Liz Truss ‘has sewage on her hands’ over
Environment Agency cuts
Exclusive: Truss oversaw cut in funds to tackle water
pollution, since when raw sewage discharge has risen
Pippa
Crerar and Helena Horton
Mon 22 Aug
2022 18.52 BST
The Tory
leadership frontrunner, Liz Truss, was responsible for cutting millions of
pounds of funding earmarked for tackling water pollution during her time as
environment secretary, the Guardian can reveal.
Truss, who
was in charge at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)
between 2014 and 2016, oversaw “efficiency” plans set out in the 2015 spending
review to reduce Environment Agency funding by £235m.
This
included a £24m cut from a government grant for environmental protection,
including surveillance of water companies to prevent the dumping of raw sewage,
between 2014-15 and 2016-17, according to the National Audit Office.
It
represents almost a quarter of the funding cut from this area between 2010,
when the grant stood at £120m, and 2020, by which time it had fallen to £40m.
Labour
analysis of official figures shows that since 2016 raw sewage discharge in
England and Wales has more than doubled, from 14.7 spill events an overflow to
29.3 in 2021. Greenpeace said the figures showed Truss had “sewage on her
hands”.
The
Environment Agency has called for the government to reverse the cuts but
campaigners want the next prime minister to go further and also give the body
the power to properly monitor water companies over sewage, rather than allowing
them to self-report discharges.
It follows
the finding that 24% of sewage overflow pipes at popular seaside resorts in
England and Wales have monitors that are faulty or do not have monitors at all,
meaning people could be swimming in human waste this summer without realising.
Last year
the head of the Environment Agency, James Bevan, called on the government to
reinstate the funds, saying that given the length of the country’s river
systems, having “only a few hundred people to oversee them is a pretty tall
ask”.
He told
MPs: “It has had an effect on our capacity to monitor, to enforce the rules and
to help improve the environment where we think it needs doing. Honestly, I
would like to see that grant restored. I would like to get back to where we
were 10 years ago, and I think it would make a massive difference.”
In response
to the findings, the shadow environment secretary, Jim McMahon, said: “The
country is facing a crisis in our water supply. Our water infrastructure is at
bursting point with billions of litres of water being wasted every day and raw
sewage being dumped into our waters.
“The fact
that Liz Truss was the one to cut the EA so severely not only demonstrates her
lack of foresight but also her lack of care for the detail, in recognising the
need to adapt to the serious flooding that had just happened on her watch.”
Privacy
Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content
funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use
Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms
of Service apply.
Environment
Agency insiders said that after Truss’s cuts, staff were moved away from
environmental monitoring towards flood protection, and the number of samples
taken from rivers went down dramatically.
Vaughan
Lewis, a senior consultant for the agency, told the Guardian: “They plummeted
to the point it was impossible for the Environment Agency to know what’s going
on. They had no control or monitoring capability that was meaningful. They
ceded the control of monitoring to water companies, which ended up being able
to mark their own homework. They take their own samples and assess whether they
are being compliant.
“We saw
that doesn’t work – look what happened with Southern Water, which didn’t
declare its pollution incidents and ended up being fined by the EA when they
were found out. There are suspicions this could be happening across the board.
It has been left to citizen scientists who monitor and fill in the gaps.”
Lewis
added: “Lots of this would have happened under Liz Truss; she was there when
some of those cuts were made. She was a poor minister and the Environment
Agency has been cut to the bone and it can’t monitor or regulate effectively.”
As
environment secretary, Truss defended the cuts by saying “there are ways we can
make savings as a department”, citing better use of technology and inter-agency
working.
She is
already facing questions about why she was registered absent from a vote on a
Labour amendment in the House of Commons that aimed to place legal obligations
on water companies to stop polluting England’s waterways during heavy rainfall.
Greenpeace
UK’s chief scientist, Dr Doug Parr, said: “A decade of budget cuts and
government deregulation has left the Environment Agency, almost literally, up
shit creek without a paddle. The growing tsunami of sewage unleashed on to
Britain’s waterways is a shocking demonstration of how undermining our
regulators leads to a disregard for nature and those meant to protect it.
“That our
likely future prime minister was an instigator of cuts to the money used to
protect our rivers, and so helped cause this environmental catastrophe, doesn’t
bode well for the UK’s protection of the natural world. Liz Truss has sewage on
her hands.”
Hugo
Tagholm, the chief executive of Surfers Against Sewage, said: “Self-monitoring
has clearly failed for the water industry, the culture of self-reporting has
clearly failed, millions of hours of sewage pollution going into our waterways
every year, it’s a failed model.”
Martin
Salter, from the Angling Trust, said: “The consequences of these ill-advised
cuts to the Environment Agency’s pollution monitoring capabilities are now
present for all to see and smell, with raw sewage flowing down our rivers and dead
fish and other wildlife washed up on the banks with depressing regularity.
“The move
away from tougher regulation in favour of allowing water companies to report on
their own failures has created a polluter’s charter, as evidenced by the recent
prosecution of Southern Water for deliberately falsifying their discharge
data.”
The
Environment Agency has long bemoaned its lack of funding and power, underpinned
by a lack of ambition from ministers on tackling waste. In 2020 it said it
recognised that a “huge gap is opening up between the outcomes we want to
achieve and our ability to achieve them”, and estimated that “at the current
rate of progress” it would take more than 200 years to reach the government’s
target of at least 75% of waters being close to their natural state.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário