprehensible method of assessing and publicising relative environmental performance.
6. Functional specialisation: separating water supply from sewerage and water treatment.
7. Regulatory specialisation: discrete and independent bodies for standards, permitting, monitoring and enforcement.
8. Democratically accountable catchment authorities that are independent of central government.
9. Complete transparency and real-time data.
10. Formalised 3rd sector and citizen science validation of standards.
Rivers do not care whether the water industry is owned by the state, by pension funds, or by listed companies. They respond only to whether sewage is treated properly, infrastructure is maintained, and the law is enforced. If we keep the debate focused on those outcomes, rather than on ideology, we might build a water system worthy of the landscapes it serves.
Nationalisation-lite – the longer version.
Taking its lead from last year’s hit drama Mr Bates Versus the Post Office, Channel 4’s Dirty Business has dramatised the malpractice of water companies and the incompetence of regulators, bringing public anger to a fever pitch.
From the town square— the X account of Hugh Grant, for example— comes the universal cry to ‘nationalise the water industry’. Nationalisation is, after all, what leading lights amongst the campaigners have been calling for. As Feargal Sharkey said to Toby Perkins MP, Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, last summer 2025: ‘Right now, the vast majority of this industry, if not the whole industry, actually needs to be taken back into state control’.
Not nearly as prominent a voice as Mr Sharkey, I have nevertheless been campaigning for river health since the early 1990s. I co-authored the 2017 WWF report Flushed Away that helped bring this sewage scandal to a wider audience and stood with WWF’s brilliant Rose O’Neill and Kathy Hughes in a drafty corridor in Westminster, vainly trying to interest passing MPs. I should be delighted that a campaign once thought too esoteric for the public to care about (WWF hesitated over publication) has now hit the headlines. Finally, something might happen.
So, why do I feel uneasy about this war-cry of nationalisation as the answer? Reform UK has expressed support, and I suspect a more left-leaning Labour government might eventually do the same, particularly under pressure from the Greens. The current Labour government has taken state ownership off the table, for now, but you never know.
It’s not as if nationalisation would necessarily be the wrong answer long term, but quite apart from the fact that decisions like this shouldn’t be swayed by TV dramas, it feels in its current catch-cry form like too much of an easy, crowd-pleasing solution and one that won’t necessarily lead to cleaner rivers and seas.
Nationalisation has replicated and could very well again replicate the failings of the privatised system, under a different guise. Unaccountable corporate greed or unaccountable inefficiencies of state: take your pick. I’m more interested in the environmental outcome than thumbing the eye of capitalism: even if, in this case, the thumb may be deserved.
An equality of badness
There is mixed evidence, at least nationally, as to whether state-owned water industries lead to better environmental standards. True, beyond our shores the best countries for quality of wastewater treatment all feature various forms of municipal and state ownership. But here in the UK, where we appear constitutionally unable to run state entities as well as they do on the Continent, the pollution of our rivers and seas is as bad in Northern Ireland and Scotland (where water is state-owned) as it is in England and Wales.
Conversely, there is little evidence that private companies deliver better environmental standards either. This equality of badness may, in large part, boil down to cost. A clean environment is more expensive than a dirty one, no matter who is running the system. Over the last 50 years we have had underinvestment by the state followed by underinvestment by private companies. Is this because a world-class system would cost more than the British public is willing to pay? Has our industrial heritage driven too deep a wedge between people and their own landscape?
It can’t be an accident that the five best European countries for quality of wastewater services are motivated by the need to look after prominent and fragile ecosystems: Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Austria. Of course, England’s population density is much higher— 450 per square kilometre— than all of those other ‘good water’ nations, bar the Netherlands (441). Wales is comparable with Denmark (150 v 140), Scotland (70) is someway between Finland (18) and Denmark (109).
Arguably, none of the above rivals started from such a low base. In the UK, river water quality is actually much better now than it has been for several centuries, especially when it comes to poo. Rivers like the Mersey once clogged with islands of industrial filth. When the SS Alice sank in the Thames in 1878, it was the sewage-infested water that killed people.
Designed to pollute
Worse, in the UK we have inherited a water system that is pretty much designed to pollute: Bazelgette’s combined sewerage was a massive improvement relative to the squalor of the mid 19th century, but time has caught up with it. We have plugged our modern lifestyles and the Augean oceans of poo 70 million people produce onto the nation’s river network via a system of pipes that must be flushed through with rainwater to remain functional. To keep even vaguely on top of this, our sewage systems need to have massive overcapacity and then must also stay ahead of the relentless creep of urban sprawl, paving, house building, car parks, retail parks, and roads that send more and more rainwater down the drain. Not to mention the 13 million extra bottoms relative to when the water industry was privatised and the more intensive rainfall patterns of recent years.
Now you see it, now you don’t. Our ‘combined’ sewage system has a fundamental flaw, mixing rainwater with sewage.
It is clear that privatised or nationalised, our industry needs investment: firstly to become fit for purpose with its existing, flawed (combined rainwater and wastewater) plumbing network and masses more investment than that to become fit for the 21st century. I wrote about a better system in my last blog: as far as possible we would take our rivers – certainly our most ecologically fragile rivers – off the supply and discharge network altogether. We would take the water in pipework to large, technically advanced treatment works close to the coast, with all the existing sewage works repurposed as stormwater storage tanks, like beads on a chain. This is all a long way off. For now we need to fix the holes in the roof. As we stand, water companies are looking to Ofwat to take the brakes off and provide a bit more investment through increased bills. Ofwat is looking to shareholders to fund their share. One option is unjust (in the historical context); the other is unlikely to happen.
But the fundamental idea of privatisation is not inherently wrong (nor nationalisation, for that matter), and need have nothing to do with the grottier ends of capitalism. Under any form of ownership, sewage infrastructure (if it is to be functional) requires a lot of capital, so much that it must be borrowed and the debt recouped over time through the bills charged to the beneficiaries of that infrastructure. The creditor (whether lending to the state, municipal utility or a private company) will therefore demand a reasonable dividend – they’re not going to invest for free – but they can at least be sure of a very reliable income stream, for people must use the loo in good times and bad.
I don’t see any way round that basic model. Either the government borrows the money and water infrastructure joins the queue behind all the other things the government must borrow money for (welfare, the NHS, education, policing, and defence). Or private companies, or some other institution, must borrow it. Independent funding is a feature of the exemplar publicly owned system I analyse below. A very large part of the protest against the current set-up in the UK is the apparent profiteering. However, a private entity can take various shapes and forms, can even be not-for-profit. Ideally to investors a water utility should look more like an income-yielding bond, rather than a geared-up cash cow.
Clearly, any set-up needs effective regulation, and clearly, our privatised industry didn’t get it. The problem was not so much the principle of privatisation but the way it was allowed through lack of effective regulation, environmental or financial, to metastasise into opaque financial wizardry.
How we got here.
The water industry was privatised in 1989. For a while, some extra investments were made: the shares floated at about £7 billion. Debt was written off and a green dowry added by the UK government to sweeten the deal. The infrastructure was in no great shape, and at the time, society had no real awareness of the degree to which releases of raw sewage were just part of what went on. In the 1980s, ‘Bocky Belly’ was an inevitable side-effect of swimming in the Frome downstream of Dorchester. I’m sure it was the same everywhere. People joked that you couldn’t drown in the Mersey, because you’d die from poisoning first.
Years later, it became clear that water companies really were routinely dumping raw sewage into rivers and seas (I took the photo at the head of the blog in 2007 and if you could smell it you’d gag), though still no one quite knew how much or how often. It was all just ‘flushed away’. In 2012, the much-unsung environmental hero Bob Latimer established through the European Courts(see para 7.) that according to the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive – to which we were signatories – raw sewage should not be released other than in ‘exceptional weather conditions’: very much contrary to what was happening on his local river, the Whitburn.
A short while later, Fish Legal won a ruling that compelled water companies to comply with Environmental Information Regulations, and on the heels of that, WWF’s Rose O’Neill sent a Freedom of Information request to every water company, asking for details of their raw sewage spills. From memory, only one answered because only one had any idea. At the time, only a handful of sites were monitored at all. However, research by the South East Rivers Trust showed that the outfalls on the River Hogsmill in South London were spilling far more frequently than they had been designed to. And into a fragile chalk stream at that, the site of John Everett Mills famous painting of Ophelia. The spills were not related to exceptional weather.
If only that had been the worst of it. It took dogged campaigners like Phil Hammond and Ash Smith (as portrayed in the Dirty Business drama) to push more persistently and unearth a nationwide scandal of environmental malpractice driven by financial malpractice.
As Flushed Away identified, water company investment had stalled: that’s assuming it had ever really started. I remember we calculated that at the existing levels of investment in 2015 it would have taken 800 years to upgrade the systems. Ofwat – the financial regulator – set the price of water and was determined that it wouldn’t go up. Shareholders added little extra capital over time. Caught between the regulated price and income-hungry shareholders, water companies sweated sewage infrastructure to breaking point and the environment paid the bill. Debt accrued but flowed sideways into the pockets of shareholders, many of them overseas institutions that – one might argue – had little interest in the UK’s environment.
