Dirty waters: how the Environment Agency lost its way
When Helen Nightingale joined the National Rivers Authority, the predecessor to the Environment Agency, in 1991, she thought of her work as a calling. She had been fascinated by nature since she was a child, when she used to poke around in the earth on her father’s allotment, looking for worms and beetles. In her job, Nightingale spent most of her time walking along the rivers in Lancashire and Merseyside, taking water samples and testing oxygen levels. She was responsible for protecting rivers, and she often learned about sewage and pesticide pollution from members of the public who called a dedicated hotline. “They’d phone you up and say, ‘There’s something wrong.’ And you would go out straight away,” she recalled. “You stood a much better chance of figuring out what was wrong if you could get there quickly.”
Nightingale, who has a Lancastrian accent and curly blond hair, investigated pollution like a hard-nosed police detective inspecting a crime scene. She would visit dairy farms, industrial estates and sewage treatment plants, dressed in a raincoat and boots with steel toe caps, and usually started with the same question: “Can I look at your drains?” The work was demanding, and the pay, when Nightingale started, was just £9,500 a year (the UK average at the time was around £12,000), but she was proud to be protecting the environment. “It was a dream job,” she told me. “If we sat in the office, our boss would say, ‘Why are you here? Go out and look at something.’”
In 1996, when the authority merged with Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Pollution to become the Environment Agency, Nightingale’s team were also given responsibility for inspecting recycling centres and waste companies, which meant they had less time for river inspections. Over the years, Nightingale felt as though staff were spending less time proactively looking for pollution, and more time doing boxticking inspections of waste sites. Rather than taking her water samples to a local laboratory where she knew the biologists, she now sent these off to a centralised lab, from which it could take weeks to get results. By the time the results came back, she says it was often too late to find out whythe river was deteriorating.
From 2010 onwards, after the coalition government took power, these dynamics accelerated. The water teams were given fewer resources, and their staff numbers shrank. Then, in 2021, Nightingale and her colleagues were told that they would have to stop investigating many of the calls from the public. “We do not have sufficient funding to continue to provide our current level of environment management,” read a briefing that the agency sent to its staff that November. “This is not an easy transition … [we] have made it clear to government that you get the environment you pay for.” Freedom of information (FoI) requests show that, based on data available up until 2022, in 2018 staff attended 5,013 pollution incidents; by 2023, that number had fallen by 36%. Last year, English water companies discharged untreated sewage nearly half a million times, and tens of beaches are now regularly declared unsafe for swimmers.
Rivers aren’t the only area where the Environment Agency doesn’t seem to be doing enough. According to numerous reports, some of them by the agency itself, Britain’s environment is in a terrible condition. Vast areas of natural habitat have either been degraded or destroyed, leaving the country with some of the lowest measures of biodiversity in Europe. Around one in six species are at risk of becoming extinct. Of the 40 environmental targets the government set for itself after Brexit, which include managing the use of harmful chemicals and improving air quality, the country is now on track to reach just four.
For a long time, this ongoing ruination occurred mostly unnoticed, with only campaigners, scientists and anglers raising the alarm. But over the past five years, the condition of England’s environment, particularly its rivers, has become a potent source of anger. Three-quarters of the constituencies with the worst rates of sewage discharges are held by Conservative MPs, a fact their opponents hope to capitalise on in the upcoming election. The Telegraph, which is usually no fan of regulation, has launched a Clean Rivers Campaign criticising water companies. The Times has done the same. There have been documentaries about sewage, parliamentary inquiries and a touring opera.
Almost everyone seems to agree that the condition of England’s environment isn’t good enough. Yet at first glance, this is puzzling: the country has plenty of laws for penalising pollution, ambitious recent targets enshrining the protection of nature, and a wellstaffed regulator with the powers to enforce them. In theory, England’s Environment Agency should resemble a fourth emergency service, somewhere between an ambulance and a police force for nature. In practice, it is struggling to improve the environment’s health, or to prevent the pollution that is destroying it.
