Environment Agency late to three-quarters of the worst pollution incidents

The Environment Agency (EA) has missed its own response time targets for around three in every four of England’s worst pollution incidents, an Unearthed investigation has found. 

Over the previous five years, England’s environmental regulator has failed to attend thousands of serious pollution events within targeted response times – including major spills of oil, slurry and sewage.

Data obtained under freedom of information (FOI) laws shows that between the start of 2017 and the autumn of 2023, the EA arrived late to 74% of “category 1 or 2” pollution incidents. These classifications are only given to incidents that have had “major” or “significant” effects on people, property or the environment.

For around a quarter of all category 1 or 2 incidents logged by the EA in those years, the agency was unable to provide any record of its officers attending at all.

If no one attends, no evidence can be collected so the water company cannot be prosecuted. They get off scot-free.

– Helen Nightingale, former environment officer

Experts and campaigners said that arriving late, or not at all, to major incidents meant the EA was missing opportunities to reduce harm to the environment – and to gather evidence for criminal prosecutions.

“These appalling findings essentially bear witness to a complete collapse in environmental protection in this country,” said Charles Watson, chair of River Action, a group that campaigns against river pollution. “The very basis of any form of law enforcement is that suspected crimes must be immediately and thoroughly investigated.” 

He added that the next UK government would need to make the “restructuring and re-funding of our failed environmental regulators” an immediate priority.

“After years of austerity, it is abundantly clear that the law enforcement capabilities of the Environment Agency have simply been hollowed out, leaving the organisation woefully under-resourced and impotent whilst polluters are at liberty to repeatedly break the law to enhance their profits,” Watson told Unearthed.

The EA was unable to provide a statement for this piece, due to restrictions on public bodies during the election campaign. However, in a statement issued last year, the agency said it assessed and recorded “every incident report we receive – between 70,000 and 100,000 a year”. It responded “to every incident” and attended those where there is a “significant risk” to people or the environment, it added.

In documents provided to Unearthed at an earlier stage in this investigation, the EA said there were a number of reasons it might not immediately attend a major incident. These included “health and safety concerns” and situations where the incident was initially assessed as being less serious, but was later upgraded to category 1 or 2.

‘You get the environment you pay for’

In recent years, the EA has adopted a policy of not routinely investigating reports of apparently lower-impact pollution – those incidents it classifies as “category 3 or 4”. 

In 2021, amid an escalating public outcry over UK water pollution, the EA’s management told staff that funding restrictions meant the agency would “reduce our response” to “unfunded low- and no-impact environmental incidents”. The agency’s leadership team said it had told the government that “you get the environment you pay for”, a leaked document showed. 

However, the agency remains committed to attending all category 1 or 2 incidents – the most serious pollution events – where it is “appropriate and safe to do so”.

More than that, it expects its officers to get to them quickly. Unearthed has confirmed from multiple sources that environment officers are directed to attend category 1 or 2 incidents within two hours during the working day, or four hours at other times.

To test how the agency is performing against this standard, Unearthed filed freedom of information requests for the EA’s response times. These covered the 3,457 confirmed category 1 or 2 incidents it recorded between January 2017 and mid-October 2023. 

The data shows that the agency missed its own response time targets in 2,550 of those cases – or 74% of the time.

For hundreds of those serious incidents it took the EA 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 947 incidents – 27% of the total – the agency was unable to provide any record of its officers attending the site at all.

Environment officers are required to record a reason any time they do not attend a major or significant incident, and Unearthed also requested those reasons under FOI rules.

For a small minority of these cases, the EA provided a substantive explanation for non-attendance, such as health and safety concerns or Covid-19 restrictions. But in 706 cases – three-quarters of the total – the reason was recorded as “not specified”.

The EA insists that having no record of attendance on its system does not mean an incident was never attended. 

“Attendance not being recorded does not mean that the site was not visited at some stage,” it told Unearthed in documents provided during an earlier stage of this investigation.

“It would be impractical to review the details for all incidents to ascertain if there was actual attendance to site.”

The EA added there were a number of reasons a category 1 or 2 incident might not be attended immediately.

These included situations where “we are able to deliver an environmental outcome by responding without attendance”. 

“An example would be our response to a waste fire, where we provide advice and guidance remotely to the emergency services at the scene,” the statement added. “This enables a reduction in harm to the environment, but it is not necessary for us to attend the incident in person.”

