pollution – Chalk-Streams

Dark waters

November 26, 2024November 26, 2024Posted in UncategorizedTagged environment, health, pollution1 Comment

Guest blog by Rev. Paul Cawthorne.

Paul – a vicar and environmentalist – read my blog about Defra’s shelving of the chalk stream recovery pack and wrote to tell me of his own frustrations with officialdom. I offered him a guest blog. His story is fascinating and concerning. CRW.

I’ve been leading a team researching the persistent industrial chemical pollution of U.K. watercourses for the last five years. Our research was the basis of the recent ten part Radio 4 series Buried: The Last Witness.

Now that the ongoing neurotoxic PCB problem in U.K. watercourses and wildlife is garnering attention again (what a UN Environment Programme factsheet called a conveniently “forgotten legacy”) I’d like to explain how this ongoing watercourse pollution has been allowed by government to happen.

The identification of contaminated land under Environmental Protection Act 1990 Part 2A has been radically undermined by its own statutory guidance. The Act itself is admirable. That makes it all the more surprising that two of its key clauses were rescinded in 1995 during Lord Deben’s tenure as Environment Secretary, after a sustained industry lobbying operation during Lord Howard’s tenure. How that was done was chronicled in the Journal of Environmental Law at the time by the chair of the Environment Select Committee, Sir Hugh Rossi:

Rossi-PAYINGPASTWILLWE-1995 Download

Implementation of the Act was delayed for ten years from 1990 until 2000 and the statutory guidance was written strangely in several aspects.

1. Most obviously and damagingly divergent from the original Act, it excludes as receptors (SG 3.8b) of pollution all watercourse lengths that do not come within a highly restrictive designation:

See Environmental Protection Act 1990

This means the majority of river lengths in the UK which do not come within this tight Table 1 definition may be polluted by industrial neurotoxic chemical leachate to an infinite extent: they are excluded from recognition within the Act as a receptor of that pollution.

Thus over half of the U.K. rivers by length and most of the downstream lengths of most of our major rivers are excluded from the primary legislative protection of the environment from chemical pollution.

2. The guidance states that Councils should “give priority to particular areas of land that it considers most likely to pose the greatest risk to human health or the environment”.

Sadly, especially in Wales, that last word “environment” gets systematically deprioritised in the detail of the guidance and its implementation. The preamble to the guidance sets a subtly chilling tone. Multiple councils in England and Wales, after reading the guidance, instruct their favoured consultants in such a way that only human risk gets reported on, fully in contrast to the Act’s comprehension of human AND environmental harm potential.

For example

For example PCB continued to trickle into the Foxhill brook towards the Mersey from Alvanley Commonside unlined PCB dump for decades without remediation.

A consultancy report written by Helsby-headquartered RSK for the local Council was used tacitly to determine that a leaching neurotoxic chemical waste dump is not contaminated land within EPA Part 2A. There is no written record in 2009 that Cheshire West Council or its predecessor even made a determination decision after the helpful consultancy report was received. This 2024 Cheshire West and Chester Borough Council.Council PR summary retrospectively summarises:

“In 2009, we concluded that, based on the assessments undertaken, the tip did not meet the definition of Contaminated Land and investigations were drawn to a close”

It’s seems to me a national scandal kept in place by a surprisingly wide-ranging official code of silence. A housing estate is currently being built over a PCB-contaminated factory site with extremely high readings at nearby Helsby, without purchasers even being made aware.

A variety of Councils use strategies to keep the false negatives in place.

3. Wrexham council claimed that it has an infinite timescale to even reach a decision, ie to comply with the law (see SG 2.9);

4. Newport said that it’s “not a priority” to decide whether the site of the largest PCB factory in Europe (which has continued to pump a particularly toxic chemical cocktail down a 3km pipe straight into the lower Severn estuary with NRW blessing) comes within the Act’s definition of contaminated land.

5. NRW has had Caerphilly council area data on file since 1994 showing that wildlife in the river Sirhowy is contaminated with elevated PCB levels. Yet bizarrely it didn’t even share that data with Caerphilly council until my team resurfaced the data via an FoI and intervened. As toxicdocs.org discloses, it seems as if a payment was made by Monsanto to the predecessor Council. We can’t know for sure because many details of NRW’s formal agreement with Monsanto are hidden under lengthy redactions.

NRW still claim there’s no wildlife or sediment PCB for the entire river Usk including where it runs past the site of the biggest PCB factory in Europe – do you believe that absence of data? O is it FOFO – fear of finding out?

