Truss, who was in charge at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) between 2014 and 2016, oversaw the “efficiency” plans set out in the 2015 spending review to cut Environment Agency funding by £235 million. This included cutting £24m from a government grant to protect the environment, including monitoring water companies to prevent the discharge of raw sewage, between 2014-15 and 2016-17, according to the National Audit Office. It represents almost a quarter of the cut in funding from this sector between 2010, when the grant was £120m, and 2020, when it had fallen to £40m. Labour’s analysis of official figures shows that since 2016 the discharge of raw sewage in England and Wales has more than doubled, from 14.7 spill incidents per overflow to 29.3 in 2021. Greenpeace said the figures showed the Trust had “ sewage in her hands”. The Environment Agency has called on the government to reverse the cuts, but campaigners want the next prime minister to go further and also give the body the power to properly monitor water companies about sewage, rather than allowing them to self-report rejections. It follows the finding that 24% of sewage overflow pipes in popular seaside resorts in England and Wales have screens that are faulty or have no screens at all, meaning people could be swimming in human waste this summer without realizing it. they understand. Last year, the head of the Environment Agency, James Bevan, called on the government to restore funding, saying that given the length of the country’s river systems, having “only a few hundred people to oversee them is a very big ask”. He told MPs: “It has had an impact on our ability to monitor, enforce the rules and help improve the environment where we think it’s needed. Frankly, I would like to see this grant reinstated. I’d like to get back to where we were 10 years ago and I think it would make a huge difference.” In response to the findings, shadow environment secretary Jim McMahon said: “The country is facing a water crisis. Our water infrastructure is at bursting point with billions of liters of water being wasted every day and raw sewage being thrown into our waters. “The fact that Liz Truss was the one to cut EA so severely not only demonstrates a lack of foresight but also a lack of attention to detail in recognizing the need to adapt to the severe flooding that had just happened on her watch. “ Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Environment Agency employees said that after the Truss cuts, staff shifted from environmental monitoring to flood protection and the number of samples taken from rivers dropped dramatically. Vaughan Lewis, a senior adviser at the agency, told the Guardian: “They have plummeted to the point where it was impossible for the Environment Agency to know what was going on. They had no control or monitoring capability that was meaningful. They handed over monitoring control to water companies, who ended up being able to mark their own work. They take their own samples and assess compliance. “We’ve seen it doesn’t work – look at what happened to Southern Water, who didn’t declare the pollution incidents and ended up being fined by the EA when they were discovered. There are suspicions that this may be happening at all levels. It has been left to the citizen scientists who monitor and fill in the blanks.” Lewis added: “A lot of this would have happened under Liz Truss. he was there when some of these cuts were made. She was a poor minister and the Environment Agency has been cut to the bone and cannot monitor or regulate effectively.” As environment secretary, Truss defended the cuts saying “there are ways we can make savings as a department”, citing better use of technology and collaboration between agencies. He is already facing questions about why he was recorded as absent from a vote on a Labor amendment in the House of Commons aimed at imposing legal obligations on water companies to stop polluting England’s waterways during heavy rainfall. Greenpeace UK Chief Scientist Dr Doug Parr said: “A decade of budget cuts and government deregulation has left the Environment Agency, almost literally, in the creek without a paddle. The growing tsunami of sewage unleashed on Britain’s waterways is shocking evidence of how undermining our regulators leads to contempt for nature and those meant to protect it. “That our potential future Prime Minister has been a driving force behind cuts to the money used to protect our rivers, thereby helping to cause this environmental disaster, does not bode well for the UK’s protection of the natural world. Liz Truss has sewage on her hands.” Hugo Tagholm, chief executive of Surfers Against Sewage, said: “Self-policing has clearly failed for the water industry, the culture of self-reporting has clearly failed, millions of hours of sewage pollution enter our water resources every year, it’s a failed model.” . Martin Salter, from the Angling Trust, said: “The consequences of these ill-advised cuts to the Environment Agency’s pollution monitoring capabilities are now there for all to see and smell, with raw sewage flowing into our rivers and dead fish and other wild animals to be flushed. in the banks with depressing regularity. “The move away from tighter regulation in favor of allowing water companies to report their own failures has created a polluter statute, as evidenced by the recent prosecution of Southern Water for willfully falsifying its discharge data.” The Environment Agency has long bemoaned a lack of funding and power, backed by a lack of ambition from ministers to tackle waste. In 2020 he said he recognized that it “opens up a huge gap between the results we want to achieve and our ability to achieve them” and estimated that “at the current rate of progress” it would take more than 200 years to reach the government’s target of at least 75% of the waters to be close to their natural state.
