I would not go swimming in the rivers of England in the same way that I would not put my head in a public toilet. It’s not just me who feels that way. Even Sir James Bevan, chief executive of the Environment Agency – the regulator responsible for protecting and improving water in England – said he would be “cautious” about this by first seeking assurances by checking the EA and the group’s websites. the Surfers campaign against the sewers before boarding.
Bevan’s agency provides some guarantees – as long as you want to swim in only one of the 417 or more designated bathing places in the country, most of which are on the coast. In fact, there are only about a dozen inland bathing lakes across the country; and so far only one river – in Ickle, West Yorkshire – that has been rated ‘bad’ in the latest bathing water agency assessment, so you may still want to avoid it. Instead, it is better to cross the English Channel, where France can offer about 1,300 magnificent lakes and rivers designed for safe swimming among its 3,300 bathing places.
The main reason Defra, which sponsors EA, is reluctant to give the green light to river swimming is that pollution from sewers, farms, urban and industrial waters is so widespread that all rivers in England have failed to respond to the legal standard for overall health at the last time they were assessed. However, according to the agency, EA is not to blame. He called for poverty because of the dire state of our watercourses, saying “you get the environment you pay for” and called for more government funding so that it could ennoble the polluters and do its job properly.
So where does this leave wild swimmers, boatmen, fishermen and almost anyone who would rather walk along a glistening stream than an open sewer? Feeling abandoned by the agency – complicated by its recent actions to stop visiting incidents with “low impact” pollution and low staff morale, which says it is no longer able to deter polluters – communities have begun to take matters into their own hands. hands. At first glance, it seems to work.
It began last year when people from the Ilkley Clean River Group in West Yorkshire managed to get a section of the Wharf River that is already popular with swimmers, designated as an official bathing site. Located downstream of the treatment plants, the group knew the water would not be safe and concluded that the bathing sign was the only way to oblige the Environment Agency to install a water quality monitor and recognize the level of pollution there. After a strange mistake to get the agency to locate the monitor downstream and not in the cleaner upstream water, this section of the Wharfe officially became the first river bathing water in England, albeit of poor water quality.
A year later, we now have a total of two river bathing sites: thanks to the efforts of the Thames21 charity, a section of the River Thames in Oxford will also receive bathing water status next month.
We are not France, but can these two sites signal the first green shoots of a wider community-led movement to clean up our rivers?
The Rivers Trust and Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) campaigns are hoping for that. Together, they compiled a map showing 273 popular river recreation sites, including some where there is already community interest in creating a bathing water label, such as Warleigh Weir on the Avon River and Sheep’s Green on the Cam River. The SAS has also launched a petition calling on Defra to create 200 new bathing sites by 2030.
Filling a place with bathing water is relatively easy, according to Thames21. For anyone involved in the process, he recommends convening river users, choosing a popular place with access and facilities, researching the risks of pollution, registering the number of people using the river during the May-September bathing season, obtaining permission from the landowner, raising public awareness and then submitting a formal application to Defra. It sounds simple, but Prof. Becky Malby of the Ilkley Clean River Group says there is no transparency in Defra’s decision-making and that it takes about two years to complete the whole process – a time that in their case would be better spent on removal of sewage spills from the pipes of the nearby water supply company.
So we are in (at best) muddy waters. It is clear that the growing flow of bathing water is positive, and the associated public awareness is crucial if things need to improve, but it is not close to tackling the problem of chronic and widespread river pollution. Several tests by the Environment Agency for two types of bacteria taken in one place during the bathing season do not even begin to scratch the surface of the number of pollutants passing through our beauty sites or the subsequent risks to humans and wildlife. .
What we need are wholesale improvements to entire catchments, made by tighter regulation of the biggest polluters: the water industry and agriculture. A few signs for bathing a river in a watershed that is flooded with sewage or suffocated by fertilizers on the farm will not be enough to make swimming safe.
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