Clearly, Ofwat failed to curb any of this. So long as the price to the consumer remained low, the feeling was – so one must guess – that the greater good was being served? Besides, Ofwat at the time had no environmental remit, only one of cost to the consumer. However, the Environment Agency, whose job it is to police the industry’s environmental standards, must also have been asleep at the wheel. Monitoring of river water quality, of fish and invertebrates, all fell from regular to infrequent to scant in the early 2010s. Prosecutions for pollution were rare. Water companies were left to mark their own homework. From the outside it looked as if the environmental regulator was compromised by the economic implications of applying the law.
No wonder it all went wrong. Now, almost everyone agrees that structural change is needed.
Structural change
The Water Special Measures Act is this government’s attempt to address some of those failings. A lot of store is being set by the potency of other eco-populist catch-cries: bonus bans and criminal liability. I don’t know how effective these will be. Do we really think that water-company chief executives set out to break the law? Sewage infrastructure is not fit for purpose because of a problem decades in the making, now colliding with a level of public awareness far higher than even a few years ago. In AMP8 Ofwat has allowed for an unprecedented level of investment, very largely paid for by increased bills and only time will tell to what extent this starts to address the problem. It is only the start, however.
Looking at where we are and where we go next, the Achilles heel of nationalisation as an alternative is surely that two of the three institutions responsible for this poor situation are public bodies already. If Ofwat and the EA failed in their parts, why should we expect a public water industry to per se do any better?
The fact is we have had nothing like the reasonable investment model that we might have, where shareholders look not for creaming profits but for a modest, steady yield, offset by minimal risk. Instead, as research has shown, we have had net zero investment, debt has ballooned, and the money spent on infrastructure has all come from customer bills. According to a 2024 analysis by David Hall from the University of Greenwich – refuted by Ofwat and the industry – shareholder investment has effectively amounted to zero in real and adjusted terms between 1990 and 2023. At the same time, debt has ballooned from effectively nothing (the companies were debt-free at privatisation) to around £70 billion today. The total spent on infrastructure has been about £190 billion, but where did the money come from? Mostly from bills, according to David Hall, while all the debt has allegedly gone to pay dividends.
The difference between fair and what we got
The difference between a fair model and the model we got must surely be the difference between the dividends owners have paid themselves and a fair dividend yield on the investments made.
Against the £190 billion invested in infrastructure, £70 billion is modestly inline with a fair yield, equating to roughly a 2% pa dividend. However, if the £190 billion mostly came from bills, and a much lower sum was invested – and it appears to be true that there have been few injections of fresh capital over time – that £70 billion of dividend, rather than being a reasonable yield on £190 billion of investment, is a very generous yield on the amount invested at floatation. A fair yield on the £7 billion would have amounted to between £9 and £16 billion. (2.5% – to 3.5% over 35 years).
Meanwhile, according to critics, the companies have been leveraged with debt and bills have been higher than they should have been, in spite of Ofwat’s determination to keep them low.
All of which suggests that the system needs rebuilding. And yet while nationalisation might stem the bleed of debt capital to overseas ‘investors,’ would a nationalised version be any better from an environmental point of view? Let’s not forget the problems privatisation was supposed to address: regional water authorities disinclined to prosecute themselves for polluting waterways, chronic underinvestment (by government), creaking infrastructure, deteriorating water quality (a 1985 River Water Quality survey found a high % of sewage works breaching their limits), and very little appetite by customers to pay more for their water and sewage. The full English one might say, since we are so very good at polluting rivers. Plus ça change.
A paucity of ideas
The replication of these problems, whether under private or public ownership, probably explains the vagaries in the public debate. Beyond the easy catch-cry of nationalisation, there are few ideas, with the exception of those coming from Dieter Helm.
Alistair Carmichael MP, chair of EFRA’s Commons select committee, was tellingly non-specific when quizzed by Toby Perkins MP, chair of the Environmental Audit Committee. EFRA looked at ownership models to inform the Cunliffe report: the government had – at that time – ruled out state ownership. Nevertheless, said Carmichael, there is a fundamental truth that ‘you can have any model of ownership that you choose, but actually, if your industry as a whole has the wrong culture, if you lose focus on the customer service and environmental protection, then you’re always going to end up with bad outcomes.’
Instead of starting with the answer of ‘nationalisation’ and working backwards, we might do better to look at specifically what has gone wrong – a hurried privatisation that didn’t compel proper investment, opaque ownership regulations with no obvious accountability, a total failure of economic and environmental regulation, all built around a system of infrastructure that is conceptually flawed – and try to build a better answer from there. The clear evidence globally is that good environmental outcomes depend on satisfactory levels of investment, adequate regulation, and corporate governance, no matter how the water entity is owned.
Carmichael argued that regulation is what it boils down to, and many will agree with him. The regulator must keep the industry’s ‘feet to the fire,’ however the industry is constituted. Our regulatory system, Carmichael highlighted, is split between too many agencies and was not set up to cope with the labyrinthine financial structures the water companies fragmented into over time.
Hmmm. The single regional regulatory authorities that preceded privatisation had failed too. A 2020 Cambridge University Press study into drinking water standards found that public bodies commit significantly more treatment and contamination event violations and fewer reporting violations relative to private bodies, but also speculated that private bodies may exercise strategic underreporting. Which might lead one to the obvious conclusion that no matter what structure is set up, the regulatory side must be completely and effectively separate from the operational side and must not be captured by economics. Although the system has clearly failed, I have strong doubts that the state would have regulated itself any better.
In the UK, it has taken a third-sector form of inspection and regulation by protestors and NGOs to bring the issue to the fore. Any good system going forward must make room for a formal moderation by citizen scientists of the official marking system and the inclusion of that third-sector moderation in the regulation process.
Nevertheless, this economic capture is probably inevitable, to some degree, both of the state regulator and – surprisingly – the courts. In his book The River Pollution Dilemma in Victorian England: Nuisance Law versus Economic Efficiency, Leslie Rosenthal convincingly argues that in spite of the fact that British rivers have been protected back into the mists of time by Common Law and riparianism (the principle that owners of waterside property may make reasonable use of the water so long as that use does not inhibit the water’s quality and quantity for other users), a balance of convenience skewed towards economic efficiency and the greater common good has long overridden the common law in terms of practical application in the courts. Courts are unwilling, in other words, pedantically to apply the law if it causes economic harm (i.e. the cost of water going up) to a very large number of people, relative to the rights of a few.
It has made virtually no difference over time whether our rivers have been protected by riparianism, the 1876 River Pollution Prevention Act, the Prevention of Pollution Act of 1951, or the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive. Economic efficiency will prevail, no matter how much a middle-class wild-swimmer or trout-angler (like me) may wish otherwise. Many critics insist that ‘we just need better enforcement,’ and they are not wrong, but the idea that courts alone can drive the levels of investment needed to build a world class system seems far-fetched.
Going Dutch?
So, what are the features of world-class water systems and how can we adapt them to our somewhat unique situation of inherited rust, too many bottoms, too much paving?
The Dutch system is widely regarded as among the best in the world. Drinking water is of a very high quality and is less expensive to the consumer than in the UK. Wastewater is treated to a very high standard too – 70% undergoes sophisticated tertiary treatment.
With the exception of the combined authority that serves Amsterdam (Waternet) the supply and treatment of drinking water is separated from the collection and management of sewer systems, which is in turn separated from the management of wastewater treatment plants. This allows for a high degree of specialisation.
Drinking water is supplied by regional non-profit and publicly owned utilities. Tariffs to the consumer cover costs, investment and maintenance.
Wastewater, on the other hand, is run under the Dutch water authority model, Waterschappen, comprising twenty-one decentralised public bodies (generally defined by geographical catchments) that form the main operational component of the water management system. Responsibilities include flood protection, water levels, water quality, and – critically – wastewater treatment.
Importantly, in terms of what we might learn, these regional boards are democratically accountable and are technically highly specialised and experienced. They are among the oldest democratic bodies in the country, originating in the 12th century and have acquired expertise over the centuries. They levy their own taxes and also have access to long-term financing through the publicly owned Nederlandse Waterschapsbank (NWB Bank), which provides low-cost loans for public infrastructure. This financial autonomy ensures stable funding for long-term water management projects and supports the sustainable operation of the Dutch water governance system.
The cornerstones of the managerial system are, therefore: functional specialisation, decentralised governance, democratic legitimacy, and financial independence.
Regulation
That’s all very well, but who holds their feet to the fire? In the UK, Alistair Carmichael MP pointed to the ‘littered landscape’ of Ofwat, the Environment Agency, the Office of Environmental Protection, the Drinking Water Inspectorate, as part of the problem in holding the water industry to account. ‘You know, everybody’s got a bit of skin in the game, and then when things start to go wrong, it’s too easy for somebody to say, well, that’s not really our job, it’s theirs.’
Countering the Carmichael viewpoint, the Dutch system is radically decentralised with tiers of overlapping regulatory responsibility. Water boards must answer to the National Inspectorate (ILT), Provincial permitting authorities, the National Water Manager Rijkswaterstaat, scientific oversight (RIVT) , democratic elections, the courts, and effective public scrutiny.
