Sign our petition!
We, the undersigned, call upon the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Secretary of State for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs, to provide enough funding to the Environment Agency, Natural Resource Wales and Natural England to ensure they are able to carry out fully their statutory duties in relations to the monitoring and enforcement of existing regulations designed to protect and improve our rivers, lakes and coastal waters.
We further call on the Environment Agency and Natural Resource Wales to take more action with respect to monitoring pollution in our rivers, lakes and coastal waters and to ensure proper and rigorous enforcement against polluters. These Agencies must reverse the cuts they have inflicted on these service in recent years to give anglers and the wider public confidence that, as regulators of our water environment, they are both capable and willing to fulfil the function that the Government and society require of them.
#AnglersAgainstPollution petition
I'm supporting the Angling Trust's #AnglersAgainstPollution campaign and wish to add my name to the petition.
THE PROBLEMS
- All our water bodies assessed under the Water Framework Directive are failing chemical pollution standards.
- Only 16% of waters assessed under the Water Framework Directive met the “good” standard (the same level as the last assessment in 2016).
- In 2019, combined sewage overflows (CSOs) released raw sewage into our waterways 204,134 times, for a total duration of 1.53 million hours.
- The discharges from 3,400 CSOs are still not monitored.
- Since 2010 the Environment Agency has seen its budget cut by 57%.
- Too often polluters are not held to account and are simply getting away with polluting our waters.
THE SOLUTIONS
- Better monitoring of our rivers, lakes, canals and coastal waters.
- Proper enforcement of existing laws and regulations.
- Stricter penalties against polluters to discourage them from polluting again.
- Review of existing laws to help close loopholes.