Soapbox
How the EA deals with water companies must change, argues Penny Gane
DO YOU BELIEVE THAT THE Environment Agency is unable to keep a tighter rein on water company pollution because of cuts to its budget? That if the Government just loosened the purse strings, the Agency would be able to do the job anglers and everyone else are crying out for it to do? That it’s been held back from policing sewage spills because it doesn’t get enough money from taxpayer coffers?
If you do, you’re wrong.
The Environment Agency has the power to raise its own funds to regulate the water industry. It just hasn’t been charging enough to meet its own costs to do the job properly for years.
Let me explain. Say you woke up tomorrow and fancied setting up a sewage treatment works on the banks of a river in England. Before you start releasing treated wastewater from your works into the river, or sewage that you can’t treat in “an emergency”, you’ll need an environmental permit from the Agency.
You’ll be charged a one-off fee for drawing up your permit. Then you’ll be charged an annual fee to cover the Agency’s costs for checking you’re keeping to your permit conditions and, if you’re not, taking enforcement action to bring you back into line.
It’s the Agency’s job to calculate how much it needs to charge you, and other permit holders, to fund its ability to regulate your works and all the others on the river to protect water quality. You’d think the Agency would review its water permit charges every year, given that ensuring it has enough money to meet its statutory duties is fundamental. But that’s not the case. These charges were last reviewed in 2018. That’s six years without a price increase. We know this because the Agency has just finished a consultation on whether it should be charging much more.
If the Agency goes ahead with its proposed increases, brings in more money and more resources, it could start proactively looking at the monitoring data from your works to figure out whether you are sticking to your permit conditions. It could inspect your works from time to time with its new “boots on the ground” approach. It could pick up on those frequent sewage overflows caused by poor maintenance or operational shortco