Carmichael’s thoughts presaged those of government, however. In June last year the environment secretary Steve Reed announced that Ofwat would be abolished and a new super regulator would take over from Ofwat, the EA and the drinking water inspectorate. ‘A single, powerful regulator responsible for the entire water sector will stand firmly on the side of customers, investors and the environment and prevent the abuses of the past’.
The Dutch model suggests that overlapping or even split regulation was not the problem. Quite the contrary, it has been a strength. The problem in the UK is buried in the optimism of Steve Reed’s quote. A conflation of the interests of customers, investors and the environment is exactly what Ofwat and the EA got so wrong. The interests of customers, for example, are precariously balanced around the question of cost. A single, super regulator sounds very grand but at the coal-face it’s always a trade-off. Resolving these competing interests is not at all easy in theory, let alone practice. I’d place more faith in discrete and clearly defined areas of regulation with watertight barriers around any possibility of regulatory capture.
For a long time, for example, the thought was that a major barrier to progress in curtailing the over-abstraction of rivers, was the water company licence of right to abstract. What we needed, we all thought, was the ability to remove those licences when it is clear a stream is being damaged, without the need to compensate the water company. We now have that ability, but vanishingly few licences have been revoked. The burden of proof has now moved to slam-dunk, plank-in-the-face evidence of damage, beyond a dry riverbed and dead fish, mind, because a dry riverbed and dead fish might be down to natural causes. The EA has long been caught between protecting the environment and permitting activities that damage it. This is an impossible situation. So long as the EA is saddled with schizophrenic regulatory tasks it will struggle to do its job properly.
A super regulator may well struggle with the same issue of irreconcilable interests. And when it does, money will win, just as it does now.
Nationalisation-lite.
So, if and when the regulators fail to ‘hold feet to the fire,’ – which they will from time to time, even in a perfect world – we come back to the question of governance and accountability. Something that is so clearly transparent in the Netherlands. How directly publicly accountable are the ownership structures in the UK?
Not very much, is the answer. Only three out of nine (South-West Water, United Utilities, and Severn Trent) are publicly listed. The majority of the shares in each of these – 60% to 70% – are held by UK investors, mostly pension funds, insurance companies, and retail investors. These institutions, which will all have active Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) departments, should in theory be more sensitive to UK public opinion than the complex and opaque smorgasbord of private equity, foreign sovereign wealth funds, foreign pension funds, and asset management companies that own the other six water companies.
Does this difference in ownership structure translate across to differing levels of environmental performance? Maybe. Severn Trent was the only company with a top-of-the-class rating in 2024. However, Wessex Water appears to be the water company with the best environmental record over time, and yet it is majority-owned by the Malaysian infrastructure conglomerate YTL.
Even so, clarity and accountability could and should make a difference.
It is standard practice globally that companies of particular strategic importance to a nation – airlines, for example, telecommunications, energy – must have a minimum percentage of domestic ownership. Delta, American Airlines, Air Canada, and Qantas must all be owned by a minimum of 51% domestic shareholders. In Canada and Japan, foreign investment is limited to 20% of telecom operators. Both Canada and Australia edict that domestic pension funds must hold majority shareholdings in strategically important companies. The reasons are obvious but include security and economic sovereignty.
Why should water be any different? If all the water companies were by law publicly listed on the UK stock exchange, with a maximum foreign ownership capped at, say, 25%, it would surely lead to more clarity and therefore accountability in their governance. Even better if the financial system and policy environment strongly encouraged investors such as domestic pension funds to own large shares of this national infrastructure. Pension funds have long investment horizons, a need for steady income, and an ability to invest very large sums of money on fair terms. UK pension funds and their active ESG departments should be much more sensitive to public opinion than opaque overseas financial vehicles.
Especially if we could also create a clearer portrayal for customers of ownership associated with relative environmental performance. Why shouldn’t every water bill list who the primary shareholders of that company are? And, why shouldn’t every water bill include the environmental performance rating of that company over the previous one year and five?
The Environment Agency produces a star rating every five years. But few people know about it and it is a bit too esoteric for customers in my view. Customers need a little blue drop or a little brown drop. And they need this printed prominently at the top of the water bill alongside the company logos and a list of who the primary UK-based shareholders are. I can see the likes of Legal & General very much preferring to see their names printed under the blue drops, not the brown.
I have no idea how legally tricky it would be to mandate this public listing, to mandate a minimum % of UK ownership, and enact the policies that would encourage the right kind of investor. But I suspect it would be easier, and less expensive for the government than nationalising the industry and less likely to spook the markets, to use an overworked phrase. A system such as this would achieve a level of nationalisation-lite and powerfully add to our arsenal of regulation the leverage of corporate sensitivity to public opinion, curtailing the financial shenanigans and driving stronger environmental stewardship over time.
Ownership alone will not clean our rivers.
It is tempting, when a system fails so visibly, to reach for the most dramatic solution available. Nationalisation has the virtue of clarity and the emotional satisfaction of redress. After decades in which the public has watched sewage pour into rivers while dividends flowed out to investors, it is easy to see why the call resonates. However, the failures we are dealing with are systemic. They include poorly designed privatisation, unaccountable corporate ownership, and a regulatory regime tasked with divided and irreconcilable priorities, that was under-resourced and in places captured by the very economic constraints it was meant to police. Changing the ownership without fixing those structural weaknesses risks simply recreating the same problems in a different set of clothes.
What ultimately determines environmental outcomes is more practical: sustained investment, transparent governance, and regulators that are genuinely independent and empowered to enforce the law. Countries that succeed at managing water tend to combine these features regardless of whether their systems are public, private, or hybrid.
That is why a better path may well lie somewhere between the slogans. A system that makes ownership transparent, encourages long-term domestic ownership and investment, aligns shareholder incentives with environmental performance, and strengthens independent environmental regulation could deliver many of the benefits people associate with nationalisation without the financial and political upheaval of full state takeover.
Call it nationalisation-lite if you like.
1. Compulsory public listing.
2. A re-patratration of ownership: 75% minimum domestic shareholders.
3. Clarity of corporate ownership / governance.
4. A financial and policy environment that encourages long-term, stable funding from sources that are sensitive to public opinion
5. A simple and easily comprehensible method of assessing and publicising relative environmental performance.
6. Functional specialisation: separating water supply from sewerage and water treatment.
7. Regulatory specialisation: discrete and independent bodies for standards, permitting, monitoring and enforcement.
8. Democratically accountable catchment authorities that are independent of central government.
9. Complete transparency and real-time data.
10. Formalised 3rd sector and citizen science validation of standards.
Above all, the debate should not become a proxy war over ideology. Rivers do not care whether the water industry is owned by the state, by pension funds, or by listed companies. They respond only to whether sewage is treated properly, infrastructure is maintained, and the law is enforced. If we keep our focus there — on the ecological outcome rather than the ownership model — we might build a water system worthy of the landscapes and people it serves.
Back in the summer we received a letter from Defra and Minister Hardy about the government’s plans for chalk streams, after they abandoned the long-promised chalk streams recovery pack. I wrote about that letter HERE.
Twice recently I’ve been asked to summarise what could be done that would be ecologically effective and cost-effective. As ever, it’s the cost of protecting nature that sets the pace. The answer is no more than I have written about before, because the ideas were always cost-effective. But perhaps if I express it all as a very simple, rounded package that could be started immediately in at least one – if not two – major catchments: London’s Rivers Colne and Lea. It goes like this:
Re-naturalise flows by relocating abstraction
Take the chalk streams off the sewage discharge system and repurpose the small sewage works as stormwater storage
Re-meander the rivers, especially in public spaces, and in so doing boost biodiversity, flood management and carbon sequestration.
In my view this would be a total no-brainer and I can’t understand why we’re banging on about water company bosses doing jail time, when we could actually get on with fixing things.
Recovery of healthy flows
It starts with Chalk Streams First. A very simple and cost-effective way to re-naturalise flows in those very heavily abstracted chalk streams around London and Cambridge. Chalk Streams First relocates abstraction from upper catchment groundwater to lower catchment surface flow and allows the chalk stream first use of the water, all without a significant loss to public water supply. It’s chalk stream cake-ism.
An ongoing process called the National Framework (NF) has identified the deficits to good ecological flow in all of England’s rivers. The water companies, NF regional groups and Ofwat RAPID are developing multi-decadal strategies for water supply, security and environmental protection and restoration, including addressing those deficits to good flows. The smorgasbord of options at their disposal includes reservoirs, pipelines, desalination plants, recycling etc. We should see Chalk Streams First as another major one of these “strategic options”.
Conceptually, CSF, works by greatly reducing groundwater abstraction in the upper reaches of chalk streams. This leads to flow recovery, as the groundwater bounces back up. Generally speaking around 85% of the reduction recovers to the river as surface flow (some is lost as aquifer throughflow and some as evapotranspiration). This re-naturalises the flow in the chalk stream and the extra flow can be taken as surface abstraction much lower down the river system from the reaches where the ecology is less flow dependent. The water is then stored in reservoirs and piped to the places formerly supplied by the groundwater abstraction.
