Sir James Bevan, Chief Executive of the Environment Agency, has told the Parliamentary Committee currently conducting an inquiry into water quality in rivers that he would like to see “eye-watering fines” for water companies.

The EA Chief was commenting when he gave evidence in person alongside David Black, Interim Chief Executive at Ofwat and Nick Harris, Acting Chief Executive, Highways England to MPs on the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee on Wednesday last week for the fourth oral evidence session in the inquiry.

In response to Chair of the EAC Philip Dunne MP’s opening comments that “the agency is not doing a very good job at that in that only 14% of English rivers have achieved good ecological status”, Sir James Bevan described the current state of rivers as “flatlining”. He went on to explain that while they were in much better condition than they were several decades ago, the situation is not nearly as good as it should be, and that over the last few years “progress has stalled.”

Water quality in our rivers is flatlining

He commented:

“However, there is bad news and I am not here to deny it. Water quality in our rivers is flatlining and as you said, Chair, our latest assessment of all the water bodies in England shows that only 14% of rivers meet the criteria for good ecological status.”

He attributed this in part to growing pressure on the water environment from developments, a growing population, climate change—and also because the two main polluters, the water and farming sectors, were not yet “doing enough to protect and enhance the environment.” It was also happening, he added, partly because the Environment Agency had “very limited resources with which to regulate those sectors as we would like.”

"Overall performance is improving"

However, he went on to disagree with the Chair’s suggestion that since 2008, pollution incidents from water companies’ sewerage assets were around the same level, and had been flatlining since then. Sir James told the Committee:

“I think the evidence will show that over the last couple of decades …..the overall performance of water companies is improving, including reducing serious pollution incidents among various other things.

“ …the latest environmental performance document, which is coming out shortly, will show the lowest number of serious pollution incidents from water companies that we have yet recorded, down from where it was last year.

“It will show that more water companies are now at the highest level of performance, what we call four-star performance, in terms of complying with the key requirements to protect our waters, and it will show improved performance on most of the metrics that we use to assess whether those water companies are complying with their permits.”

However, he cautioned that was not to say that every water company was doing well, adding:

“Some of them are doing extremely badly, and we will name and shame them when we publish the report.”

Combined sewage overflows: “ we have told water companies they need to step up their game”

Replying to questions about combined sewer overflows across the network in England, the EA Chief told the Committee the Agency had worked with the water companies to put event duration monitoring in place on 15,000 sewage overflows. About 12,000, 80% or so, now had EDM monitoring, and the EA would have all of them covered by the end of 2023.

Philip Dunne pointed out that the data did explain anything about the quality of water when untreated sewage is released into the waterways and said the EAC had seen increasing evidence, not least from the EDM devices, of large numbers of incidents of long duration.

Sir James agreed, saying that when the data was in “we will see that over time there are, exactly as you said, greater volumes and greater frequency of spillage.”

“We have told the water companies that they need to step up their game in terms of paying attention to what the monitoring is showing them,” he added.

EA resources have gone down “quite significantly” in terms of ability to tackle water quality

In response to a question from Cherilyn Mackrory MP about current Environment Agency resources, Sir James explained:

“We can always do more with more, although I need to emphasise that our resources have gone down quite significantly in the last 10 years in terms of our ability to tackle water quality.

“If you want a figure, the grant that we got in 2010, which funded all the Environment Agency’s environmental work, including much of what we do on water, was £120 million; last year it was £40 million. That is a two-thirds cut in the grant that funds much of the work we are talking about.”

He went on to comment:

“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, both in the numbers of people that we could have on this job but also in some of the hardware.

“We need to reinvest in better and more modern monitoring. We use quite a lot of the money that we have to support projects that improve water quality in rivers in various ways. I would like to do more of that as well, and I would like to do more surveillance of the water companies.”

Replying to a similar question from Caroline Lucas MP, the EA Chief reiterated:

“We do not have as much resource as we used to and that is having an effect on our ability to understand what is going on and to take action against those who are failing to abide by their permits and to work with others to remediate the damage.”

Fines in prosecutions “not big enough”

He also told the EAC that in prosecutions, the fines were “not big enough” and that “even the biggest one”, which the Agency had secured against Thames Water of about £20 million, was “peanuts compared with the daily turnover of a company like Thames Water.”

He continued:

“It is good that courts have started to impose higher fines than they were a few years ago, but we would still like to see, frankly, eye-watering fines for water companies. Until they are big enough to concentrate the minds of boards, we will not have the effect that we want.”

Commenting on the culture of water companies, Sir James said that although he thought it was improving, he would “like to see every chair and every chief executive thinking that protecting the environment is as important as producing drinking water, and that is not yet the case.”

Click here to read a transcript of the evidence session