Year After Year After Year, UK Environment AND Economy Dragged Down By Gov Inability To Enforce Clean Water Laws
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Reuters interviews with 20 people and data analysis show how polluted water has also hit tourism and delayed construction projects, acting as a drag on the economy at a time when the new Labour government is trying to kick start growth. In the five years to October 2024, the Environment Agency intervened on 60 occasions to object to planning applications due to the pressures they would place on local sewerage systems, according to a Freedom of Information request.
Clean water campaigners have started to marshal opposition against planning applications, believing that’s more likely to pressure the government into fixing the sewage system than current efforts focusing on the harm caused to biodiversity. “Money talks,” said Ash Smith at campaign group Windrush Against Sewage Pollution. Standing knee deep in grey, untreated sewage water in a local brook in Oxfordshire, he explained how they were objecting to house building to show how the water system had broken the country’s infrastructure more broadly.
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Before Britain left the European Union, mussels and oysters could be shipped to the continent prior to purification. Post Brexit, the EU only accepts purified goods or those from the cleanest British waters, rated Class A. That change has all but destroyed mussel farming in north Wales on Britain’s west coast. The region once produced the bulk of Britain’s exports to Europe but now rarely sells to the continent due to poor water and a lack of bulk purification facilities in the country.
The Shellfish Association of Great Britain (SAGB) says British exports would double if the seas were cleaner. James Green, who harvests and sells oysters in Whitstable, a town in southeast England famed for shellfish since Roman times, used to send about half of his produce to markets such as Hong Kong and Europe, but Brexit and water quality issues mean he now only sells purified oysters domestically. His water supplier, Southern Water, was fined 90 million pounds in 2021 for dumping sewage in the five years to 2015, disrupting harvests and exports. He did not get any compensation and says it is hard to wait for improvements. “I’ve got a business,” he said. “Can you wait for the changes to kick in, in five, six, seven years’ time?”
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https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/britain-water-sewage/