Dorset’s River Piddle is one shining example of what happens when flows are re-naturalised. This exact spot used to dry up regularly when abstraction was at its peak in the 1980s
There is a caveat: the flow recovery is not evenly spread through the year. It is much higher in winter, well over 100%, and commensurately lower in the summer. This leaves you with a summer shortfall, hence the need for a reservoir. In times of extreme drought, the flow recovery would be minimal and public supply threatened.
Ensuring public water supply in droughts
This is where you bring in the concept of a public supply groundwater back-up. Counter intuitively, it is during the drought that you draw on groundwater abstraction to make up the shortfall. Essentially you temporarily mine the aquifer (taking water from aquifer storage in the midst of the drought) and use the chalk streams as the means of delivery from the point of groundwater abstraction to the point of surface water abstraction. The scheme runs for just long enough to get you through the drought.
This actually protects the chalk streams with boosted flows in the drought, though this protection is a bi-product, not the purpose. It leads to slower aquifer recovery in the following winter and perhaps lower than normal flows the following year. In spite of that, the chalk streams flows throughout are still much better than they would be under our existing, chronic abstraction scenarios. A scheme like this already exists: the West Berkshire Groundwater Scheme run by Thames Water. It has been needed only a couple of times in the past 25 years and even then only briefly.
Essentially, Chalk Streams First allows us to re-naturalise flows in chalk streams without a significant loss to public water supply.
Using Chalk Streams First to solve our sewage crisis
Isaac Walton’s beloved River Lea doesn’t really exist upstream of Luton sewage works. Is there a future world where it meanders healthily through Leagrave Park, while the sewage is piped down the valley to much more technically advanced treatment works?
There’s ANOTHER dimension to the Chalk Streams First idea that has been unsung thus far, but which could be THE answer to the 24/7 inflow of nutrient rich and scantily treated sewage water to the upper reaches of our chalk streams from sewage works that are otherwise very expensive to upgrade. The brutal truth at the moment is that many to most of the chalk streams in heavily developed catchments actually need sewage discharges to meet flow targets. The Lea doesn’t really start life until the Luton works outfall. But re-naturalised flows driven by the aquifer would mean our streams are no longer dependent on sewage discharges for flow.
This will give us a solution to the thus far impossible issue of getting cost-effective phosphorus stripping to small-scale sewage works in the upper reaches of rivers. The water industry has actually done a lot to reduce phosphorus discharges, but the laws and incentives have been constructed in such a way as to drive all the investment to very large treatment works. The smaller works get left behind, even though they create the greatest problem in the most ecologically sensitive places.
Chalk Streams First means we could take our chalk streams off the water supply AND discharge circuit altogether. If we no longer need discharges for flow, the small sewage works that currently exist can all be connected and piped down the valley to larger works. Each STW that comes off-line as a treatment works can then be repurposed as storm storage facility, providing a series of buffers in the system.
If flows were re-naturalised we would no longer need sewage discharges to meet flow targets in our chalk stream headwaters and upper reaches. We could take our chalk streams off-line and treat all the water in larger works further down the valleys. Small sewage works could be re-purposed as stormwater storage areas, placing buffers in a daisy chain down the system.
Re-meander the streams, increase biodiversity and store carbon
Finally, you add to the above the comparatively cost effective physical restoration of streams that have been greatly modified over the centuries. Natural chalk stream floodplains are potentially vast carbon sinks, but we’ve dried them out and corralled our chalk streams into canalised straitjackets. I’ve just completed a raft of proposals along these lines for chalk streams in Norfolk and as part of that process reviewed the costs per mile of large-scale re-meandering and floodplain restoration. The numbers – £100 to £350K per mile – seem high, until you compare them to other numbers and reflect on the way in which restoration on this scale adds up to genuine and massive gains in biodiversity, natural flood management and carbon capture. By comparison, it costs well over £2 million to resource a 1-megalitre per day water supply.
Put those three measures together and you have the chalk streams of the future, once we get a government sensible enough to see the potential.
We live in hope.
This lovely image by photographer Charlie Hamilton-James is of a re-meandered chalk stream in Norfolk. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t roll out this sort of stream and floodplain recovery in public spaces and parks in the chalk landscapes all round the Chilterns and London, boosting biodiversity, flood resilience and carbon sequestration.
Pictured above: sewage? No. Road run-off from a mid-summer rain-shower.
You may remember Sophia’s petition for the protection of chalk streams, which quite easily surpassed the 10,000 signatories needed to elicit a letter from Defra, if not enough to trigger a debate in Parliament. However, a debate on river health was had recently (29th January) and chalk streams were mentioned several times.
The text of that debate can be found by clicking this LINK
I probably ought to let you all judge for yourselves what it amounts to or signals.
Personally, I have reservations about how easy it is now to dump blame on the water companies. Not that they don’t deserve a great deal of blame, but the parlous state of our rivers is not only down to water company malpractice. Our laws are at fault. Our regulation is at fault. Our pricing of water is at fault. Cheap food is at fault. Highways maintenance is at fault. Flea treatments are at fault. How much water we all use is at fault. Wet wipes are at fault. The ever increasing size of modern tractors is at fault. Our historic inheritance of mills, canalisation and dredging is at fault. The last three, historically the most remote, are in combination with all the above present day ills, the most significant impacts of all and yet receive virtually zero attention. Having said that, Minister Hardy, did at least extol the virtues of re-wriggling rivers.
Capping water company director’s bonuses might well be one in the eye for some of the folk who should be held to account, but I’m not sure it’s going to really do much to restore our beleaguered rivers more generally or chalk streams in particular.
For that we need some forensically focussed realignment of environmental law, economic drivers and regulation aimed not just at the water industry but at all the pressures that hold our rivers back.
There’s much in Minister Hardy’s final statement to indicate a general commitment to the above.
“Restoring the health of our rivers is fundamental to safeguarding nature, supporting resilient communities and securing our water environment for generations to come. The Labour Government are committed to delivering the most comprehensive programme of reform ever undertaken. It involves strengthening regulation, boosting enforcement, investing in innovation, supporting local partnerships and empowering farmers, land managers and water companies to play their part. From national action on agricultural pollution and chalk stream protections, to ambitious local projects in South Dorset, we are driving real, long-term improvements. Together, those measures demonstrate our unwavering commitment to cleaner water, thriving habitats and a healthier natural environment across England.”
The devil is in the detail, however, and in the end it comes down to that which can be quantified. How much less water will be abstracted from our chalk aquifers? By what date? How will we prioritise abstraction reduction so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the way we have prioritised phosphorus reduction (ie driven by economics rather than ecological benefit)? Where will the replacement water come from? Will we now, finally, incentivise phosphorus reduction from tiny sewage works in headwaters and tributaries? Exactly how will we do that? Will we persuade or incentivise farmers to adopt better ways to keep soil on their land? Exactly how? Will local authorities adopt less damaging practice in local road maintenance programmes? When by? Etc. Etc.
Specific actions. Specific numbers. Specific dates. These are the things we tried so very hard to get into a Chalk Stream Recovery Pack. Without them it’s all so much fish and chips wrapper.
Dumb, damaging and pointless drainage: one of the many things that impact chalk stream health.
Ali Morse – chair of the CaBA chalk stream group – has written a letter (see PDF below) to Minister Emma Hardy (pictured above with the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust beside the Foston Beck) encouraging her to support measures to restore and protect chalk streams, but also expressing disappointment that the water White Paper and NPPF have not given us the promised assurances that chalk streams will get the “recognition and protection they deserve.”
Some time before the last election – and sensing, without any great gifts of foresight, a change of government – I spoke with Daniel Zeichner, the Cambridge Labour MP, about how important it would be to continue our chalk stream restoration work beyond the election, to harness the momentum gained from a strategy that had been signed up to by all sides. I might have been naive (though not as naive as those firebrands who correlated conservation nirvana with a change at Westminster) but Zeichner agreed wholeheartedly. He said that Feargal Sharkey – who was vigorously campaigning for Labour at the time – would hold them all to account if they didn’t do something.
And yet in spite of all that, the responses of the new(ish) government to repeated pleas for the greater protection of chalk streams have been underwhelming, to say the least. Having filibustered the progress of Minister Pow’s promised Chalk Stream Recovery Pack, Defra used the election as a means to nudge the pesky document under the carpet and finally to bury it altogether.
But when I met Minister Hardy last summer on the banks of Yorkshire’s Foston Beck, I met someone who I felt was motivated – as Minister Pow had been – to help chalk streams. She seemed genuinely keen to listen and help. Genuinely flabbergasted by some of the anomalies in existing environmental law that, for example, drive ever more expensive sewage treatments to works where the benefit to wildlife is minimal, while ignoring those places that need it most. But I also sensed a hesitancy to commit. Having worked for a year with Defra trying to midwife the Recovery Pack I knew why. Trying to persuade that unelected part of government to do anything differently is like pushing water uphill, whether you’re a Minister, an eNGO or individual citizen.
As Ali points out in her excellent letter, during the passage of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill we saw consistent and strong cross-party support for measures to protect chalk streams. We heard ministerial assurances from the despatch box that effective chalk stream measures would be included in upcoming policies.
