Tag Archives: Environment Agency

Bad week for Environment Agency as ‘chicken poo’ failure claim lands it in court

Wake up call: these demonstrators against chicken farm pollution, including Feargal Sharkey, made their point outside the hearing at Cardiff Crown Court.

Yes, this is another ‘rivers of shit’ story.

But it isn’t about privatised water companies, for a change.

Instead, it’s about the Environment Agency failing to do its job and regulate the amount of – literally – crap going into our rivers.

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This is the second blow for the Agency this week, after it was found to have been colluding with the Tory government on ways of hiding whether UK bathing spots were unsafe for swimmers.

Now we learn that representatives of the EA have been taken to court in Cardiff over their failure to stop the River Wye being polluted with unacceptable amounts of chicken excrement from farms along its length.

Here’s a Sky News report on it:

The BBC reported,

The charity River Action, who brought the case, says laws to keep waterways healthy have not been enforced.

The Wye last year had its status downgraded to “unfavourable”, and the rapid expansion of chicken farming in the catchment area was partly blamed.

The Environment Agency said anyone breaking the law could be prosecuted.

The Wye flows along the English-Welsh border and is home to otters, kingfishers and the endangered Atlantic salmon.

“We believe that the government and the Environment Agency have acted unlawfully by deliberately not enforcing the critical regulation that, had it been in force, would have prevented the contamination of the Wye catchment area,” Charles Watson, the chairman of River Action, told the BBC.

And here’s Feargal Sharkey:

This Writer has something of an interest in this issue as I live near the Wye. The case is ongoing, and I look forward to the result.


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Is Environment Agency colluding with government to lie about bathing water quality?

The Environment Agency has been telling the government how to lie about the quality of bathing water, investigations have revealed.

Here’s Channel 4 News to explain:

According to Channel 4 News,

We’ve seen documents which show that almost twice as many English bathing waters would fail pollution tests – if the regulator [the Environment Agency] wasn’t legally allowed to disregard some of the worst results.

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Papers and emails show Government officials were also worried about negative press and wanted pollution incidents to be “better presented”. But the Environment Agency warned some options they gave could look like ‘greenwashing’.

The Government and the agency insist it’s perfectly above board and follows scientific best practice, but campaigners want the system to change, insisting public safety should come first.

Former musician, now clean water campaigner Feargal Sharkey has obtained a copy of the Environment Agency’s advice to the government, explaining how to – basically – lie to us about the amount of pollution in our waters:

In the TV report, an interviewee suggests that protection of the environment should be what the Environment Agency does, and not “spinning for the government”.

This Writer would certainly agree.

But it’s just another example of the corruption sweeping the UK.

It seems clear that the Environment Agency is not fit for purpose; when an organisation that is supposed to penalise water companies that break pollution rules is instead providing advice on how to hide such breaches, it does not deserve to continue.


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Tory government defiant after warning over sewage law breaches

Rivers of S**: unbelievably, the Tory government and regulators Ofwat and the Environment Agency reckon they have not broken the law by failing to regulate this torrent of untreated sewage properly.

Unbelievable but true: the UK’s Tory government is digging its heels in and insisting that it, together with regulators Ofwat and the Environment Agency, has not broken the law over how it regulates sewage releases into the UK’s waterways.

Here‘s the BBC:

The UK’s environment watchdog suspects the government and water regulators have broken the law over how they regulate sewage releases.

It follows continued high levels of sewage releases in England which topped 825 times a day last year.

Campaigners and opposition MPs have called the regulators “complicit” in allowing the pollution.

The government said it did not agree with the Office for Environmental Protection’s “initial interpretations”.

Following complaints to the OEP over sewage in June 2022 it announced it was investigating whether England’s regulators, Ofwat and the Environment Agency, along with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), were correctly enforcing the law on water companies.

In response to the announcement the government said: “The volume of sewage discharged is completely unacceptable. That is why we are the first government in history to take such comprehensive action to tackle it.”

That is hardly an alibi as it is the first UK government in history that needed to!

As for the substantive complaint – that far too much untreated sewage is stinking up our waterways – the instinctive urge is to come out with a lavatorial expletive like, “No sh**, Sherlock!”

Except…

It seems clear that there is far too much sh** flying around – as much from the mouths of government spokespeople as from privatised water firms’ pipes.


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Tories sat on NHS body parts scandal for six months and then denied responsibility

The waste organs that have been stockpiled are the products of surgery, in many cases.

Exactly as predicted: The Conservatives contracted-out an important part of the National Health Service – the disposal of medical waste – paying a private company not enough to do the job properly, and now they have blamed the company rather than taking any responsibility themselves.