6. Another way the statutory guidance undermines the Act is in defining what environmental damage qualifies as damage. Unless the pollutant is increasing the contamination doesn’t officially exist (SG 4.38b “sustained upward trend”). So a plateaued high chemical leachate flow would not qualify within the wording of this statutory guidance section, however damaging to invertebrates or fish the leachate may be. Thankfully Councils seem so embarrassed by this drafting error which misrepresents the Act wording that they tend simply not to follow it. It’s no wonder the Law Commission concludes in report:

“The first issue is at the very least a policy reform issue, which may involve elements of law reform (including a role for the Law Commission).”

– Henni Ouahes, Head of Public Law, 12/4/24

7. Additionally, the main EA method for testing for the mainly insoluble heavy congeners of indicator neurotoxin PCB is midwater, not testing in the sediment where PCB adsorbs into the vegetative silt. Dangling a test tube off Cefn Mawr bridge every week won’t tell whether the PCB used at the factory there (Monsanto’s European PCB research headquarters) has leached underground and into the river Dee:

The Environment Agency systemically using suboptimal testing protocols which potentially miss the main flow of a particular neurotoxin is surprising, especially given the reproduction disruption characteristic of PCB as it biomagnifies, known to EA chief scientist Gideon Henderson. I’ve emailed Gideon and EA Senior Chemicals Adviser Richard Hawkins about it several times without acknowledgment.

https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/23253376.monsanto-pcb-chemical-spill-1970s-cleaned-teesside/

Using a type of testing which intrinsically misses the main benthic zone presence of this immunosuppressant contaminant greatly helps underestimate the scale of the UK national contamination problem. Regulatory toleration of UK POP pollution is perplexing. It’s all so different in America …

Here the EA, NRW, MMO and Cefas all appear to tolerate the pollution. My team may soon be testing whether this is legal, supported by a kind new philanthropist. But I’d prefer it if our legislators faced into the problem and sorted it themselves. Why have politicians issued this ongoing distorted mandatory ‘guidance’ – a passport to ongoing river pollution? Will our Lords Deben, Howard, Young and Mills and senior civil servants dare to now fess up for the public good and move to helping civil society to solve the problem they’ve allowed?

The EA now claim in a new information release refusal this month not to have the key American court action document, Appendix B listing sites where the main polluter should be held liable, despite Baroness Young having written to assure The Ecologist magazine in 2007 that the EA had an official plan.

This whole narrative – especially the failings in the statutory guidance – has significant practical impacts for the ecological health of us, and for the wildlife of iconic rivers like the Severn, Dee, Tees, Thames, Mersey, Usk, Taf, Ely, Sirhowy.

The abandoned chalk stream recovery pack?

November 2, 2024November 4, 2024Posted in UncategorizedTagged environment, news, politics, pollution3 Comments

As far as I have been told Defra has abandoned publication of the promised chalk stream recovery pack. A great shame for beleaguered chalk streams like the Ivel (above), the Lea, the Ver, the Darent, the Misbourne, the Cam, the Granta and dozens of other globally unique but over-abstracted and polluted rivers. Is the door open for a change of mind? I truly hope so.

That dogged river warrior Feargal Sharkey – who will no doubt be leading the river of people through London this weekend – repeatedly asked the last government after the fate of the chalk stream recovery pack that had been promised by then Minister Rebecca Pow.

Twenty-one times he asked on Twitter what had happened to the document – Defra’s response to the recommendations in the CaBA chalk stream strategy – that the minister had said on the 15^th June 2023 would be published by the end of that year.

It wasn’t. (Not the minister’s fault, btw … see below)

But since the general election Feargal has stopped asking. Which is a great shame, because his tireless needling does resonate in government. And the pack is worth publishing.

I have to admit, it used to bother me that he once asked so often, because elsewhere Feargal has written that the CaBA chalk stream work is a waste of time. I felt it was a taunt, much that I also wanted him to keep chasing. I don’t agree with him. Our chalk stream work is not a waste of time. But here was Defra proving him at least partly right, and utterly failing to fulfil a promise.

Feargal’s tweets and the lack of anything material suggested that the pack was a total fiction.

But I knew it wasn’t a fiction … because I was helping Defra to write it.

And by December, the date by which it had been promised, it was all but ready to rock. Feargal kept on asking and I kept on waiting for Defra to prove him wrong and publish the damn thing. But the promised chalk stream recovery pack has gone round and round in circles ever since, every component repeatedly sliding back to the bottom of the negotiation tree as staff are cycled from one place to the next.

Following months of groundhog day delays, it has now been shelved. Defra told me there is now “no mandate”.

I suspect their reluctance to publish might partly be because myself and the brilliant Ali Morse – water policy director at the Wildlife Trust and vice-chair of the CaBA chalk stream group – worked so hard to make the pack amount to something: we were nettlesome and pushy, for sure. But I like to think always in a positive way.

