Life of a Chalkstream: Goodbye Ranil. Hello Thérèse

Greetings!

As well as three Prime Ministers in as many months we are now onto our third Minister of State at the Department of Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) with arrival of Thérèse Coffey, replacing the avowed Trussite Ranil Jayawardena who barely had time to print his new business cards before returning to the backbenches.

Some people have questioned Coffey’s appointment, but this is a return home for her having started her ministerial career at Defra. With a PhD in chemistry and having spent her working life prior to parliament in finance I for one don’t feel inclined to write her off just yet but clearly, she has a difficult brief.

Essentially the problems drain into three buckets: formulating the legislation required to transition from environment law based on EU statutes to UK statutes. Reforming the regulatory oversight. Finally engaging in a public discourse that explains why proper water provision, sewage treatment and clean air requires higher consumer bills.

Thérèse Coffey (and cat!)

I got into trouble with some of you when I wrote in September that contracting-out our environmental legislation to the EU was always a bad idea and I was surprised that the ‘great and the good’ such as the National Trust, RSPB et al suddenly leapt to the defence of legislation they had routinely trashed and derided as inadequate for decades.

However, it seems I was not alone in my thinking as Henrietta Appleton, Policy Officer at the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust said something similar last week citing, as an example, the ‘EU’s decision to ban the only effective herbicide for bracken control, based on residue data submitted when the chemical was used on spinach.’ Yes, rewriting 2,500 pieces of EU-derived legislation as required by the end of 2023 will be difficult. Not all the outcomes will always be good or to the satisfaction of everyone. But equally plenty will be better and ultimately, we should have a framework of legislation suited to the particular needs of our island.

If the legislative road will be a hard one for Coffey, then she can take some comfort that the regulatory one need not be. Bodies such as the Environment Agency, the Water Services Regulation Authority (Ofwat) and Natural England are directly under her control. If fact, members of all these bodies sit on the Executive Board of Defra. Here are some stark facts she should lay out to our friends at the EA at the first board meeting as detailed this week by New Civil Engineer magazine,

‘The 107 prosecution cases brought by the EA in 2021, are more than the 2020 (70 cases) but less than 2019 (143 cases). Data analysis provider Ends [a research group] has found that the number of prosecutions has fallen by 76.4% in the past decade compared to the previous one – an average of 710.6 prosecutions a year between 2000 and 2010, while between 2011 and 2021 the yearly average stood at 167.6.’

Let us just chew on that final statistic for a moment: the average number of EA prosecutions each year has fallen from 710 at the start of the millennium to 167 last year. Really? Have our rivers got cleaner with each passing year to warrant such a decline? Or course not. It is time to relieve the EA of a task to which they are clearly unsuited.

Finally, it’s that public discourse thing. All the legislation in the world will not change the parlous state of our rivers and coastline in the short and medium term. The one thing that hit me right between the eyes when I was doing the research for The Otters’ Tale was that it took a full thirty years for the organophosphates that bought our otters to the edge of extinction to work their way out of the food chain. However, we could stop pouring sewage into our rivers overnight if we built decent sewage processing plants. We could save our rivers from terminal abstraction with a national water grid and desalination plants. If we started today, and at less cost than HS2, within five years we could stop the rot and in ten start to make things better.

I know with all the talk of a cost-of-living crisis proposing higher bills comes with political risks but surely it is a conversation worth having?

Salmon Shame

I’m always slightly hesitant in giving a recommendation to watch a film where the topic is outside my area of expertise but I’m still going to suggest you watch Salmon Shame from Wildfish, the body previously known as the Salmon & Trout Conservation Trust.

The short film, just over nine minutes long is, in the words of the producers, ‘An eye-opening video that exposes the horrors of open-net salmon farming in Scotland.’ ending with an exhortation to ‘Say NO to open-net salmon farming’ at www.wildfish.org

You can watch the film here As an aside, the one thing that puzzles me is why, at the time of me posting this, has Salmon Shame only received 15,000 You Tube views? I’m guessing it is an issue the wider public have yet to latch on to.

Click to watch Salmon Shame

Meet the new Environment Agency Chairman

You will all know my scepticism for the new Chairman of the Environment Agency, Alan Lovell. He has, as you may also know, strong Hampshire connections, but what I did not know was that he was bought up in the Test Valley, on the banks of the River Anton in Upper Clatford.

So, in a return to the village of his upbringing he will be giving the All Saints’ Winter Lecture 2023 at the King Edward VII Memorial Hall in Upper Clatford on Monday 16th January. The topic of his lecture will be, “Restoring confidence in the quality of English rivers – the Challenge for and the Role of the Environment Agency”. Lovell will explain the role of the Environment Agency and how it will address the challenge in restoring the environmental integrity of the unique chalkstreams.

Alan Lovell

Tickets cost £12.00 per person. Please use this link to book. Doors open at 7pm and the lecture starts at 8pm at the King Edward VII Memorial Hall, Upper Clatford, SP11 7QL. A cash bar will be open before the lectures start. Parking is available behind the hall.

The law of the river

I sometimes dream of coming back in another life as a lawyer specialising in riparian rights, the dictionary definition of which is relating to or situated on the banks of a river.

I hardly know of a beat which, at some time or another, has not had some kind of disputation ranging from the totally trivial to the substantive. Most of the trouble arises with boundaries or access. Years ago, nobody attributed much value to a river so, coupled with inaccurate or indecipherable deed mapping, what might have been an accepted practice dating back decades for one party suddenly becomes a trespass issue for another. Yes, it soon can become a rich seam to mine for the legal profession.

Now, I can’t pretend this latest advice from Hampshire County Council is a cure-all for riparian woes, but it is a useful aide memoire, and I learnt a few new things so I reproduce it here at no charge (!) for general advice to squirrel away for a day when you might need it.