Water White Paper raises more questions than answers

The Angling Trust has warned that the government’s newly published Water White Paper raises more questions than answers about how it intends to fix a water sector that is fundamentally broken.

The Trust highlighted the appalling condition of the UK’s wastewater infrastructure as far back as 2021 in its Broken Water report. That report exposed the scandalous lack of investment in the sewage system and drew attention to the lamentable failures of Ofwat to properly regulate water companies or to facilitate the capital investment required to prevent system failure — failures that have led to ever more frequent sewage pollution incidents with current replacement rates meaning that many of our sewers with a design life of 100 year are expected to last for up to 2,000 years.

The government has presented the White Paper as the outcome of recommendations from the Independent Water Commission. However, the Commission’s remit prevented it from looking at the full range of options for how water companies should be managed and operate, and prevented from looking at all sources of pollution including agriculture – the biggest source of pollution.  This is despite both being a matter of clear public interest and growing public concern.

The government must now set out credible, long-term plans to end pollution from both water companies and agriculture. Alarmingly, reports that water companies could be allowed to avoid or have reduced pollution fines as part of the proposed overhaul raise serious concerns that reform could weaken, rather than strengthen, accountability for environmental harm.

Jamie Cook, CEO of the Angling Trust and Fish Legal, said:
“If this Water White Paper and a forthcoming Water (Reform) Bill, really does amount to the ‘once-in-a-lifetime reform’ ministers claim, then the government must be clear about how this will deliver real change. Reform must strengthen, not weaken, environmental protections and enforcement, and it must put the recovery of our rivers and a clean, healthy water environment at the heart of the system.”

While the Angling Trust recognises the need for wholesale reform of water regulation, something we have been calling for since 2021, simply identifying problems that are already painfully obvious from the condition of our rivers and watercourses is a long way from taking meaningful action to fix them. The proposed abolition of Ofwat and the creation of a new ‘super-regulator’, including a Chief Engineer’s Office and an MOT-style assessment of water company assets, is welcome and must address long-standing technical and regulatory weaknesses — but structural reform alone will not clean up rivers.

The White Paper commits to bringing forward reforms to create regional management structures involving water companies, farmers, local councils and developers to “deliver joined-up local plans to tackle river pollution, water resources and housing growth”. This must include a far broader range of stakeholders, including recreational and conservation interests. Crucially, any regional system-planning approach must be independent of the central water regulator, genuinely reflect local needs and priorities, and adopt a bottom-up model if it is to command the trust of local angling communities.

Beyond the Water White Paper and the proposed transitional arrangements, the government must bring forward the Water (Reform) Bill it has committed to. Taken together, these proposals amount to a major restructuring of how water is managed in England. Any reform of the River Basin Management Planning approach, and any streamlining of regulation, must not serve to weaken the requirements of the Water Framework Directive. Nor must reform allow water companies to escape responsibility for pollution or repeat the failures exposed by the High Court and Court of Appeal judgments in the Pickering cases, both of which found against the government and the Environment Agency.

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