Appalling response from Thames Water

FORQ Facebook group readers will no doubt remember that the pupil eco-council at Barley & Barkway CofE VA First Schools recently wrote a letter to Thames Water, raising their concern over the amount of sewage pollution that was entering our local chalk streams.

This was a brilliant initiative and illustrates the concern that many of us share – by the time they reach adulthood, what will be left of these iconic, almost uniquely English riverine environments?

This week they received a response – in FORQ’s opinion, an absolutely disgraceful, patronising, inappropriate and in some parts inaccurate reply eco council’s beautiful and considerate letter.

They are as upset with this appalling response as we are. They have already written to MP Sir Oliver Heald to ask that he visit the school and explain how Thames can do this.

This letter can be taken apart paragraph by paragraph, but the two most disingenuous parts are to blame heavy rain, when the law says only in exceptional circumstances (which has been defined as NOT meaning heavy rain, snow melt etc.) are overspills permitted. they know this (it went to the EU courts), Defra know it, the EA know and the government knows it. Secondly they seem to proudly point to investment miles away, with no mention of remedy in the greater Lea Catchment. Shame on them and the organisations and government bodies that facilitate this criminality.

What is all the more galling it is a standard cut and paste response that has been sent out to everyone that writes to them – be they customers, campaigners, responders to Joe Lycett’s excellent TV programme and Turdcast campaign, and now young children.

The children of Barley & Barkway have our sincere thanks for writing this letter. We have assured them that despite the setback, their actions are part of a wider national campaign that WILL bring about change, eventually. We also look forward to seeing and hearing that Sir Oliver Heald is able to visit the school and what he has to say on the matter.

Eco council pupils delivering their letter to the Post Office

Barley & Barkway eco-heroes and the brilliant Mrs Gould presenting me with a wonderful poster –
We stand together for our chalkstreams

After 4 months, the EA replies!

At the beginning of October, FORQ wrote to the Environment Agency, seeking to understand;
♦︎ Why the Rib and Quin catchment is so disproportionately abstracted by Affinity Water.
♦︎ Why so much raw sewage is released into our catchment by Thames Water.
♦︎ Why the EA is objecting to further development in Cambridgeshire, but not in Hertfordshire.
We wrote again last month, enquiring as to why we hadn’t received a reply.

The full text of the letter is reproduced below.

As both a concerned resident of North East Hertfordshire and as chair of Friends of the Rib & Quin – a community group founded specifically to raise awareness and concerns for the future of our local chalk streams, I wonder if you can help me.

Over recent years we have investigated much of the publicly available data relating to our catchment, much of it generated or curated by the EA, which highlight a number of areas of concern that I trust areas of particular focus as Water Management Plans are developed.

We have found that abstraction is disproportionate across Hertfordshire, both in terms of catchment and population size. Herts Chalkstreams are abstracted at levels far in excess of the 10% recommended as the maximum percentage of annual recharge in the Chalkstream Recovery Plan. In our particular catchment’s case, our abstraction levels are particularly disproportionate to our population.

We have found that raw sewage spill pollution events in East Hertfordshire represent over 90% of Hertfordshire storm overflow events, with over 50% in Sir Oliver Heald’s constituency alone. We’ve also found that phosphate from Buntingford STW, as an example, has been releasing excessive levels of phosphate for over 30 years, with still no remedy in place.

With these obvious deficiencies in infrastructure and resource to support the existing population of East Hertfordshire, we wonder why the Environment Agency has recommended against further development in Cambridgeshire and yet has made no similar objections to developments in East Hertfordshire at Buntingford, Barkway and Ware.

Your help in understanding these issues, decisions and discrepancies would be of great interest to our members. I greatly appreciate your help in reaching that understanding.

Today, we received the following, somewhat selective and incomplete reply:

Thank you for your email regarding water resources, biodiversity, and development in East Hertfordshire. I sincerely apologise for the delay in our response.

