The watchdog for England’s rivers and seas is “practically defunct”, says Greenpeace, following an investigation which found it had been late to around three-quarters of the most serious pollution incidents.
The investigation – carried out by Greenpeace’s investigative arm Unearthed – reveals that the Environment Agency has failed to meet its own response time targets for pollution incidents including major spills of sewage, oil and slurry over the past five years.
Unearthed says that the government agency is directed to attend the most serious incidents – known as ‘category 1 or 2’ – within two hours during the working day, or four hours at other times.
However, data obtained under the Freedom of Information act reveals that between January 2017 and October 2023 the regulator failed to attend 74% of category 1 or 2 incidents within the targeted times.
It says that for hundreds of these serious incidents, it took the watchdog more than a day to attend, while for hundreds more it was weeks or even months before an environment officer arrived on the scene.
For around a quarter of the category 1 and 2 incidents analysed by Unearthed (947 out of a total 3,457), the agency did not provide any record of the incident being attended at all.
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In a minority of these cases, an environment officer had recorded a legitimate reason for this non-attendance, such as Covid 19 or health and safety concerns. However, for the overwhelming majority, no specific reason was given for the non-attendance.
Among these, Unearthed identified more than 100 major sewage pollution incidents for which there was no record of any agency attendance.
According to Greenpeace, heavy funding cuts by the Conservative government over the past 14 years have prevented the agency from being able to carry out its job properly, causing the missed response time targets.
“Imagine having a heart attack, someone calling an ambulance, and it not turning up for a week or more. That’s what’s been happening for the past five years with some of the most serious pollution incidents,” said Greenpeace UK’s policy director, Doug Parr.
“The Environment Agency has been so hamstrung by such savage funding cuts by successive Conservative governments that it’s now practically defunct.”
According to the Times, the agency said it receives between 70,000-100,000 incident reports a year and said that while attending in person was important, assessments could increasingly be done remotely.
The agency also disputed the data by the Greenpeace report. For example, it said that in case of some incidents regarding illegal waste sites, an officer might visit later as part of routine enforcement activities — which is not always recorded as “attendance”.