There may also, of course, be an element of the new administration wanting no part of the old: after all the pack was promised by the Conservative minister Rebecca Pow. But I prefer to think not.

Anticipating a Labour victory in an upcoming election I went to see the Cambridge Labour MP Daniel Zeichner in December ’23, when the chalk stream recovery pack was all but ready, but was failing to find a publishing runway or clearance from the Defra conning tower.

I must have had some notion that Defra officials might filibuster the thing for as long as they could. I had met Daniel at a chalk stream conference in Cambridge and I had a hunch that he would be an important figure in a new administration. I wanted to emphasise how important it was that our collective approach to chalk stream conservation should transcend party politics if we were to stand any chance of making progress.

Nothing he said made me doubt his commitment to that truth. Apart from anything else, he knew Feargal would hold them to account. I hoped, even believed, that a Labour government would be as supportive of our work to improve chalk streams as the Conservatives had been.

And much as it runs against the grain of the popular view, some Conservatives politicians, certainly Rebecca Pow, and the likes of Sir Charles Walker and Sir Oliver Heald (all gone from Parliament) were very supportive. As were MPs in other parties, of course: Sarah Green MP, for example. And members of the House of Lords, notably Viscount Trenchard and all those who spoke in favour of including chalk streams in the Levelling up and Regeneration Act. Chalk streams have cross-party support.

The delay in publishing the chalk stream recovery pack actually had nothing to do with the Minister, Rebecca Pow. She was committed and passionate about making a difference, and appeared as frustrated as I was at the procrastination. My reading is that Defra was focussed on one thing: ending the media onslaught about raw sewage discharges. And their policy-making – in spite of good words about chalk streams in the Plan for Water – appeared to be focussed on this single BIG issue.

If my hunch is true then, ironically, the ferocity of the raw sewage campaign was undermining the possibility of progress in all the other areas where rivers are equally, if not more pressured. The raw sewage scandal gets easy media attention and of course that is what government then responds to.

Techie, nerdy stuff like perfectly legal discharges of phosphorus, which arguably do more damage in many vulnerable, headwater settings, are then ignored.

But we should not ignore the full range of ills that beset our streams.

Our chalk stream restoration strategy and Defra’s unpublished chalk stream recovery pack, were based on the interconnectedness of pressures on rivers. It’s so important to build this understanding into advocacy and ultimately into policy, because otherwise you get skewed action or unchallenged inaction and you waste money.

For example, the impact of sewage and other components of poor water quality are inextricably bound up with abstraction and the quality of the physical state of the river. In the case of abstraction, most obviously because abstraction reduces flows and thus drives up the concentration of nasties in the water. As well as water temperature which turbo-charges the activity of those nasties.

More subtly these pressures are bound up because in many places (especially headwaters of chalk streams like the Lea and Lark) we abstract so much that our river flows become – in summer – entirely supported by sewage discharges!

Alternative abstraction and water treatment arrangements could feasibly and cost-effectively provide the same amount of water to public supply and allow naturalised flows which would immeasurably improve water quality.

But this will only ever be possible if people think around the policies in a three-dimensional way and do not get swayed by single-issue protest into chasing half-baked policy responses.

As Ali and I tried in vain to persuade Defra to create a policy and economic driver that would address phosphorus impacts from small works in upper catchments we were told that what would be happening (instead?) is legislation to enforce the highest technical standards on designated rivers. In other words, only the places that were already good would get any better.

Now the new government appears to have ditched the troublingly joined-up chalk stream recovery pack and vowed to jail water company bosses who break the law, a populist policy, but not necessarily an effective one.

Steve Reed has announced a review of the water industry but the terms of reference do not look auspicious. There’s no sign of the nationalisation that some so hope for, but instead talk of ‘trade-offs balancing affordability with service and clean water’: which is exactly what we’ve had since forever. Only, without the clean water.

The environment always picks up the bill.

So, we have “a march clean water” but we should also march for “more water” and “better habitat”.

In the time I have dealt with Defra over a chalk stream strategy instigated by Defra – or at least their minister – I must have interfaced with at least half-a-dozen individuals who were handed the chalk stream brief. They have all been very bright, committed and well intentioned. They have all learned quickly about the pressures and the whys and wherefores of the policy recommendations in the CaBA strategy. Then just as they are getting their feet under the desk, they have been moved on and another fresh face has appeared on the Teams screen. This makes progress quite challenging.

The last new face I met had been shoved to the fore to tell us the recovery pack had been shelved, but that instead the government would focus on chalk streams in national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty. In other words, as far as I could tell the new Labour government wanted to double down on the concept of privileging the privileged and abandon the chalk streams whose condition is most abject, in the suburbs and orbit of London, in the intensely farmed landscapes of East Anglia, and in ordinary towns like Dover, Driffield, Bridlington, Dorchester, Luton, Fakenham, King’s Lynn, Bury St Edmunds, which are the focus of so much concern.

