Life of a Chalkstream: Sorry is the easy word

Greetings!

I’ll have to say Ruth Kelly, chair of Water UK, the lobby group for the sewerage and water companies of the UK played a blinder when interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Today show last week to announce £10bn of funding over the next 10 years (or was it 7 or 5 years, accounts from post interview briefings vary) to redeem our rivers from the hell we currently call the water industry.

She hit her talking points perfectly as you would expect from an erstwhile thirtysomething Blair babe of the 1997 intake well versed in the ways of the media. And she actually made some fair points. Everyone sees the water companies as eternal cash cows but five actually lost money last year and though she did not mention it, Southern Water effectively went bust in 2021 and had to be rescued by Australian distressed utility specialists, Macquarie Bank.

Ruth Kelly with Tony Blair in 2007

With the ease of David Gower in his pomp she swatted away the needled questions delivered by the interviewer, a testy Nick Robinson. It was not long into the interview that Robinson latched on to executive pay. How is it he asked, with suitable chattering class mock incredulity, that one CEO earnt £3.9m last year? Aside from the fact that this would barely get you an averagely good Premiership footballer he kept banging on about it and the interview disappeared down this particular rabbit hole. Post interview I am sure Robinson was smugly satisfied with himself and Kelly delighted that a serious analysis of how much consumer bills would be increasing to fund the £10bn was missed, plus any serious analysis of how that £10bn, woefully inadequate in the context of the £50-£100bn required, would move the pollution needle.

And therein in lies the nub of the difficulty that water campaigners find themselves today. Having breasted the sunlit uplands where the issue is now bathed in light for all to see it is now too easy for the debate to descend into spats about private vs. public owners, dividend allocation or the sideshow of executive pay. The nuts and bolts of saving our rivers is about building 21^st century sewage treatment works, cracking down on the pollution caused by farming and creating a water supply system that avoids ruinous over abstraction.

These three fixes are the ultimate prize. We must not let the media-baiting of the water industry distract us from the true purpose of the mission.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul

You may have seen the headline in The Daily Telegraph last week that read, “Why Britain’s housebuilders are buying up trout farms to stave off a collapse.” The reason is nitrate neutrality rules.

In essence, if you build a new house or houses you have to demonstrate that no additional nitrate load, the by-product of sewerage output, will end up in the rivers and sea. Nitrates, along with phosphates, are two of the big pollutants doing long term harm to the countryside created 60% from sewage and 40% from farming, including fish farming.

Of course, it is absolutely impossible to build one house, let alone the millions government see as required, without creating nitrates so some bright bureaucrat came up with the idea of nitrate credits. Essentially, developers go out into the market to buy nitrate producing assets such as farmland, piggeries or trout farms, take them out of production to ‘trade’ the nitrate credit with the planners in return from planning permission. If you recall, you would have read here of one such example on the River Avon that I wrote about last year.

Hurst Castle Point on the Solent in Hampshire

Nitrate trading might not be such a bad idea if we were approaching the nitrate tipping point; a useful method for keeping it below damaging levels. But the problem is that we are way past that point. Next time you are by the sea and the tide goes out admire (I use the word advisedly) the bright green sludge blanket that will be covering the foreshore, suffocating to death the sea creatures beneath. That is nitrate pollution.

Maintaining the nitrate status quo with a trading scheme does nothing to solve the basic pollution problem in that there is already too much nitrate load. We cannot simply pretend that by robbing Peter to pay Paul to build yet more houses will not have a further deleterious effect on our land, rivers and coastline.

Facing up to disingenuous lobby groups

Interesting developments from over the pond in the USA where the pro-hunting lobby, what we call shooting and fishing, hope to score a significant victory over the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management who between them control many millions of wild federal acres and wished to ban the use of traditional tackle and ammunition on public lands – that is to say lead.

Widespread harm from the use of lead is far from proven, though many ‘conservation’ bodies campaign on the basis that the harm is a given. Regardless of what side of the harm debate you stand it is clear that lead substitutes have less killing power for shooters and make the ammunition many times more expensive, as are the substitutes for anglers.

As a result, a group of US congress members, who saw the proposed ban as literally a land grab, have countered with a bill that would prohibit any such ban, ‘unless such action is supported by the best available science and state wildlife and fish agencies.’

Lead is largely a side issue for angling but I could readily see our pastime cunningly marginalised by pressure groups who use such diversionary tactics as discarded fishing line, lost hooks or disturbance to wildlife as reasons that do not actually ban angling but put our rivers and lakes off limits on largely spurious grounds.

I for one would like to see more science based oversight to regulatory bodies such at Natural England or the Environment Agency who, and I’m thinking beavers and fish stocking, too often base policy on assertion or pressure from special interest groups rather than science.

That said unlike in the US, I am not hopeful of a Private Members Bill, or heaven forbid a government backed bill, coming down the Westminster track any time soon.

Photo of the Week

This photo is by our multi-talented Jamie Pankhurst who, as well as dividing his time between guiding, river keeping and manning a desk in the office managed to find time in the week to fly his drone over Bullington Manor on the upper Test.

Quiz

The normal random collection of questions inspired by the date, events or topics in the Newsletter. It is just for fun with answers at the bottom of the page.

1) Who was crowned King of Italy on this day is 1805?

2) Rapeseed, currently turning British fields yellow and a blight for hay fever sufferers is related to which of the following: mustard, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower or turnip?

3) If you were suffering from xanthophobia, what would you have a fear of?