I had a very eye opening lecture today provided by Southampton’s own professor Ian Williams. He relayed the true facts that have caused the steady decline in England’s water quality.
According to the Environment agency, only 16% of the UK’s waters meet a ‘good’ ecological standard. This means free from nasty pollutants such as pathogens, heavy metals and microplastics; all of which have long-term health affects on both the environment and human health.
Now the metaphorical ‘housekeepers’ (political members) that have made our bed (the current water quality crisis we are currently experiencing) must be held accountable, not for the sole purpose of mockery or blame (maybe just a tad), but also to highlight the political mishaps that have occurred in order to prevent this from happening time and time again for the sake of our future water needs.
Owen Patterson was appointed Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in September 2012 (he has had multiple different roles and politically aligns with conservatives but we shan’t detail his other roles here).
Despite being entrusted to watch over our environmental affairs, he is a climate change sceptic and has publicly denied knowledge on climate change from real scientists. He has supported fracking movements and the cherry on top has been his 40% cut for climate change adaptation – leaving the UK vulnerable to the effects of floods.
Now flooding is known to cause increased pollution into water bodies due to excessive run-off which would contain a plethora of urban street chemicals, pesticides and such. I think it’s a safe assumption that UK politics can at sometimes feel like a cruel joke – especially hiring a climate sceptic as the secretary for the Environment.
You thought Patterson was bad, lets hear the journey of Liz truss, his successor (years 2014 – 2016). Despite Patterson’s clear fumbles in terms of climate action, Truss appears to be the key determinant of the water quality fate we see today.
Truss was able to cut £24 million from the environmental protection under the guise of ‘efficiency measures’, however these ‘measures’ depleted surveillance of water companies allowing them to get away with unmonitored sewage discharges into the sea.
Data from labour’s analysis of official figures shows that raw sewage discharge in England and Wales doubled between 2016 – 2021.
The Ironic part of this is Patterson was sacked for his lack of preparedness and foresight when slashing climate adaptation budgets, when subsequent floods destroyed the UK.
Then Liz Truss was appointed to his position and moves resources away from water monitoring to flood protection. However, she has failed to realise that this will (and has) severely jeopardised the quality of UK waters to the point where the environment agency are so far stretched that they simply could not monitor all of England and Wales’s water ways.
Thus, they allowed the students to mark their own homework by letting the water companies to asses themselves according to regulations, as well as disclosing their own sewage discharges (spoiler alert – they cheated!).
Now we can only hope for a more competent and swift resolution of these current issues, striving to bring back Britain to its former water quality greatness.