But we haven’t seen much of substance, thus far.
No surprise, perhaps. There is no Damascene moment in conservation. I’ve been banging on about chalk stream protection since the dark days of the late 1980s when abstraction was at its peak, when cattle poached the riverbanks to bits, when land drainage engineers ruled the waterways, when zero phosphorus was removed from sewage and when “restoration” of rivers was an eccentric form of guerrilla resistance. Things are better than that now, though sometimes it may not feels as if they are.
To that end, Ali has extended to Defra the hand of continuing cooperation backed by the wealth of expertise now assembled under the umbrella of the CaBA chalk stream group, very ably managed by Alison Matthews. And I have invited Minister Hardy to come and visit the River Chess to meet with the River Chess Association and the Chilterns Chalk Stream Project and see first hand how collaboration and persistence can bring about the recovery of a chalk stream.
“(6A) Where a strategy area includes a chalk stream, the spatial development strategy must include policies on permissible activities within the area of the stream for the purposes of preventing harm or damage to the stream or its surrounding area.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would ensure spatial development strategies include policies to protect chalk streams.
My Lords, Amendment 93, in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, aims to secure the future of England’s chalk streams by enshrining specific protections and standards into our planning regime. As we made clear in Committee, these globally rare ecosystems—there are only 200 in the world—are often referred to as our country’s rainforests in terms of biodiversity and they face genuine risk from piecemeal development and inadequate water management. These are risks that will only intensify without a robust and specific legislative lever.
Relatively recently, I went for a customary walk in a beautiful green space in south-west London, only to discover that the beautiful River Wandle, home to brown trout and kingfishers, had been destroyed by a devastating diesel leak. The Government intend to streamline housebuilding and environmental measures in tandem, but the practical reality is stark.
Chalk streams are uniquely vulnerable. Abstraction of water, chronic pollution and unchecked development have led to tangible declines in many local areas. In 2023, the Liberal Democrats collected data through freedom of information requests, which revealed that one in 10 chalk stream sewage monitors were faulty, with some water companies having much higher rates of broken or uninstalled equipment.
Amendment 93 delivers a targeted solution: a statutory driver for sustainable drainage standards before any development interfaces with public sewers, closing a loophole that currently exists and has allowed cumulative harm to chalk streams. This amendment would ensure that developers are compelled to apply national standards for drainage and water treatment ahead of any permissions, rather than leaving mitigation as an afterthought.
Amendment 94 in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich complements this approach, and I thank him for the work he has done on this issue and his environmental expertise, which he has brought to this debate. Amendment 94 tightens oversight and demands full transparency in environmental impact reviews on watercourses at risk, an essential safeguard for communities whose local rivers are too often treated as collateral damage by the planning system’s inertia.
None of us should accept that cleaner, safer waterways are an optional extra and a nice to have. By adopting an amendment on chalk streams and supporting, out of these two amendments, Amendment 94, this House will signal that nature restoration, water quality and sustainable infrastructure are not in competition but can be advanced through co-ordinated and legally binding steps. I urge noble Lords to support these amendments for the sake of our streams and the communities they sustain.
If the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich moves to a vote, these Benches will support him. It is right that, with something as crucial as our unique chalk streams, we ask our colleagues in the House of Commons to think again and strengthen and protect in law this ecosystem that is almost unique to England. I hope that this House will unite in voting for Amendment 94 and protecting this rare heritage for future generations.
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 94, and I thank the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, and the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, for their support. I am most grateful to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, who has just spoken so powerfully about her amendment, as well as offering her support for this amendment. Amendment 94 would require a spatial development strategy to list chalk streams in the strategy area, outline measures to protect them from environmental harm and impose responsibility on strategic planning authorities to protect and enhance chalk stream environments.
Chalk streams, as we have heard, are a very special type of river. Some 85% of the world’s chalk streams are in England. They are fed primarily by spring water from the chalk aquifer, not rain, which means that they have clear, cold water and very stable flows. These globally rare habitats are found in a broad sweep from Yorkshire and the Lincolnshire Wolds through Norfolk, the Chilterns, Hampshire and Dorset. The Bure, Glaven, Wensum, Test, Itchen and Meon are river names that come to mind flowing, as they do, through the tapestry of English history and in our literature, such as the River Pang-based Wind in the Willows. They are rich in minerals, especially calcium, and this “base rich” environment supports a distinctive and rich ecology.
It is no wonder that this amendment and a similar one in the other place have received such positive support, including in your Lordships’ Committee. What it seeks to do is such an obvious thing, for what we love, we should desire to protect; what we value, we should safeguard; what is of global significance, we should be deeply proud of.
I am grateful that the Minister responded to my letter to her about my amendment. However, her response was far from reassuring in two ways. First, the Government have pointed to local nature recovery strategies as a way of protecting chalk streams. These could, of course, in future be capable of considering, avoiding and otherwise mitigating for direct damage to these habitats, such as occurs from the footprint of a development near a chalk stream. However, to do so, LNRSs will need more bite in the planning system than they currently have. We are still waiting for the regulations designed to do precisely that, placing a duty on local planning authorities to take account of the nature strategy when making planning decisions.
We are still waiting for that to be commenced, and it is now a full two years after these regulations were promised in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023.
Even once the regulations are passed, LNRSs will not be well placed to map, quantify and avoid or mitigate for the offsite impacts of development such as downstream pollution or the additional water that will be abstracted from chalk streams or their aquifers to serve new homes. These very real threats to our chalk streams, over areas much larger than are covered by strategies, cannot be addressed by LNRSs.
Secondly, the Government have pointed to their plans to limit overabstraction by water companies through amending licences, but their target achievement date is 2030. This could take far, far too long and be far, far too late for many threatened chalk streams. The current abstraction situation is grave. Water companies are not sourcing their water from chalk streams within sustainable limits. The Catchment Based Approach’s chalk streams annual review 2024-2—a mouthful of a title—published last week, reports that a third of chalk streams do not have healthy flow regimes. This CaBA report also highlights additional water bodies where, despite flows being classed as compliant overall, abstraction can cause significant local impacts in parts of the watercourse. For example, in the River Loddon, upstream areas are impacted by abstraction but, because of wastewater discharge downstream of them, flows at the assessment point are classed as compliant. If overabstraction occurs for a sustained period upstream, the whole chalk stream could well dry out.
In light of the growing and urgent challenges facing our chalk streams, we cannot afford to wait for LNRSs to have more planning bite, or for 2030, when the abstraction licence amendments come into effect. We need Amendment 94 so that spatial development strategies are equipped to enable planning authorities to direct development away from areas where development footprints, pollution and overabstraction could sound the death knell for declining chalk streams. I will certainly listen to the Minister’s response with care. However, if this amendment continues to secure wide support, I will look to test the opinion of the House.
I am pleased to add my name to the important amendment tabled by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich, and to Amendment 92 in this group, because, let us be honest, we are not starting from a good place with chalk streams. As mentioned by my noble friend, the current status of these unique and extremely rare habitats in the UK is poor, with more than three-quarters failing to meet good ecological health standards. This is precisely why the chalk streams became such an important issue for debate in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill. I remember only too well the same Front Bench colleagues debating long and hard for their protection.
The chalk stream recovery plan, announced by the previous Government, was seen by many, including me, as a good step in the right direction. But here we are again, with chalk streams back in the firing line and, despite the reassurance from the Minister on Report that local nature recovery strategies could propose priorities for their protection, the problem with our planning system is that it requires local authorities only to have regard to our LNRSs, which is not strong enough to protect these vulnerable habitats. We came across this a number of times in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill. Those words are etched in my memory.
Also, although the NPPF recognises the importance of irreplaceable habitats, chalk streams, much to my alarm—and, I am sure, to that of many in this House—are not specifically listed as protected habitats. Therefore, they do not have the overarching level of protection in the Bill, through the spatial development strategies, in the same way other protected habitats do. The only hope left, therefore, is the chalk stream nature recovery plan, launched by the previous Government. However, in reply to the question on this asked in Committee by the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, who sadly cannot be here today, the Minister stated that even this is now on hold because it is out of step with the ambitious programme of water reforms proposed by the Government. Perhaps the Minister can say for how long it will be on hold, as a result permitting further damage to occur in these unique freshwater habitats.
I say this because time is of the essence here. As an ecologist, I went back to look at the literature. Research on chalk streams has demonstrated that while removing pollution can result in the improvement of water quality within a month to a few years, ecological recovery can take between 10 and 20 years. The more damage we do, the longer it will take for them to recover.
Lastly, surely there must be some no-go habitats in some of our river catchments, and these chalk streams should be one of them. I therefore urge the Minister to agree to this amendment, within which the spatial development strategy would mandate the sort of responsibilities that lead to the protection and enhancement of these unique and rare chalk stream habitats.
My Lords, I support both amendments. I made a speech in Committee in which I laid out very similar arguments to those put by the right reverend Prelate and the noble Baroness, Lady Willis. I will not repeat them now, except to say that the right reverend Prelate referred to a number of chalk streams in my old constituency of North West Norfolk. These incredible assets—these unique and precious assets—are at risk as we speak. I say to the Minister that neither amendment is particularly demanding. They are quite modest in their overall fabric and intent. If the Government are serious about their environmental credentials, and about trying to do something for the countryside, I urge them, please, to accept these amendments.