When Nightingale retired in June 2022, she sent a terse email to her colleagues with the subject line, “Bye then, I’ll get my coat.” She wrote: “We seem to spend more time and effort avoiding attending incidents than actually going to them now. Water quality is deteriorating, [and] we don’t really know how much because we’ve stopped looking.” Instead of protecting the environment, Nightingale and other former staff members I spoke to felt as though the agency had become a witness to its decline. Between 2007 and 2021, the number of prosecutions it brought fell from 800 to just 17.
It is not just disgruntled former employees who sense that the organisation isn’t doing enough: three current members of staff told this newspaper in 2022 that the agency had been cut back so far that it could no longer improve the environment or deter polluters. Even its current chair has admitted that he does not think his agency is “doing a good job at the moment”. But if the Environment Agency is failing in its mission, the question remains: how – and why – was it allowed to fall into such disrepair?
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Few environmental regulators in Europe have such a vast range of responsibilities as England’s Environment Agency. It forecasts floods, sells fishing licences to anglers, and tracks coastal erosion. It advises the government on net zero, prosecutes criminal gangs that make money from illegally dumping waste, protects England from radioactive substances, and provides a public database of scrap metal dealers. It sets the environmental standards for water companies, including how often they are allowed to discharge raw sewage, and can fine and prosecute companies that break these rules. The agency has an annual budget of more than £200m and a staff of nearly 13,400 people, including freshwater ecologists and hydrologists, experts in macroinvertebrates and the disposal of nuclear waste, research scientists, statisticians and fisheries officers who know more about the spawning patterns of salmon and pike than you could ever hope to learn.
Over the past five months, I’ve spoken to more than 30 people, from former chairs and chief executives of the agency to frontline officers and water scientists, as well as campaigners, lawyers and environmentalists who come across the agency in their everyday and professional lives. Many had positive things to say about the agency’s technical expertise and the calibre of its staff, but the one thing everyone agreed was that it has been significantly weakened during the past 14 years of Conservative government. The impression many gave was of a demoralised and paranoid organisation that had been severely undermined by austerity. “It’s an organisation that routinely pulls people up for trivial health and safety breaches while not funding
their day job correctly. It’s an organisation where [leaders] say that talking to the press is a disciplinary matter. It’s a nasty organisation,” said one former fisheries officer.
The Environment Agency is a public body overseen by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which provides much of its funding. For a long time, the agency’s expertise and independence meant that it could be critical of government policies. “I was quite frank about that,” says John Selwyn Gummer, the former Conservative environment minister who signed the Environment Agency into law in 1995. “If I wanted to get the cabinet to do the right things, I had to have an independent environment agency telling me when I’m getting it wrong.” In 2008, the agency published a damning report arguing the proposal to add a third runway at Heathrow, which was a popular idea among Labour ministers, would breach controls on air pollution. (The runway has still not been built.) “We were at that time entirely able to say, ‘Our responsibility is to the environment, and this is what that responsibility leads us to conclude,’” says Chris Smith, who was chair of the agency from 2008 to 2014.
When the new coalition government arrived in 2010, the prime minister David Cameron boasted about going to war with public bodies as part of his commitment to cutting “red tape” and making the state more accountable. To cut spending, the government began to close down public bodies. Others, including the Environment Agency, were threatened with drastic reforms. The government took away the agency’s independent website, and merged its press office with Defra’s. “The idea was that the agency should be seen but not heard,” says Barbara Young, its chief executive from 2000 to 2008. “I always think it’s a mark of a sophisticated democracy if, having invented a watchdog, you don’t take its teeth out and muzzle it the minute it starts to bark.” But that was precisely what was happening, she believes. When I mentioned this to Gummer, he was blunter: the Cameron-led government “didn’t have the confidence in their ability to deal with these things, and didn’t like criticism, so they wanted to put the cap on it”, he said. (An agency spokesperson told me that the Environment Agency “operates independently of Defra and has full control of its press and communications”, and that “press statements are always agreed and signed off by the EA”.)