Plus ca change, for those of you who know what that means.

Here‘s how the BBC has reported the story:

“A firm has been stripped of NHS contracts after hundreds of tonnes of clinical waste from hospitals was allowed to pile up at its sites.

“Health Minister Stephen Barclay said new arrangements have been made to replace the service by Healthcare Environmental Services (HES).

“In a statement to Parliament, Mr Barclay said NHS Improvement concluded that HES “failed to demonstrate that they were operating within their contractual limits.

“”Consequently, 15 NHS Trusts served termination notices to HES formally to terminate their contracts at 4pm on Sunday,” he said.

“New arrangements have been made with Mitie to “step in and replace this service” and “NHS services continue to operate as normal”, Mr Barclay told MPs.

“The Environment Agency said HES was in breach of its environmental permits at four of its six sites which deal with clinical waste – by having more waste on site than their permit allows and storing waste inappropriately.

“The EA has launched a criminal investigation.”

Hang on a second!

Hasn’t it already been reported (yes it has) that the Tory government has known about this problem for a very long time – and that HES put the parts in refrigerators on the advice of the government?

Isn’t it true (yes it is) that HES had been telling the Environment Agency about this problem for a whole year? It seems unfair for the government’s regulator to announce a criminal investigation into a company that has been blowing the whistle on the issue for that length of time.

And isn’t it true (yes it is) that the problem is one of underinvestment in the renewal of industrial incinerators by the Conservative government?

So it seems the Conservative government’s part in this matter needs to be explored in considerably greater depth.

Shadow Health Secretary Jon Ashworth has touched on the government’s part in this scandal in Parliament:

… But there’s a lot more to be said, I think.

This is a case of an incompetent government trying to cover up its own inadequacies.

And what are we to conclude?

We could start by drawing the obvious conclusion that contracting-out public services to private contractors is always a terrible idea.

As we have seen from this scandal and that of Carillion (remember that collapse?), Tory governments always go for the cheapest deal possible – which means the company winning the contract is never able to carry out its responsibilities in a reasonable manner.

The result is an extensive – and expensive – clean-up operation that is likely to be more costly to the public purse than keeping the service in-house would have been.

And the government – whose ministers caused the fiasco in the first place – washes its hands of the whole process in an example of the kind of corruption that cries out for the imposition of far more accountability on MPs – of every grade.

What do you think?

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Heavy rain expected to increase flood risk – in Newark?

140208floods

According to the Environment Agency, there is a “low but increased risk of flooding this weekend across the whole of England, as isolated torrential downpours are predicted”.

The Environment Agency is monitoring the situation and is also supporting local authorities who will respond to any reports of surface water flooding.

One can’t help but wonder if Newark is among the places threatened. The constituency that is hosting today’s by-election was hit badly by the winter floods that hit between November last year and February, but was sidelined by both politicians and the news media, who preferred sites in Oxfordshire and Somerset that were easy to reach along the M4.

Conservatives have been dangling the promise of extra money for flood defences in front of voters like a carrot for donkeys, according to The Guardian, which said George Osborne told residents: “I can’t make the announcement today, it wouldn’t be proper, but I think people in this community can rest assured that I have seen this for myself, I have listened to the community and we will act.”

The paper added that Southwell locals had indicated David Cameron had also been talking to local people about the flood money bid on Monday.

Will the Tories do anything about it if they lose? Doubtful.

Isn’t that electoral fraud, then? Blackmail, economic threats (flooding has a severe effect on local businesses), bribery… misinformation at the very least?

In that case, never mind their candidate’s undeclared directorship of Christie’s and £1.3 million house.

The Tories deserve to lose because they are trying to bribe the voters.

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Were the winter floods really that bad – or were they a distraction?

Photo opportunity: David Cameron and his posh new Wellies, talking a good fight but putting up less funds than he previously took away.

Photo opportunity: David Cameron and his posh new Wellies, talking a good fight but putting up less funds than he previously took away.

The storm of recriminations over the floods that battered the UK during the last few months appears to have been entirely disproportionate to their effect, if Vox Political‘s moles in the Environment Agency are to be believed.

Consider this: In 2007, the UK was hit by unprecedented flooding that damaged around 55,000 properties. Between December 2013 and February this year, the country was again hit by floods. Total number of properties flooded: around 5,000.

So we’ve had one-eleventh of the damage to homes, and (it seems) 11 times the fuss!