My Lords, I have put my name to the right reverend Prelate’s amendment. I am delighted to see him back in the Chamber; we missed him in Committee.
My noble friend Lord Roborough was absolutely right when he said in Committee that all rivers are important. Yes, that is true, but chalk streams are that bit more important. The reason for that is that we have 85% of the world’s chalk streams. We are custodians for that majority, but 83% of those chalk streams do not meet good ecological standards. We have handled the whole situation very badly. I think we have taken a retrograde step with this Government, who have dispensed with the chalk stream recovery pack, which the noble Baroness just referred to.
I have written to the Minister and told her that I will ask her a number of questions. I have given her forewarning, so I expect replies. In what respect did that chalk stream recovery pack fall short? It was nearly ready to go when the Labour Government took over after winning the election. They could have pressed the button; that chalk stream pack focused on some difficult questions that nobody had fully addressed before, so why have they torpedoed it? What do they propose to do that will be better than that pack had proposed?
Let us go down to some specifics of the pack. It had time-bound commitments to reduce groundwater abstraction on numerous chalk streams which, according to the Environment Agency’s own data, are unsustainably extracted: for example, the Darent in Kent, where over half the rainfall that feeds the river is taken away for public water supply. There was a timescale for getting that right. Will the Government stick with that timescale or will there be something longer? Do the Government have plans to move water abstraction further downstream, rather than at the headwaters of these rivers?
The chalk stream pack also had a timebound commitment to address the hundreds of small sewage works in chalk streams that do not remove phosphorus in the treatment process and where there is currently no policy or incentive to drive investment. What are the Government going to do better to give a good timescale to get all those water treatment plants in good order? The pack also addressed run-off from highways and local roads, which I have spoken about before in your Lordships’ House, and how damaging it can be to chalk streams in particular because of the added silt. The CaBA chalk stream strategy recommends revised best practice guidelines for local councils that give more protection to chalk streams. Do the Government have better plans than that? The pack also put forward solutions to reform the farming rules for water, which are currently ineffective. What are the Government going to do to replace that recommendation?
I did not mention this question when I wrote to the Minister, but I will add it now: how do the Government intend to address the physical dysfunctionality of many chalk streams moved, straightened, dredged or dammed over the centuries and put them back to their natural state? In destroying the hard work of some very good, able and committed people who produced the chalk stream pack, the Government have alienated some potential friends in their effort to improve the environment. How are they going to get friends back onside when, after all that work, they have just dismissed it as though it did not matter? What plans do they have to include such people in the future to try to improve the whole river system for chalk streams? It is no good taking just one little area in one district or county council, because chalk streams do not understand those borders; they flow through lot of different councils. The whole thing has to be tackled on a holistic basis, and the only way to do that is by supporting the right reverend Prelate’s amendment.
My Lords, I shall speak to the amendments in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich. I am grateful for their excellent, informative introductions. We on these Benches tabled similar amendments in Committee. The amendments share a vital purpose: to ensure that our planning system gives proper recognition and protection to chalk streams, one of our most distinct and rarest natural habitats. These streams help define our landscapes, support unique biodiversity and supply water to many communities. The amendments would require spatial development strategies to identify and protect chalk streams, setting out the responsibilities for planning authorities in their stewardship.
These are sensible, constructive proposals and I am grateful to those who have tabled and supported them. We will support the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich if he divides on his amendment this evening. Will the Minister say whether she considers chalk streams to be irreplaceable habitats, like ancient woodlands, and therefore deserving of similar policy protection? The case for stronger recognition of chalk streams within our planning system is compelling. They are an irreplaceable part of our natural heritage and a globally important asset, and the way we plan for growth must reflect that.
I hope the Minister has heard the House and will be able to accept these amendments, and explain, as the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, and my noble friend Lord Caithness have asked, why our chalk stream restoration strategy is on hold.
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich for Amendments 93 and 94, which propose additional statutory obligations for strategic planning authorities in relation to the identification and safeguarding of chalk streams. With 85% of the world’s chalk streams found in England, these unique water bodies are not just vital ecosystems but are indeed a symbol of our national heritage. The Government are committed to restoring them, which is why we are taking a strategic approach to restoring chalk streams. Working in partnership with water companies, investors and communities, the Government will introduce a new water reform Bill to modernise the entire system so that it is fit for purpose for decades to come. This is essential to restoring chalk streams to better ecological health and addressing the multiple pressures facing these habitats.
Alongside the programme of ambitious reforms, the Government are continuing to deliver vital improvements and investment for chalk streams, including £1.8 million through the water restoration fund and water environment improvement fund for locally led
chalk stream projects. Over the next five years, water companies will spend over £2 billion on chalk stream restoration.
The Government remain firmly committed to the restoration and protection of chalk streams. Plan-makers and decision-makers should recognise these habitats as valued landscapes and areas of high biodiversity. They deliver essential ecosystem services, contribute significantly to natural capital, and should be identified and protected through local plans.
As I emphasised in Committee, local nature recovery strategies provide a tool for identifying and enhancing chalk stream habitats. These strategies map priority areas for nature and are informed by key environmental data, such as the assessments carried out under river basin management plans. Under Section 12D(11) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, spatial development strategies must already take account of relevant local nature recovery strategies.
In answer to the points made by the right reverend Prelate, local nature recovery strategies are a legal requirement and are prepared by responsible authorities, typically county or combined authorities appointed by the Defra Secretary of State. There are 48 LNRS areas and lead authorities covering the whole of England; there are no gaps, and no overlaps. LNRS responsible authorities work closely with local partnerships, involving all local planning authorities, to identify and map proposed areas for habitat management, enhancement, restoration and creation for biodiversity and the wider natural environment. The West of England Combined Authority published the first LNRS in November 2024. Five more have since followed: North Northamptonshire Council, Cornwall, Isle of Wight, Essex and Leicestershire. The remaining 42 are expected to be published by the end of 2025, or shortly thereafter.
I will also address the right reverend Prelate’s point about the provisions in the LURA. The Act created a duty requiring plan-makers to take account of LNRS. This builds on the existing requirement on all public authorities to have regard to LNRS in complying with their duty to conserve and enhance biodiversity. This duty will be commenced as part of wider planning reforms later this year.
Where a strategic authority considers chalk stream protection to be of strategic importance, Section 12D(1) requires that spatial development strategies include policies on land use and development that address such strategic priorities. Authorities will therefore be able to include such policies where appropriate.
Furthermore, planning policy is clear that decisions should prevent new and existing development contributing to unacceptable levels of water pollution. Where water quality has the potential to be a significant planning concern, an applicant should explain how the proposed development would affect a relevant water body in a river basin management plan and how they propose to mitigate the impacts.
Fixing systemic issues is essential to addressing the multiple pressures facing these habitats, and restoring our chalk streams to better ecological health is part of our overall programme of ambitious reforms for the water sector.
I will respond to the points made by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. I am more than willing to answer all his points—I will try to do so briefly. It might have been more helpful to have them in writing before today, but I will cover the points he has raised. First, on the time-bound commitments to reduce ground water abstraction, we are tackling one of the biggest threats to chalk streams by reducing harmful abstractions by an estimated 126 million litres daily by 2030, protecting vital water flows to these fragile ecosystems.
Companies covering chalk stream areas, such as Affinity Water and South Staffs Water, have made specific commitments to reduce abstraction from chalk streams. Affinity Water has committed to reducing abstraction by 34% by 2050. Portsmouth Water is building a new reservoir in Hampshire to protect the River Test and the River Itchen—this is the first new reservoir to be built since the 1970s. In June 2025, the Environment Agency updated its national framework for water resources, which set out the importance of chalk streams and how we will include their needs in water resources planning and decision-making.
On time-bound commitments to address hundreds of small sewage works in chalk streams that do not remove phosphorus, under the Environment Act, to achieve the 80% reduction in phosphorus load discharge, the phosphorus improvement driver prioritises action for catchments that meet one or more of the following criteria: catchments with water framework directive regulations—phosphorus standard failures; catchments with identified nutrification issues under the Urban Waste Water Treatment Regulations; and catchments where phosphorus targets set by conservation policy advisers are exceeded. That prioritisation ensures targeting to achieve the best environmental outcomes.
In addressing run-off from highways and local roads, the Defra Secretary of State has committed to including a regional element in the new water regulator. We are considering how road or highway run-off and urban diffuse pollution can be managed at a regional or local level as part of moving to a catchment-based approach.
Lastly, on the reform of farming rules for water—which the noble Lord said in his letter are currently ineffective—the levels of water pollution from agriculture are unacceptable. We are looking at reforming the regulations, including the farming rules for water, as a priority within a suite of broader interventions. We are also working with farmers, environmental groups and other parties to improve the farm pollution regulations to make sure that they are simple and effective. This will allow us to deliver pollution reductions and clean up our waters while supporting farm businesses to grow. I hope that is helpful to the noble Lord.
