The Environment Agency has slashed its water-use inspections by almost a half over the past five years, it can be revealed.
Environment Agency (EA) officers visited people and businesses with licences to abstract, or take, water from rivers and aquifers 4,539 times in 2018-19, but this dropped to 2,303 inspections in 2022-23, according to data obtained by the Guardian and Watershed Investigations.
The fall in inspections comes despite England facing a possible water deficit of 4bn litres a day by 2050 unless action is taken, and predictions that the summer flows of some rivers could dwindle by 80% in that time.
“Obviously, this is highly beneficial to water companies and agriculture, and incredibly detrimental to water resources and therefore the environment,” an EA insider told the Guardian and Watershed on condition of anonymity. Last year, the Guardian reported that the EA did not have a strong grasp on the total volumes taken from rivers and groundwater.
The agency has also introduced desk-based inspections, which the insider described as meaningless. “They are a substitute for field inspections, and given an officer needs to check meters or records, or on-site behaviours, they are useless except for ticking a key performance indicator box.” The EA says it only uses desk inspections to assess compliance of low-risk abstraction and impounding licences.
“By reducing inspections you reduce the ability to detect illegal activity and gather evidence against,” the insider said. “Desk-based inspections are solely reliant on the word of the operator, so, for example, if an operator tells an Environment Agency officer he hasn’t abstracted any water, then the officer records that as fact. If it is an illegal operator, they are unlikely to hand themselves in. These methods provide a smokescreen of numbers that suggest correct regulation is being carried out should anyone try to audit it, when in reality the regulation is meaningless.”
Figures obtained by the Guardian and Watershed Investigations show that the biggest drop in inspections was in the Kent, south London and East Sussex area, where inspections fell 67% – from 450 to 148 between 2018-19 and 2022-23. This was followed by Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Cheshire, where the number of inspections dropped from 139 to 47. In East Anglia, 824 abstraction inspections fell to 318, and in the Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire area they dropped from 173 to just 67.
However, an EA spokesperson said the insider’s interpretation of the drop in numbers was misleading because “inspection figures alone are not the only way of assessing whether those who take water from the environment are complying with their licences – satellite data, irrigation patrols, river gauges, groundwater level and ecological monitoring systems are increasingly used. This allows us to target activity to where and when the risks are highest and the environment is most vulnerable.”
Despite the total funding for the agency’s water, land and biodiversity area business group having risen by £73m, from £221m in 2015-16 to £294m in 2021-22, staff costs for roles in land and water management, groundwater, contaminated land and environmental monitoring fell by £2.6m (9%) over the past three years.
“The Environment Agency leadership have received vast increases in money to tackle the issue, but this has been deliberately moved away from the frontline,” said the insider. “This means they must not view protecting water supplies as a priority and that the money could be better spent elsewhere.”
The EA spokesperson said the regulator was “recruiting and training more staff to carry out water resources compliance work and … also strengthening the way we regulate to drive better performance from the water industry, with additional specialist officers and new data tools to provide better intelligence”.
Public water supply and rivers are at risk from intensifying droughts driven by the climate crisis. The chair of the EA, Alan Lovell, said about 4bn extra litres of water would be needed every day by 2050 if significant action were not prioritised, and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology has predicted that some rivers could lose up to 80% of their flows in summer by 2050.
Meanwhile, water sector leaks remain high, with the Environment Agency putting the volumes of water lost at 2.3bn litres a day last year.
A spokesperson for Water UK said water companies were “acutely aware of the environmental impact of abstraction and are proposing to stop half a billion litres’ worth of abstractions from rivers by 2030. Companies also have ambitious plans to cut leakage, which has come down every year since 2020, by a quarter by the end of the decade. To ensure the security of our water supply in the future, water companies are planning to build up to 10 new reservoirs as well as looking at alternative supplies of water including water recycling and desalination.”
Richard Benwell, the CEO of Wildlife and Countryside Link, said: “A long-term funding drought for the Environment Agency has left it under-resourced for the water challenges ahead. Recent funding rises don’t offset the years of underinvestment in the agency.
“This drop-off in post-Covid inspections is highly worrying and runs the risk of failures going under the radar. Desk-based and industry self-assessments simply aren’t up to the task, as we’ve seen with the sewage pollution crisis.”