Whitehall tightened its grip over the agency, and neutered its approach to the industries it was supposed to police. In 2012, Cameron commissioned a report by Michael Heseltine called No Stone Unturned: In Pursuit of Growth,which recommended that all “non-economic regulators” – from the Environment Agency to English Heritage – should be held accountable for the economic consequences of their decisions. Two years later, the government introduced a new code stipulating that such regulators should avoid imposing unnecessary “burdens” on businesses, and consider how they could best “enable economic growth”. Every regulator now had to abide by a government-mandated “growth duty”. The Department for Business identified fines, and the negative publicity that stemmed from companies breaking the rules, as particular threats to growth. When I spoke to Heseltine recently, he defended the logic behind his 2012 report, arguing that “enhancing the environment is often determined by your ability to finance the enhancement – and that depends upon the economic performance of the economy”. Yet the economy remained sluggish, while the environment continued to deteriorate.
The new guidance encouraged regulators to treat fines and prosecutions as a last resort. “With water companies, with big business, you can see a trajectory downwards over the past 10 years, where we’ve developed a soft touch,” said an Environment Agency source who now works in water regulation. Meanwhile, funding for environmental protection was cut by 80% between 2010 and 2021, meaning that the agency now has far fewer resources to investigate companies that might be breaking the rules. Of its many thousands of staff, just 91 people are qualified to inspect the plants where sewage is treated. “I think the cuts were also a way of silencing the EA,” said a retired staff member who worked on policy issues. “It was a way of saying: get back in your box. There was a realisation that it is expensive to have a high-quality environment.”
These reforms and cuts meant that the Environment Agency found itself in an impossible position, torn between irreconcilable objectives. It was supposed to penalise environmental crimes, but it had also been told to prioritise economic growth. It was responsible for ensuring companies weren’t polluting rivers, but it had also been encouraged to let those companies police themselves.
These changes seemed to be driven by something more insidious than fiscal discipline. “There is a missing political analysis in all this,” said Tom Burke, the former director of Friends of the Earth, who was a special adviser to three secretaries of state for the environment – Heseltine, Michael Howard and Gummer – from 1991-97. “The government knew it couldn’t have a political argument about winding back environmental law, because the public likes environmental law. So instead, they set out to kill environmental law by stealth.”
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It can be tempting to blame the deterioration of England’s rivers on water companies alone, but there is another big problem that the Environment Agency has done remarkably little to police. Agricultural pollution affects more lakes and rivers in England than sewage releases, and the number of “megafarms” in England – livestock farms that house 40,000 or more chickens, or at least 2,000 pigs reared for meat – has increased by 20% since 2016.
Yet the agency’s approach to farmers remains cautious. Rather than prosecuting rule-breakers, it prefers a gentler approach: offering advice, guidance and occasionally a letter of warning. “The agency continues to peddle this rubbish about having a chat over the farmyard kitchen table,” says Guy Linley-Adams, an environmental solicitor. “When you’re dealing with huge industrial operations with sophisticated accounting and management, they don’t need to be told that putting fertiliser too close to water causes a problem. They already know.”
Within Defra, the balance of power is tilted firmly towards agriculture. Five of the department’s current six ministers either own land or come from farming families. The National Farmers’ Union (NFU), which represents 46,000 farming and growing businesses across the UK, enjoys political access that would be the envy of any lobbyist. Its headquarters occupy 18 Smith Square in London. Next door, at number 17, are Defra’s offices.
The farmer’s lobby gets results. Since 2018, “neonicotinoids”, harmful pesticides that kill bees, have been banned in the EU. After lobbying from the NFU, Defra has granted farmers “emergency authorisation” to use them on sugar beetsevery year for the past four years. Meanwhile, the agency has long known that farmers have been spreading fields with a toxic mixture of chemicals and carcinogens. In 2020, an FoI request revealed the agency had been warned about the dangers of this practice in a report that it commissioned and then chose not to publish. Last year, the agency pledged to take action against this harmful practice, but on the ground it seems that nothing has changed. “It’s a real ‘tail wags dog’,” Barbara Young, the agency’s former chief executive, said of the relationship between farmers and the government.