The media frenzy has given us photographs of David Cameron visiting flood-hit areas in his posh new Wellington boots, Ed Miliband being unjustifiably upbraided by a posh-voiced villager in his new Wellington boots, Eric Pickles blaming Owen Paterson, Owen Paterson blaming anyone he can, and everybody blaming the Environment Agency.

This is why Vox Political‘s EA moles are feeling ill-served; they say they have been doing the best they can under extremely difficult conditions – starved of funds, working 60-hour weeks including weekends with no extra pay (of course).

The extra cash provided by Mr “Money Is No Object” Cameron did not even equal the amount he had previously cut from the Environment Agency’s budget, meaning that the organisation was still unable to provide the service it had managed before the Conservative Party took the reigns of government in 2010.

Although funding cuts have been put on hold – for now, the Agency has no reason to believe its budget will not be hit again, as soon as the politicians find it expedient. If that is the case, what do you think will happen when the next flood hits?

This was a disaster that could have been avoided, with better planning and funding. But it wasn’t, and the government publicity machine went into overdrive while it was going on.

So our moles have been left with two questions:

Was this disaster manufactured?

If so, what was the government really doing while everyone was distracted by the constant media coverage of the storms?

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Flooding: Why is the taxpayer picking up the tab? There’s an EU fund!

The Conservative response: David Cameron swans around the Somerset Levels in his wellies while local MP Ian Liddell-Grainger (second from left) tries to get a word in edgeways.

The Conservative response: David Cameron swans around the Somerset Levels in his wellies while local MP Ian Liddell-Grainger (second from left) tries to get a word in edgeways.

It seems that David ‘Money Is No Object’ Cameron is unnecessarily forcing British taxpayers to fork out for flood relief while European officials scratch their heads and wonder why he isn’t taking advantage of a huge EU fund that is available to us.

We should all know why the comedy Prime Minister is avoiding Europe – he doesn’t want to lose face.

Eurosceptics in the Conservative Party across the UK criticise our membership because we pay so much in and take so little out (in their perception); this argument would be defeated if Cameron actually used the fund in the manner for which it was created and he would then lose support from members of his Parliamentary party.

Also, at a time when the UK’s future in Europe is being questioned, it would be “politically sensitive” (as Reuters describes it) for Cameron to go there and ask for a handout.

But governments are judged on the way they deal with crises (as the Political Rant blog put it) – and this one has put Cameron, figuratively as well as literally, between the rock and the river.

According to Reuters: “Asked whether Britain would ask for EU money, Cameron’s official spokesman told reporters on Wednesday the government was looking at every source of possible funding, playing down the idea that there was anything political behind it.

“Under EU rules, a country has 10 weeks from the first damage caused by a natural disaster to request aid.

“A person close to Cameron said there were technical grounds to do with spending thresholds that determined when to apply for a grant. Britain had no desire to get into a war of words with Brussels on the matter, he said.”

The news agency added that the government had deployed the armed forces to evacuate residents and shore up river defences, while under fire from critics for what ministers have acknowledged was a slow initial response.

Political Rant is less diplomatic (as you might expect): “Ken Clarke said it was just a normal winter and people complaining about flood defences were just a ‘lynch mob’. Eric Pickles criticised the Environment Agency while the Environment Agency criticised government cuts and Owen Paterson criticised Eric Pickles.

“David Cameron has undertaken several jaunts in his nice clean wellies, first to Kent just after Christmas where he was harangued by people left waist-deep in water without power for a week, then Somerset which he only visited after Prince Charles had been the day before, making it look rather silly the Prime Minister hadn’t bothered, and … to Cornwall where, a friend tells me, Railtrack diverted engineers who were supposed to be fixing the washed-out rail line at Dawlish to shake hands with the PM at a rail depot.

“The same PM has talked sadly about how a power cut interrupted his viewing of The Sound of Music on New Year’s Day while staying silent about two SSE engineers who said they were diverted from reinstating the power for 11,000 people to locate his trip switch.

“When the floods recede, we are more than likely to find a few people who died.”

Yes, and they’ll be in rural areas because the increased funds Cameron has announced amount only to a slightly smaller cut than he had originally intended, and the funding formula for flood defences demands £8 of economic benefit for every £1 spent – meaning a concentration on densely-populated urban areas.

Add to that the fact that Cameron only bothered to act when Conservative-voting areas were affected – the Somerset Levels, Windsor, Reading, Oxdfordshire, Surrey, Kent – and couldn’t care less when the waters were hitting places like Scunthorpe (as revealed on the BBC’s Question Time yesterday) and Cameron has put himself in a serious political mire.

He has made it clear that his is a government that only looks after its own supporters.

Everyone else can drown.

We won’t forget that.

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