We need to continue to tackle the biggest impacts on chalk streams, including reducing the risk of harmful abstraction, and we are doing so, as I said, by 126 million litres through the amendment of water company abstraction licences, and rebuilding the water network with a record £104 billion investment to upgrade crumbling pipes and cut sewage spills. In light of all this, I hope noble Lords will not press their amendments.
My Lords, I thank the Minister. It is very clear there is a strong feeling within this House that there is a need for something to shift and be enshrined in law. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment in order to hand over and support the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich if he decides to press his.
“(6A) A spatial development strategy must—(a) list any chalk streams identified in the strategy area;(b) identify the measures to be taken to protect any identified chalk streams from pollution, abstraction, encroachment and other forms of environmental damage; and(c) impose responsibilities on strategic planning authorities in relation to the protection and enhancement of chalk stream habitats.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would require a spatial development strategy to list chalk streams in the strategy area, outline measures to protect them from environmental harm, and impose responsibility on strategic planning authorities to protect and enhance chalk stream environments.
My Lords, I thank all who have contributed to this important debate and the Minister for her response. However, I am not convinced by her arguments; we cannot wait for a water reform Bill and have these arguments again at that stage. Amendment 94 seeks to protect chalk streams, this precious habitat which we are the custodians of. It aims to restore biodiversity and create a planning system that works with nature, not against it. At present, I am afraid, the Bill before us fails to do this for chalk streams. Thus, I seek to test the opinion of the House.
I have decided it is time to hand on the chair of the CaBA chalk stream group.
It is five years since I agreed to chair the then brand new CaBA chalk stream restoration group (CSRG). Five years is a good chunk of time to dedicate to something like this: long enough to get stuff done, short enough to remain fresh, focused and driven. But I have always thought that turnover of leadership in these kinds of roles is a good idea. It stops one from getting stale, and it brings in new ideas and new approaches.
There can be no one better to take the reins than the exceptionally capable Ali Morse (above), who has been supporting me so brilliantly as vice-chair. Ali will be a brilliant chair. She is Water Policy Manager at the Wildlife Trusts and she also chairs Blueprint for Water. She has been vice-chair of the CaBA chalk group for the past two years, during which time I have relied heavily on her in-depth knowledge and thoughtful, pragmatic approach.
She will be very ably supported by Alison Matthews, who joined us last year as the CaBA chalk stream project manager and who has well and truly got her feet under the table organising our work and pushing ahead with our initiatives.
They will make a great team.
As for me, I’m not going far or even really leaving the ship. I want to give Ali space to do her own thing, but I’ll be around to help wherever I can.
I’m also looking forward to refocussing on campaigning for reducing abstraction in vulnerable chalk streams. This is kind of where I started, going back to 1995 and my very first campaign feature published in Trout & Salmon about the over abstraction of a small chalk stream in Dorset called the River Tarrant.
It is a measure of how this battle to protect chalk streams lies eternally uphill that the River Tarrant is still suffering. Over the past decade it has run dry in its lower reaches 9 years out of ten, whereas through the 1970s 80s and 90s it dried – as in trout-killingly bone dry – only twice.
The pressure on our water resources is going only one way: we have to run just to stand still.
So, what has the CaBA chalk stream initiative achieved, and has it been worth it?
Before CaBA there had been many other campaigns for chalk streams over the years and I was involved in several. It wasn’t for lack of protestations that chalk stream protection was scant. When we started compiling the CaBA chalk strategy I looked back at all that had been asked for in these campaigns and how much had been delivered (page 29 to 30 of the main CaBA Strategy, if you want to check). The answer was some things, but patchily. Flow targets, an Ofwat duty of care for the environment and a power to revoke abstraction licences were all significant, even if they didn’t actually appear to be making the hoped for difference.
It struck me that a weakness of these campaigns had been their unilateral nature, and that a strength of the CaBA project could be that it would have to involve agreement from all parties. In that sense it was a big achievement to publish, after a year of deliberation, a strategy that regulators, industry and eNGOs all signed up to. This strategy comprised 30+ recommendations that will, if we actually manage to deliver them, make a big difference to chalk stream protection and restoration.
That’s a big “if”. No one should make the mistake of wishing for some Damascene moment or even a moment in time when we get to say “our work is done”. It never will be. That patchy progress we had made before? That was all part of the achingly slow process of easing pressure on a far too seductive and easy source of water and receptor of pollution in the busiest of landscapes. As to the degree anything has been or will be delivered, we inch forwards.
We haven’t had “our big wish” of an unambiguous higher status of protection for chalk streams. But we have banked some components of what that would amount to.
In the planning regime, chalk streams have been singled out for protection in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act, via the potential tool of Environmental Outcome Reports. These Reports are at the discretion of the Secretary of State and we wait – anxiously – to see if the government follows through and makes use of its new powers in the framing of an EOR for chalk streams. This commitment would have been in the (still missing-in-(in)action) chalk stream recovery pack.
We are still collectively pushing for amendments to the new planning and infrastructure bill.
In terms of water resources, the Environment Agency has responded to the relevant recommendation and reviewed and now adjusted the anomalous abstraction bensitivity banding (ABS) that had mistakenly been applied to many chalk streams.
Very significantly the Environment Agency has also raised the status of chalk streams over and above the current (baseline) scenario in the revised National Framework for Water Resources, by imposing higher targets for flow compliance in both the “intermediate” and the “full” scenarios. This is techie but it means that – providing the catchment partnerships push for these higher levels of ambition – water companies must now factor in significant reductions.
Even better, within the “full” scenario, discharges will be excluded from flow calculations in chalk streams headwaters. This goes towards answering our recommendation for reviewing assessment points and water boundaries and ensuring they reflect the actual condition of the stream. A problem well illustrated by the alleged “good” flow status of the frequently dry upper River Ivel. It is only good because the assessment point is downstream of a tributary and a sewage discharge.
Defra has also now designated all chalk streams catchments as water stressed, which at least enables – even if it doesn’t compel – the roll-out of water metering in all chalk regions.
As for the timetabled commitments to abstraction reduction, that was something I really hoped to get published as targets (my word) or goals (Defra’s word) in the Defra chalk stream recovery pack that never was.
In terms of water quality chalk streams were made “high priority sites” – alongside SSSIs and SACs – in the Defra Storm Overflows Discharge Reduction Plan. This means that target-failing discharges must be addressed by 2035. That was very much a win.
In recent months over 70 sewage works have been given phosphorus licence limits for the first time.
There are individual instances of success too. That plan the EA briefly had of revoking an abstraction reduction on the River Chess because of localised flooding issues? That was shelved amidst of storm of protest, not least the point we raised that abstraction licences are not granted to alleviate flooding. It is also fantastic to see that the sewage works at the head of the River Chess in Chesham is now operating to the highest technical standards of phosphorus stripping.
Elsewhere we’ve made less progress.
We haven’t got far in our request to the government to more generally provide a policy incentive to water companies to target their legally required reductions in phosphorus discharges towards the ecologically fragile chalk stream headwaters. Literally everyone on the planet thinks this is a good idea and yet no one at Defra seems able or willing to make it happen.
We haven’t got far, either, in our request for better targeted “farming rules for chalk streams”. Another set of no-brainer suggestions – “smart” buffer-strips based on mapping of run-off risk and flow pathways – that can’t quite see the light of day.
Finally, in terms of physical habitat restoration, I think we are making bigger strides. It’s less controversial, for a start. No one disagrees with the idea of restoring physical habitat. Through Flagship Projects and now Landscape Recovery, we have the opportunity to take on catchment-scale restoration and prove what a difference good physical habitat can make. The barriers here are funding, know-how and the consenting process. All these are nuts that can be and should be cracked.
The Defra chalk stream recovery pack would have been an important mark in the sand. I am very sad that we didn’t quite get it published before the election and frustrated that the new administration has buried it for what feels like party political reasons. Their response to the chalk stream petition contained warm words, but no explanation for why a policy document that took almost a year to negotiate was dropped.
Having said that, I have a feeling and a hope that we may see much of what was in it, or even what should have been in it, over the next few years. Minister Emma Hardy and the new chalk streams lead at Defra both seem genuinely committed and positive. Their hands may be tied by funding restrictions, but I believe there is a lot the government can do that picks off low hanging fruit. I will write about that and the Chalk Stream Recovery Pack that never was in my next post.
There is much, therefore, for Ali to get her teeth into. I am sure she is just the right person to work with Defra and others to eke out more concessions, in favour of chalk streams. That’s how it happens: one stitch at a time.
Thanks everyone for all the support over the last five years. Onwards …
This is what they said … I’ll comment in numbered notes below.
Government responded
This response was given on 1 July 2025
The government has secured £2 billion from water companies over the next five years to deliver more than 1,000 targeted actions for chalk stream restoration as part of our Plan for Change. (1)
Chalk streams are a source of national pride. As one of Britain’s most nature rich habitats, they support some of our rarest wildlife – from chalk salmon to trout, they are home to beloved and endangered species.