I hope everyone who reads this will think that is as misdirected as I do.

Knowing that I wasn’t speaking to the general and was therefore wasting my breath, I nevertheless pointed out that a central plank of the chalk stream strategy, signed up to by all parties, including the Environment Agency, Natural England, Defra and Ofwat and the water industry, was the urgent need for the protection of ALL chalk streams to match those few already well protected.

The abandoned but oven-ready recovery pack addressed that protection through a range of commitments including time-bound goals for abstraction and phosphorus reduction bringing all chalk streams to good or high status by certain key dates. It also included undertakings to consider chalk streams irreplaceable habitats in planning law, to consider better practical measures to reduce run-off in improved farming rules for water, to include special consideration for chalk streams in national highways and local road network technical guidance, and in restrictions relating to septic tanks.

Okay, so over time much of it became watered down by undertakings to review rather than to act. Frustrating but that’s the way these things work. And as statements of intent and clear support from government, it was still very much worthwhile.

Besides, when the pack wasn’t published before the election this became a golden opportunity for a new government, committed to the restoration of our rivers – as this one claims to be – to inject a bit more oomph and send it to the printers.

I haven’t entirely given up hope however, because as I say, I’m not entirely convinced this decision – in as much as it is a decision, as opposed a slow and relatively silent abandonment – comes from the new government so much as the permanent department. In a recent debate on chalk streams Minister Emma Hardy was asked by Sarah Green MP when Defra would publish the chalk stream recovery pack. The minister didn’t entirely sound as if she’d been briefed about it.

If only the minister had known it was ready to go, is a total no-brainer, could be made more impactful in a jiffy and would go down very well with all those people marching through London on Sunday.

Water policy manager Ali Morse looks at why the Environment Act phosphorus-reduction target could fail to deliver improvements in the chalk stream reaches where it’s most needed.

January 16, 2024January 16, 2024Posted in UncategorizedTagged climate-change, environment, featured, pollution, waterLeave a comment

Today I am posting a guest blog by Ali Morse – water policy director at the Wildlife Trust and chair at Blueprint for Water – on why it is so important to ensure our new, ambitious phosphorus reduction targets are applied to the parts of the landscape where we will see the greatest ecological benefit for the money spent. It’s astonishing to think that although we have been spending millions reducing phosphorus from sewage (66% reduction 1995 to 2020 … and now a new target of 80% reduction 2020 to 2038) we still haven’t found a way to ensure that we reduce phosphorus from the small works in the upper reaches of rivers where the reductions would have the greatest ecological outcome. Essentially, ever since the UWWTD (Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive) was passed to drive these reductions, cost-effectiveness has been measured by population attached to a given works as opposed to for example: % length of river d’stream of the pollution source, or the volume of flow in the receiving waterbody relative to the volume of flow from the pollution. This doesn’t make sense. We create targets to reduce phosphorus because it has a negative ecological impact: the primary outcome should surely be, therefore, to minimise the ecological impact, regardless of the local population size. In practice we reduce phosphorus in such a way that the ecological impact its secondary to accounting methodologies. This means we have rivers like the Frome in Dorset (a SSSI chalk stream) where the phosphorus concentrations go down as you travel downstream and are lowest just above the estuary (see the map below which I drew up when working on the chalk stream strategy, (based on 2016 WFD data)). It cannot be rocket science to find some simple policy drivers that would make the difference. All the river-oriented eNGOs should take a united front on this in my view, change the raw-sewage record for a few turns of the dance floor, and implore government to develop a way to maximise the ecological outcome for their ambitious Environment Act targets.

Here’s Ali’s excellent blog, first paragraph with a link across to the Wildlife Trusts site:

“In November 2021, the Environment Act became law and, with it, the promise of ambitious targets that would turn the tide on nature’s decline. Early last year, new regulations set out the detail of targets on water[i], waste, woodland and other topics that all contribute to the overarching and ambitious ‘apex’ goal, of seeing declines in species abundance halted by 2030.

For our watery habitats, the targets are intended to tackle the key pressures against which there has been stubbornly little progress to date. Nutrient pollution is a key factor that blights the freshwater environment, not just in England but around the globe. Although there are downsides to having targets on specific, potentially siloed topics, the logic of seeking to drive action on THE greatest pressure faced by our rivers, lakes and coastal waters is understandable. In freshwaters, phosphate is the pollutant causing the greatest number of failures against ecological standards. It’s a reason that more than half of England’s rivers, and three quarters of lakes, are assessed as not being in good health.

Of particular concern is the impact of phosphate pollution upon England’s chalk streams …”

CONTINUED HERE