The less powerful the agency has become, the less farmers have come to fear the consequences of breaking its rules. An FoI request from 2020 showed that the average farm would be inspected by the agency once every 263 years.(In 2021, the agency received additional funding to hire more agricultural inspectors. A spokesperson said that it has carried out more than 10,000 farm inspections since 2021 – which amounts to no more than about 3% of farms per year.) Occasionally, the agency’s own reports will give a dark glimpse of its shortcomings as a regulator. In 2016, it began a three-year study of the River Axe in Devon, where water pollution is a major concern. Officers visited 86 farms along the Axe, all of which belonged to the Red Tractor scheme, which is supposed to assure supermarket shoppers of high farming standards. Nearly every single farm failed to comply with storage requirements for slurry, fuel and oil. Some farmers were illegally burning waste on the banks of the river, others were spreading dangerous volumes of slurry on to fields, and 49% of the farms were discharging pollution into the river.
Not a single farmer was prosecuted or formally cautioned. Several former staff members told me this leniency stems from the government. British farmers have long felt under increasing economic pressure, and recently many have been struggling with the loss of EU subsidies, which are being phased out after Brexit. Ministers are keen not to add to these difficulties. Earlier this year, Defra officials, concerned about ministerial reactions, chose to bury a report about the bleak financial prospects for hill farmers when these subsidies are phased out completely in 2027.
Confronting the problems caused by intensive farming would be like pulling at a thread on an unravelling jumper. While the government has introduced a fiendishly complex patchwork of post-Brexit subsidies that encourage farmers to conserve hedgerows and maintain peatlands, this will only go so far. If ministers seriously wanted to tackle farming practices, they would also have to take on the big supermarkets, which drive down prices and force farms to ruthlessly maximise their yields. And then they would have to start asking even bigger questions, such as whether our environment can continue supporting the production of £2.70 chickens that sustain low-wage Britain. “I’d say that most farmers want to do the right thing by climate and nature, but they can’t just do it out of the goodness of their hearts,” said Joseph Gridley, the chief executive of the Soil Association Exchange, a company that helps farmers transition to more sustainable practices. “For the past 70 years, most of the incentives in place have encouraged farmers to not do good things for the environment. I think there’s a degree of frustration. Farmers feel, ‘You’ve set up a system for us to do it one way, and now you’re blaming us.’”
Very rarely, a farmer does something so egregious that the agency is forced to prosecute. In November 2020, John Price, a Herefordshire farmer known for his irascible temper and run-ins with local environmentalists, dispatched his farmhands to drive an 18-tonne bulldozer through the River Lugg. Price owns 1,000 hectares of land that sits beside the Lugg, a river with such a diversity of species that it is officially designated as a conservation site. His plan was to dredge the riverbed to prevent flooding.
Responding to a tipoff, an official from a local nature charity drove down to the Lugg and photographed the bulldozer on his phone. He returned to his car, started to drive away, and then saw another car coming in the opposite direction. It was Price. The farmer sped behind him for 12 miles, flashing his lights and shouting at him to stop. When that didn’t work, Price parked his car across the road, blocking it entirely. (Price later claimed that he was concerned the official was photographing his partner and children.)
These details came to light in a case heard at Herefordshire crown court in April 2023. “Any person, with even a passing interest in the countryside and conservation, could not fail to be dismayed by the devastation caused by Mr Price,” the judge told the court. “He has turned a traditional, tree-lined, meandering river, full of wildlife, into a canal void of most life. It is nothing short of ecological vandalism on an industrial scale.” Rather than preventing flooding, this stretch of the river was now deeper, wider and straighter than ever, so water flowed faster, increasing the risk of flooding downstream. It was, one former agency staff member told me, “the worst environmental crime I’ve ever seen”.
Price pleaded guilty to seven offences and was sentenced to 12 months in prison (he served three). The story was widely covered, partly because it is the only case in which a landowner has been imprisoned under laws that target farming pollution. The agency has documented hundreds of cases where farmers seem to be violating these laws, but in 2021 it revealed that it had not issued a single fine to any of them. (A spokesperson said that since 2019, it has “prosecuted 21 cases on agricultural sites” – but only two of these were for breaking the rules that are supposed to target river pollution caused by farmers.) Although it has recently recruited 84 new farm inspectors, these inspectors will seek to pursue “advice-led regulation”, rather than more aggressive investigation and enforcement. “Even when it looks like they’re about to tackle the sector,” said the source, who now works at the agency, “they do it with the softest touch imaginable.”