Water is a precious resource that is under pressure across the country. These pressures are being felt most acutely in and around Cambridge and East Anglia, with increasing abstraction posing a real risk to chalk streams, river, and wetland habitats. As you are aware, we objected to some planning applications in the Greater Cambridge Area on the basis that the water supply for these developments will pose a significant risk to our local water environment. Our main concerns in this instance related to Cambridge Water Company’s draft water resources management plan. We are continuing to liaise with the Greater Cambridge Partnership planning authority and Cambridge Water Company to find a solution for people and the environment. 

We publish abstraction licensing strategies (ALS) which set out the water availability picture. The Upper Lee Abstraction Licensing Strategy is relevant for the Rib and Quin catchments. This strategy indicates that no new water supply options are available. This situation is replicated in the neighbouring Colne ALS. As a result, any water to support growth needs to be found from within existing resources and improved efficiencies, or from outside of these catchments. To meet our environmental duties, we have been seeking various reductions to existing water company abstraction sources in these areas. There are agreed licence reductions already in place in the Upper Lee and Colne ALS areas, with further changes to be implemented in the Upper Lee by December 2025.

As part of our duty to ensure compliance with the Water Framework Directive (WFD) Regulations, we require water companies to cap their abstraction licences in water bodies where using unutilised headroom could cause a deterioration. Unutilised headroom is the difference in volume of water which companies have been abstracting, compared to what they are licensed to abstract. However, the specific method will vary depending on the type of legal permissions held by the relevant water companies or licence holder. This influences the time frames by which agreed changes need to be put in place and/or how the legislation can be applied in those circumstances. The situation in East Anglia is different to that in Hertfordshire and North London, as Cambridge Water Company must deliver some of these caps by 2024, with additional ones due by 2030. Affinity Water’s situation is different due to the nature of their abstraction licences. In their Water Resource Management Plan (WRMP) 19, they had to investigate which water bodies were at risk of deterioration. The implementation of licence caps to prevent deterioration is detailed within their draft WRMP 24 and due by December 2030. We have sought assurance from Affinity that they can still supply growth, whilst delivering these licence caps. 

Buntingford Sewage Treatment Works (STW) is currently being upgraded as part of the Water Industry National Environment Programme (WINEP). The upgrades at Buntingford STW are to increase flow to full treatment, flow monitoring, and add event duration monitors (EDM). This work should be completed by the summer. Storm overflows are a necessary part of the current sewage system, they act as relief valves which prevent the system from overloading during high rainfall events. Every storm overflow is now fitted with EDM, providing accurate information about where and when storm overflow discharges are happening. This is a significant improvement from 2001 when just 7% of storm overflows had monitors fitted. Monitoring storm overflows allows for greater transparency of where there are issues, this allow us to better tackle illegal discharges from storm overflows, investigate those who breach their permitting conditions, and supports the government’s Plan for Water.

In September 2023, as part of the WINEP programme, a 0.25mg/l phosphorus limit was added to the permit conditions at Buntingford STW. This limit is assessed over a rolling 12 month mean. This brings Buntingford STW’s discharge in line with the industry’s technically achievable limit of phosphorus removal from sewage treatment works.  Ensuring clean and plentiful water for future generations is one of our key priorities. We are progressing our work to transform regulation of the water industry and have just launched a public consultation to charges applied to water quality permits, which will transform how we regulate the water industry.

I hope that the above is useful in highlighting some of the planned interventions to help maintain water resilience at a local and strategic level. We continue to build our evidence base to inform our position and responses.

One small success then – after over 30 years of phosphate pollution, Buntingford STW will now apparently have a phosphate stripper installed as part of its upgrade. However, it is our belief that these are inadequate answers to reasonable questions. Furthermore it indicates how the Environment Agency is failing to protect our chalkstreams generally and in the Upper Lea and Rib & Quin Catchments specifically. We can also perhaps conclude that the plight of our chalk streams is entirely in the hands of the water companies, who are quite happy to play off one catchment against another, whilst neutering certain local eNGOs with greenwashing funding.

Extract from HMWT Report & Accounts 2023

What a sorry mess we are in.

As a side note, when we chased a response to our original letter last month, we copied in local councillors and Sir Oliver Heald, to see if it made a difference. Apparently it did – we received a reply. However Sir Oliver also replied saying he had sent our letter to senior Environment Agency officials. It is unclear whether we will receive a separate response from them.

