COMMENT Safe to go into the water


Something unusual is happening in the fractious world of bathing water policy, writes Barrie Clarke of Undercurrent


ake love not war. Give peace a chance. The season’s hot beach style may not quite match hippy times; campaigners, ministers and executives are not yet paddling together with flowers in their hair; but after years of aggro there is something in the air that smells like cooperation.


M


The beach, for some reason, brings out the truth in us all. Men happily swap style and taste for board shorts. Women delight in bikinis or ponder alternatives. Legislators take implausibly green positions. Environment agencies criticise polluters but quietly accept the difficulties. Editors rub hands in scatological glee, but claim to uncover dirty deeds. Coastal authorities live and die Blue Flags and visitor numbers. Livestock farmers, faced with the truth about run-off, ask for help or money. Water companies, stoic in trial by media, stick at the improvements while explaining the cost and complexity to anyone who will listen.


The good vibrations stem from the revised Bathing Water Directive. Its passage into EU and UK law was hard-fought. At the end of the 1990s it was accepted that standards would be tightened.


For years the revised version was high-profile in Brussels, passing back and forth between Commission and Parliament with ever-present ‘help’ from environment, business and consumer lobbies. In the end, EU-style common sense prevailed in a new four-category classification (excellent, good, sufficient and poor), a four-year, rolling assessment, and better public information.


Working together


What seems to be happening in the UK now is that the key players have seen that working together the best, if not the only, way to comply and reap the benefits. This is certainly right. Given the history, it will be a bumpy road, but the signs are encouraging; most notable is that everyone is supporting a trial project on the operation of combined sewer overflows.


The impact of CSOs on bathing waters has always been a bugbear (in all senses) despite major improvements. The latest arguments have been about publishing monitoring data. But this summer, in preparation for the revised directive, a trial has been agreed in which companies are testing


“Beach managers, it is hoped, will be able to post better water quality information; beach users will have more to go on in deciding whether to bathe”


the practicality of reporting CSO activity in real time. Beach managers, it is hoped, will be able to post better water quality information; beach users will have more to go on in deciding whether to bathe. Government and Surfers Against Sewage (SAS), the campaign group, are both involved, along with local authorities and the Environment Agency.


It is worth reflecting on this moment of togetherness. For the industry there is real value in collaboration. Some stakeholders have been blindly


30 Water & Wastewater Treatment June 2011


critical despite being aware of legal consents monitored by the agency. More honesty and openness can only help the pace of improvement. The agency also depends on cooperation with business and others. It is a tough regulator but, as its letters and comments in the Sunday papers increasingly show, also willing to expose untruths in the industry.


Disingenuous


I wonder at the participation of SAS in the monitoring trial. Its most extreme positions show it to be a single-issue lobby almost without compare.


It ignores investment and improvements in bathing waters and puts the interests of its small active membership ahead of many more deserving claims on industry investment. To say, as it did in April, that “The shame of turning up on the list of failures is the only driver we have for getting investments by water companies,” reveals its true, disingenuous colours*. Yet the group has genuinely welcomed the trial and is helping make the new data available. We shall see if it really wants to use its profile and skills for the greater good when results are known and comments invited later in the year.


SAS built its recognition by clever use of the media. It has had no more willing instrument than The Sunday Times. For years the newspaper’s campaign for water quality has drawn deserved attention to a problem faced by society.


But its insistence on heaping all blame on water companies and saying that the “shame” it uncovered was why they were forced to clean up, showed a basic lack of seriousness. That said, it has reported the monitoring trial and even seems lately to have dropped the epithet ‘water rats’ of which it was absurdly proud.


If the trial works and helps make the case for more amicable management of coastal catchments, the Age of Aquarius may be dawning sooner than we think. nnn bclarke@undercurrent.org.uk


* ‘The Times’, 28 April


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