Supported by the Ilkley Clean River Group.

The report sets out how:

1.Investors didn’t invest.

2.Yorkshire didn’t need to borrow to finance capital expenditure.

3.Yorkshire debt is not like a mortgage to fund long term infrastructure.  It is like credit card debt to finance an extravagant life-style.  And it keeps growing.

4.Privatisation made capital investment hugely expensive.

5.Yorkshire’s parent companies have not been a support, but, instead, huge financial burden.

Evidence submitted by Up Sewage Creek

Evidence from A Fresh Water Future Alastair Chisholm, Director of Policy at CIWEM

Evidence from Prof Liz Sharp, Presented at the Resilient Water Systems Event.

 1. The current water system treats water supply, drainage, and flood protection as isolated technical domains, managed by experts for a passive public. 

2. Excluding the public from engaging with the water system represents a missed opportunity to reduce our demands and to enable greater resilience. 

3. Mobilising public action to address water requires regional democratic oversight 

This includes

1 Weak regulation allowing water industry to game the system

2 Access and quality standards for data and regulatory permits

3 Animal and human health issues not receiving suƯicient attention

Greener Berwick estuary group, have concluded that regulation by EA is wholly inadequate, largely due to lack of funding, eroded over many years. Also that the tools available (licences, EDMs and relevant legislation for classifying bathing water) are not fit for purpose.

The Water Company (NW) 2025 proposals will assist, but it remains to be seen if, how and by when they might be fully implemented.

After the water and sewage companies in England and Wales were privatised in 1989, significant progress was made in inland, bathing and drinking water quality. Over the past ten to twenty years, much of this good work appears to have been undone, especially in the public eye. What is really going on and how can the sector restore its reputation?

The author reviewed Environment Agency macrophyte survey data from around 2004 to 2022 to see if it was able to illustrate the change from a river brimming with macrophytes (higher plants, waterweeds) as recently as 2019 to a weedless river as we now have in 2025. It includes information on phosphate, ammoniacal nitrogen and nitrate in the river, some from the EA, plus more from CARP measurements. 

The main points are:

The phosphate concentration in the river decreased over this period to plateau just above the WFD threshold good status threshold of 0.1ppm.

The waterweed population crashed to extinction after the phosphate concentration had been reduced.

Invertebrates, such as molluscs, have also decreased, using surveys from our local Wyre Forest Study Group (articles available in their Annual Review 2024)

The River Severn is now deeply turbid for longer each year, the sediment is orange-brown, the same colour as local soils.

We note that the Commission focuses on the water industry; its discharges are not the only influence on life in the river, we must also target agriculture.

Addressing the quality of water in catchments is very fragmented, with minimal targeting of incentives by government or others.

Statutory agencies, such as the EA and Natural England, are insufficiently resourced to perform their regulatory functions.

As a group, though not detailed in the report, we have been disappointed by the opaque and sometimes misleading responses of Severn Trent Water to our enquiries.

Investigation into Welsh Water Finances by Alastair Hill, Save the River Usk

Wylam Clean Tyne is convinced that only radical reform of the EA and its approach to policing the water companies and other polluters will clean our rivers and coastal waters. The EA has not succeeded in controlling pollution and needs to change both its philosophy and its methods of control.