I think we also need to seriously consider the implications of todayās announcement for the rule of law.
In effect, an important law set down in clear terms by Parliament for vital public policy reasons was roundly ignored for decades, with the government agencies & regulators who were supposed to enforce it effectively legalising rampant criminal conduct.
And make no mistake, the consequences of this failure to uphold the law are not trivial. The deeply serious results include:
- billions of pounds of money that should have been spent on infrastructure effectively being stolen & fraudulently siphoned off.
- our irreplaceable rivers damaged & destroyed in ways that may take decades to recover.
- thousands of people injured (some very seriously) by being made ill as a result of illegal sewage spills.
- millions of people denied their clear legal right to use & enjoy our rivers & seas; businesses bankrupted by sewage spills & whole towns damaged & devalued by it.
We now need those organisations who failed to uphold the law to recognise the serious consequences & how they will do things differently, stop this happening again & repair the damage caused.
Well, there we have it.
Todayās ruling by the Office for Environmental Protection confirms the simple fact that much of the sewage going into our rivers would not be happening if government had simply enforced the law.
The ruling strongly vindicates what environmental campaigners & volunteer river guardians have been saying for years: the law is clear & unambiguous & is not being enforced. However, given the destruction this has caused to the rivers we love, we arenāt going to enjoy saying āwe told you soā.
We now need urgent action: the government must properly fund the Environment Agency so that they can prosecute every.single.illegal.sewage. spill & direct all the fines back into restoring the rivers that have been so badly damaged by the sewage scandal.
If these prosecutions donāt happen, the privatised water companies will simply have no incentive to fix illegal sewage spills. It is also terrible for the rule of law to have flagrant criminal offences occurring in broad daylight that result in zero action or enforcement.