Counting the Birds

Benchmarking the wildlife of our catchment, both in and out of our rivers, is a core element of FORQ’s objectives. Through our iNaturalist recording project, which anyone with the iNaturalist app on their smartphone can participate in, we have to date recorded 846 species in the catchment with the help of 92 spotters. However only 69 of the species recorded are birds, which rather under-represents the variety of birds which live in or visit the catchment.

With this in mind it was with great interest that I followed the progress of the Braughing Birding Group in 2023 as they compiled a list through the year of all the birds seen in the Parish of Braughing. Their final total of 101 species represented a sterling effort by the group, with some terrific birds spotted. The full Braughing 2023 species list is shown below.

BRAUGHING BIRDS 2023
BIRDS OF PREY Red Kite, Marsh Harrier, Hen Harrier, Sparrowhawk, Buzzard, Kestrel, Peregrine Falcon, Barn Owl, Tawny Owl, Short-eared Owl
THRUSHES Blackbird, Song Thrush, Mistle Thrush, Fieldfare, Redwing, Ring Ouzel
WARBLERS Reed Warbler, Garden Warbler, Whitethroat, Lesser Whitethroat, Blackcap, Willow Warbler, Chiffchaff, Yellow-browed Warbler
FINCHES Chaffinch, Brambling, Siskin, Greenfinch, Goldfinch, Bullfinch, Linnet, Lesser Redpoll
BUNTINGS Corn Bunting, Reed Bunting, Yellowhammer
TITS Great Tit, Blue Tit, Coal Tit, Marsh Tit, Long-tailed Tit
CORVID Raven, Carrion Crow, Jackdaw, Rook, Jay, Magpie
DOVES: Woodpigeon, Collared Dove, Feral Pigeon, Stock Dove
HIRUNDINES: Barn Swallow, House Martin, Swift
WAGTAILS: Pied Wagtail, GreyWagtail, Yellow Wagtail
GAME BIRDS Grey Partridge, Red-legged Partridge, Pheasant, Woodcock
GULLS Herring Gull, Commin Gull, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Black-headed Gull
OTHERS Spotted Flycatcher, Wren, Robin, Dunnock, House Sparrow, Whinchat, Stonechat, Nuthatch, Treecreeper, Starling, Meadow Pipit, Green Woodpecker, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Ring-necked Parakeet, Skylark, Common Redstart, Northern Wheatear, Cuckoo, Goldcrest

Birdwatchers within the Standon Parish were keen to get involved and compile a list of species for their Parish too, and have in 2024 taken up the challenge. Toby Spencer, one of our riverfly monitors is compiling the list and has shared the results for January – an impressive first month total of 73 bird species.

Standon Parish Bird List for January 2024
Little Grebe, Cormorant, Little Egret, Grey Heron, Mute Swan, Greylag Goose, Canada Goose, Barnacle Goose
Mandarin, Teal, Mallard
Red Kite, Hen Harrier, Sparrowhawk, Buzzard, Kestrel
Red-legged Partridge, Grey Partridge, Pheasant
Moorhen, Coot
Golden Plover, Snipe, Woodcock
Black-headed Gull, Common Gull, Herring Gull, Great Black-backed Gull
Feral Pigeon, Stock Dove, Woodpigeon, Collared Dove
Ring-necked Parakeet
Barn Owl, Tawny Owl
Kingfisher
Green Woodpecker, Great Spotted Woodpecker
Skylark, Meadow Pipit, Grey Wagtail, Pied Wagtail, Wren, Dunnock, Robin, Stonechat, Blackbird, Fieldfare, Song Thrush, Redwing, Mistle Thrush, Goldcrest, Long-tailed Tit, Coal Tit, Blue Tit, Great Tit, Nuthatch, Treecreeper,
Jay, Magpie, Jackdaw, Rook, Carrion Crow,Raven
Starling,House Sparrow
Chaffinch, Greenfinch, Goldfinch
Siskin, Linnet, Yellowhammer, Reed Bunting

FORQ will post regular monthly updates on the species count throughout the year and will be intrigued to see how the two parishes compare, being of slightly different geography.

You can also follow the adventures of the Braughing Birding Group on Facebook here.