Water UK, the organisation that represents all of the UK water companies, is calling for the self-monitoring regime to be scrapped.

Water UK has been calling for an end to Operator Self-Monitoring for several years - this formed part of the industry body’s submission to the recent Independent Water Commission.

Introduced by the Environment Agency in 2009, the Operator Self-Monitoring regime requires water companies to do their own testing of ‘final treated effluent’ - the wastewater discharged into waterbodies following the sewage treatment process.

Sometimes characterised as ‘water companies marking their own homework’. the Self-Monitoring regime has been the target of ongoing commentators, journalists and water campaigners.

Water UK commented:

“Our view is that now, more than ever, it is vital that the public can trust how water companies are regulated.

“Whatever the efficiencies of Operator Self-Monitoring, it is abundantly clear that the public do not have faith in it and it must be scrapped.

“In response to the Independent Water Commission’s final report, last summer Defra committed to end Operator Self-Monitoring and move toward ‘Open Monitoring’. Although not fully defined, this suggests an approach that involves a much wider range of checks, sampling and data – an approach we would support.”

According to Water UK, while continuous river water quality monitors are not a panacea, if used alongside other sources of information they should allow a better understanding of what is happening in each river.

They should also be further supported by citizen science, which could see members of the public more systematically trained in reliable techniques adding their own data to help inform local plans and projects, as well as emergent technology (such as AI-enabled satellite data) and more frequent and granular physical sampling of rivers by the Environment Agency.

In addition, the data on both final treated effluent and the health of rivers should all be checked and made available quickly, reliably and transparently to the public.

“If Defra’s ‘Open Monitoring’ work delivers this outcome then we will have a much more comprehensive and timely understanding of the sources of harm, priorities for action and how assets are performing,” Water UK says.