This Government will restore our chalk streams to better ecological health as part of our mission to clean up rivers, lakes and seas for good. Fixing the systemic issues in the water system is essential to address the multiple pressures facing chalk streams. (2)
We are taking action to hold water companies and other polluters to account through the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 and delivering an ambitious programme of reforms will fix the water system, managing and resetting the water sector. (3)
The Government has launched the largest crackdown on water companies in history. The era of profiting from pollution is over. Unfair bonuses have now been banned for six polluting water companies. In the largest criminal action against water companies in history, a record 81 criminal investigations have been launched into sewage pollution. Polluting water bosses who cover up their crimes now face two-year prison sentences. (4.)
Alongside our programme of reforms we are taking immediate action to clean up chalk streams. Water companies will invest £2 billion over the next 5 years to deliver more than 1,000 targeted actions for chalk stream restoration as part of our Plan for Change. (5)
Furthermore, the government is investing £1.8 million through the Water Restoration Fund and Water Environment Improvement Fund for locally-led chalk stream clean-up projects across affected regions. And over £100m in fines and penalties levied against water companies will be reinvested into projects to clean up our waters which could include local programmes to address pollution in chalk streams. (6)
Our Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes, funding for which will increase by 150% to £2bn by 2028/2029, are providing incentives for farmers and land managers to farm more sustainably – six of our Landscape Recovery projects are being developed in chalk stream catchments, with potential to benefit up to 350km of chalk stream habitat. (7)
We’re tackling one of the biggest impacts on chalk streams by reducing the risk of harmful abstraction by an estimated 126 million litres daily, through the amendment of water company abstraction licences, protecting vital water flows to these fragile ecosystems. (8)
Our Storm Overflows Discharge Reduction Plan ensures chalk streams are prioritised for improvement as part of the record £11 billion investment to improve nearly 3,000 storm overflows nationwide. (9)
From June 2025, the Environment Agency’s updated Water Resource National Framework will place chalk stream environmental needs at the heart of all water resource planning and decision making. (10)
Our protections through the Water (Special Measures) Act will hold polluters accountable and ensure these iconic British habitats are preserved for future generations. (11)
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
My notes on the above:
This is the amount due for investment through the WINEP (Water Industry National Environment Programme) in the next five-year cycle. It is part of a record-breaking sum (the size of which is to be welcomed and is largely due to the tireless campaigning of the eNGOs and others), but it is not a new announcement. In fact, most companies will have had to trim back their programmes as Ofwat examines and passes the proposals.
Reforming the water system was not on our list of recommendations in the chalk stream strategy and doesn’t address our central ask, which is for greater protection for chalk streams, though clearly it is related. And few would argue with the idea that reform is necessary. There are indeed “systemic issues” and the current system is obviously not working as well as it could in a number of key respects. Monitoring, regulation and enforcement being key. The system also lacks joined up thinking. Empowering the catchment partnership structures would be a good thing.
As above – reform in regard to governance and financial transparency is clearly needed.
Personally I don’t think we should ever kid ourselves that we don’t all “profit from pollution”. We all enjoy clean water and flushing loos. Half the increase in human longevity since the middle of the 19th century is down to improved water sanitation, during which time the environment has picked up most of the bill through diminished natural flows in rivers and by serving the job of national lavatory for treated (and untreated) water. Arguably, it was historically inevitable that things would evolve this way. New towns built over forgotten chalk streams. Natural flows diminished until all the dishwashers and loos discharge their stolen water back into the river. The real cost of water to the environment is not even slightly reflected in water bills. The question is what value does society NOW place on living, healthy rivers? It’s a much higher value than it used to be and half our battle is persuading government to catch up with public opinion.
See 1.
This sounds encouraging. In 2022/23 £242 million in fines was levied on to the water industry only £11 million of which found its way into the Water Restoration Fund, £1.8 million (roughly 18%) of which is finding its way to chalk stream projects. Everyone has been asking, where’s the money gone? Dare we hope for 18% of this new figure? £18 million? You could totally re-naturalise the floodplains and re-meander 6 medium sized chalk streams top to bottom for that kind of sum.
We knew about Landscape Recovery already. It does offer the potential for significant restoration of the chalk streams within LR projects. I’m writing reports for a few of these streams and will be scoping and recommending exactly what I have described in the last line of point 6 above.
This is mostly the reduction of abstraction license headroom rather than actual abstraction reduction. 106 Ml/d of headroom reduction. 20 Ml/d of actual abstraction reduction.
Good stuff but we knew about it already. One component of our request for better protection for chalk streams was delivered by the previous administration when it included chalk streams in the “high priority sites” in the Storm Overflows Discharge Reduction Plan.
This is really interesting, if cryptic. We have asked for chalk streams to be prioritised in the environmental destination scenarios in the National Framework for Water Resources. What that means in plain English is that we have asked for chalk streams to be prioritised in the delivery of the abstraction reductions that must be met as part of a process called the National Framework: the construction of a joined up water resources network, where new sources and reservoirs and inter-regional transfers are developed in order to take pressure off the environment. There is a potential “business as usual” scenario which none of us wants to see when it comes to vulnerable chalk streams. This statement by the government is new and encouraging but so far rather vague. It could potentially be another piece in the jigsaw of greater protection (adding to 9. above) for chalk streams.
See 2 and 3 above.
So … possible incremental progress in a couple of respects, one of which could be key, though the statement too is too vague to say either way. It doesn’t amount to the bespoke and specific policy document that the Defra chalk stream recovery pack would have been. Albeit, as I have said, that pack had itself been watered down more to series of commitments to review than to act, it nevertheless would have amounted to a clear steer from the government as to the importance of chalk streams. This response and the Minister’s letter (see previous post) are clearly progress relative to a few months ago when one might have got the impression that chalk streams had slipped through a gap in the floorboards at Defra. Call me blindly optimistic but I’m still holding out for a bespoke document.
I met with Minster Emma Hardy on a Yorkshire chalk stream earlier in June to discuss what this government might do to help chalk streams. The meeting was mentioned in parliament as excerpted below and I have also received a letter from the Minister setting out the government’s ambition for chalk streams, also below.
I’m obviously as disappointed as anyone that government has dropped the Defra chalk stream recovery pack. I’m still not sure why it has chosen to when the fate of our fragile and unique chalk streams is so obviously important to such a broad range of people and to so many people … including Sir David Attenborough.
Encouragingly, however, Minister Hardy has written “chalk streams will continue to be fundamental to our mission to reform the water system”.
The proof of the pudding, as they say …
I have heard good things about what may in the pipeline (following the Cunliffe and Corry reviews) in terms of revitalised and empowered catchment management, and the easing of the treacle-wading bureaucracy that is a sheet anchor to river restoration efforts. Both much needed. So, it may well be – fingers very crossed – that the progress we make through this term will move things forward for chalk streams.
Nevertheless, the CaBA chalk group continues to feel that the gist of its recommendations – greater protection for chalk streams, prioritised abstraction reduction and phosphate reduction targeted to where it will most benefit ecology (not some obtuse economic algorithm) are all very much in the gift of Defra and Ofwat, and are total no-brainers if we want to restore our chalk streams and deliver on the collegiate, universally supported work of the past 5-years.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Emma Hardy): Chalk streams are not only a beautiful and iconic part of our precious natural landscape; they are symbols of our national heritage. The protection and restoration of our cherished chalk streams is a core ambition in our overall programme of reform to the water sector.
Luke Murphy: I am grateful to the Minister for her response. In Hampshire, we are blessed with several rare and irreplaceable chalk streams, including the River Loddon, the River Itchen and the River Test. The Minister will be aware of the campaigns to secure greater protection for these irreplaceable habitats, including during the passage of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, and I pay tribute to the Hampshire & Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust, Greener Basingstoke, and Natural Basingstoke for all their work. Can the Minister confirm that this Government are committed to the protection of chalk streams, and set out what further steps they will take to restore these precious habitats?
Emma Hardy: My hon. Friend is quite right: chalk streams are a source of beauty and national pride. Just a few weeks ago, I had the privilege of visiting a chalk stream restoration project with Charles Rangeley-Wilson, who is a passionate campaigner for chalk streams. Under this Labour Government, water companies will spend more than £2 billion to deliver over 1,000 actions for chalk stream restoration, and will reduce their abstraction from chalk streams by 126 million litres per day.
Mr Gagan Mohindra (South West Hertfordshire) (Con): The River Chess in Rickmansworth is one of the chalk streams that goes through my constituency. The volunteers at the Rickmansworth Waterways Trust are keeping our canal heritage alive, despite funding for the Canal & River Trust being cut. I believe the cut is short-sighted, because these waterways tackle water shortages, boost biodiversity and protect 2,500 miles of national assets for a modest cost. Will the Minister rethink the funding cuts and back the Fund Britain’s Waterways campaign, so that local champions like David Montague and his team at Batchworth lock are not left to sink or swim on their own?
Emma Hardy: The hon. Gentleman is quite right to say how important volunteers are in supporting our natural environment up and down the country. He will be aware that the decision to reduce the funding for the Canal & River Trust was taken by the previous Government, and that was extended under this Government. There will be a tapering off of some of the funding, but we continue to support water projects up and down the country. As I have already mentioned, the changes that we are introducing for water companies will help to protect not only our beautiful chalk streams, but all our rivers, lakes and seas.
Chalk-Streams 