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In my conversations with former agency staff, one phrase kept coming up: “Boots on the ground.” Over and over, these former staffers emphasised how much more you notice about a landscape when you spend regular time in it. This could be something as subtle as a cloud of water crowfoot that is missing from a chalk stream, or a river that has fewer grayling than usual. “You’ve got to have an understanding of how rivers work, how they work in flood, where the key spots are, where the pollution hotspots are, the geography, the landscape … and you can’t buy that,” says Dave Throup, the agency’s former area manager for Herefordshire and Worcestershire.
Several former staff members told me that officers are losing this understanding. “People tend to be in the office now,” said another former fisheries officer. The mood among staff who have worked at the agency over the past 10 years is often despondent. An internal staff survey carried out in 2021 reflected diminishing levels of job satisfaction and increasing workplace stress. Defra has some of the lowest salaries of any central government department, and a new environment officer will earn no more than about £25,000 a year. Almost 9,000 people have left since 2016, many of them older and experienced specialists. Managers have made it clear that staff concerns should not be aired in public. In 2022, agency officers said they had been warned against speaking to the media.
This fear of negative coverage may help explain why the agency can seem reluctant to share information with the public. “It’s a very opaque organisation. It’s incredibly secretive,” said Ashley Smith, a former police detective and the co-founder of Windrush Against Sewage Pollution, a prominent campaign group. The agency’s current chair, Alan Lovell, recently told MPs that it receives 48,000 FoI requests a year – nearly as many as every department in Whitehall put together. “We do not publish enough material easily, so people have to go with FoI because they cannot get hold of things they want to know,” he said. Earlier this year, Philip Duffy, the agency’s current chief executive, told an audience at a water event that staff sometimes evaded these requests because disclosing the truth would be too “embarrassing” (a spokesperson at the time said that Duffy “wants to make more Environment Agency data readily available, and we are already looking at how this can be achieved”).
Some former staff seem to think the agency has failed to notice rivers deteriorating. “The attitude from the higher-ups was really a sense of, ‘If we did a better job at finding pollution, there would be more of an expectation that we would then have to do something about [it],’” said one former staff member. Peter Lloyd, a retired water quality expert who worked at the agency for nearly 40 years, told a parliamentary inquiry in 2021 that its monitoring was “so poor, so inadequate and so misleading”, and he worries that this is getting worse. Lloyd argues that a new system that gives a national overview of the state of England’s rivers will obscure the changes within specific rivers, or the different types of pollution that occur within them. Without such information, people can draw wildly different conclusions. In 2019, for example, the then chief executive of the agency, James Bevan, wrote that Britain’s water quality is “better than at any time since the Industrial Revo
lution” – a claim that has not aged well.
“This suggestion that water quality has got better, a lot of that is because [the agency doesn’t] go and look,” says Throup, the former Environment Agency area manager. “If you don’t look, you don’t find.”
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This year, flooding in the southwest of England has deluged crops and left fields underwater. As the climate crisis intensifies, pressure will grow on the agency to protect homes and farmland, and the costs of doing so will escalate. Earlier this year, the agency slashed a quarter of flood projects it had planned to deliver in the next six years, owing to rising construction costs.
Yet flood protection was one of the few areas that former staff I spoke with took pride in. When a bad flood hits, agency staff become the green-fleeced responders who arrive at the rescue. “You were doing eight-hour shifts five to six days a week, two to three weeks at a time. But people wanted to do it. The adrenaline was going,” says Throup, who was sent all over England to help with the agency’s flood response. He became so popular among flooded-out locals in Herefordshire that they petitioned for him to get an MBE. “What Dave Throup doesn’t know about rivers and flooding isn’t worth knowing,” it read.
During natural disasters, the organisation has also proved a useful scapegoat for the government. In 2014, when the Somerset Levels experienced the wettest winter in 250 years, the government turned on the agency for being slow to dredge the county’s main river, a practice that most experts agree is a poor solution to flood management. Eric Pickles, then communities secretary, lambasted its staff on television. “We were dealing with the Environment Agency,” he said. “We thought we were dealing with experts.”
In this skirmish between the agency and the government, it was possible to glimpse the outlines of a larger battle, between those who insist we will be able to engineer our way out of the climate crisis, and those who think that we will need to work with nature, not against it. “There’s an undercurrent of not believing this so-called green crap,” said Linley-Adams, the lawyer. “And that’s all rolled into this idea that we can dominate nature. We can dredge the rivers, drain the land.”
This is perhaps the greatest challenge at the heart of the agency’s work: it is responsible for protecting an environment that is being degraded by processes it cannot control. There are good reasons why the agency should hand out more fines to rule-breaking farmers and bring criminal charges against the bosses of malfeasant water companies. But this would only go so far. Truly protecting and restoring the environment would require dramatic changes, particularly in how we use land – and these changes would extend far beyond the agency’s remit. “Ultimately, we want to get to a place where we’re asking, ‘What is the best use for this parcel of land?’ In some cases, it will be food production [or] conservation. And in some cases, it will be much better to use that land for the environmental [benefits] it could deliver,” said David Johnson, the technical director at the Rivers Trust, who worked at the agency from2000 to 2010.
This, in turn, would require a deeper shift: valuing land differently, seeing it not as a resource for maximising crop yields or building housing equity, but as the answer to a collective problem. A radical, democratic national plan on this scale is hard to imagine in Britain, where developers continue to build on flood plains, intensive farming rumbles on, and no property owner wants to imagine their house becoming a stranded asset.
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How much might things improve under a Labour government? The party recently announced a new plan to restore and protect at least 30% of Britain’s natural environment by 2030. This would introduce a land-use framework to encourage more sustainable farming, and would ban some harmful pesticides. These are laudable goals, but delivering them will cost money – something Labour seems unwilling to commit to. The party has already cut its £28bn green investment pledge by half. And its refusal to introduce further tax rises, coupled with the fiscal rules the party has adopted, means that spending on everything but health, defence and schools could fall by as much as £20bn. Some staff I spoke to felt that the relationship between the government, polluting industries and the regulators had long been too cosy. A number of people with connections to the Labour party have recently taken up jobs at Water UK, the trade association for the water companies.
On water, at least, some things seem to be improving. Public pressure has led to a flurry of activity, and in 2021, the Environment Agency, with Ofwat, announced that it was conducting its largest ever criminal investigation into the water companies in England and Wales (this is still ongoing, but its initial assessment has suggested “widespread and serious non-compliance” by “all companies”). The government has given the agency funding to recruit 500 new staff, and Defra has announced an “inspection surge” of water companies. As the scale of sewage pollution has come to light, officials within the agency have become more combative towards the water companies, and more willing to accept criticism of its failures. “We have not been doing our job well enough and we will correct those areas,” Duffy recently said.
Cleaning up rivers has become an electoral issue that commands nearuniversal support. Conservatives are now being forced to reckon with the consequences of cutting the agency’s funding and encouraging it to take a softer approach. This has resulted in the absurd spectacle of public arguments about who is to blame for the state of rivers conducted by the very people who are responsible for the state of rivers. The only thing on which ministers seem to agree is that it is all someone else’s fault. Yet despite all the talk of pollution, neither Labour nor the Conservatives have pledged to restore the money cut from the agency’s budget since 2010.
Since Helen Nightingale left the Environment Agency in 2022, she has been looking after her husband, who has Parkinson’s. She potters in her garden, and talks about England’s rivers with the bitter frustration of someone who tried to warn others of an unfolding scandal, only for those warnings to be ignored. “Water pollution seemed to just not be seen as significant or important. But not now. Oh no,” she said, addressing her former managers as if they were present in the room. “Water quality is suddenly very important. You didn’t have your eye on the ball!”
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