‘There’s no excuse’

But former EA staff told Unearthed it was important for environment officers to arrive quickly at the site of significant incidents. 

“More harm will occur because the Environment Agency doesn’t turn up on time,” former EA officer Jo Bradley told Unearthed. 

“There are things you can do to reduce the harm on the environment if you arrive on time,” said Bradley, who is now operations director for anti-pollution charity Stormwater Shepherds. “By arriving late, those opportunities are gone.” 

For water pollution incidents, this might mean helping to stop the discharge, aerating the river, carrying out a fish rescue, or laying out oil-absorbent booms to control an oil spill, she explained.

The agency would also know who was using the water downstream – such as farmers with livestock drinking from the river – and be able to warn them. 

She added that to successfully prosecute a polluter, it was essential to arrive in time to gather samples of the pollution entering the watercourse.

Helen Nightingale, a former environment officer who worked at the EA for more than three decades, agreed. 

In the case of sewage pollution incidents, she said, “if no one attends, no evidence can be collected so the water company cannot be prosecuted”. 

“They get off scot-free,” she told Unearthed. “All category 1 or 2 incidents should be attended – there’s no excuse.”

‘Disappointingly normal’

Unearthed identified over 100 sewage-related category 1 and 2 pollution incidents where there was no record that an environment officer ever attended the event.

Among these was an episode in Kent in the summer of 2021, when the utility company Southern Water released sewage into the sea between Whitstable and Herne Bay following heavy rainfall.

The same downpour saw homes and businesses in Herne Bay flooded, after storm drains operated by the company “struggled to cope”, ITV reported at the time. Swimmers were told to keep out of the sea. Canterbury City Council described the sewage release as “disappointingly normal”, coming as it did just weeks after the beaches were reopened following a previous incident.

“While we continue to lobby Southern Water and the EA,” a council spokesperson told reporters, “it is the EA that has the power to take action against Southern Water.”

An EA source told Unearthed that this category 2 incident remained under investigation, and they were unable to comment further.

Unearthed approached Southern Water, but the company was unable to respond by time of publication.

Struggling to breathe

The EA classifies the most severe incidents it deals with as category 1. In its ranking system, these are the ones that cause “major, serious, persistent and/or extensive impact or effect on the environment, people and/or property”. 

Out of the 3,457 serious incidents Unearthed analysed, 384 were ultimately ranked as category 1. Unearthed’s analysis found that environment officers turned up late, or not at all, to 255 of these incidents – or 66%.

Among these was a suspected water pollution incident in an Essex seaside town, which reportedly left large numbers of beachgoers “coughing and struggling to breathe”.

The Telegraph reported that hundreds of families were enjoying the sun in Frinton in August 2019 when “a large number of people” on the beach “began to have trouble breathing”. 

Around 150 people fell ill during the incident, according to the BBC, and 14 people were treated at Colchester Hospital. 

Data obtained by Unearthed shows that the EA originally estimated the incident to be category 2 – which means it should have been attended within four hours – but its officers did not arrive on the scene until the following day, nearly 19 hours after it was first reported. The agency carried out tests on the water but was unable to identify the cause of the incident. It later upgraded the incident to category 1.

In another case, the EA recorded no attendance at an oil spill off the Fylde coast, near Blackpool, which required a clean-up operation along a 12-mile stretch of coastline, and forced officials to close access to the sea and shellfish beds for days. 

A local ferry service was also suspended for days, while council workers and specialists cleared tonnes of oil-contaminated waste from the coastline. 

The Italian oil company Eni accepted responsibility for the spill, which came from a storage tanker anchored in Liverpool Bay. Data obtained by Unearthed shows no record of an environment officer attending the incident, and no reason specified for the non-attendance. 

An EA source said the incident in Essex was predominantly a “public health incident” and there was no evidence at “any stage” that it was a “water quality or pollution issue”. 

They added that the agency did attend the site within 24 hours to conduct “additional monitoring”, as the fire service and local council also conducted testing. 

Despite this, Unearthed analysis of EA data shows that the Essex incident was recorded in the agency’s database as a category 1 water pollution incident.

The EA source told Unearthed that the Maritime and Coastguard Agency had led the immediate response to the Fylde coast oil spill, with the Offshore Petroleum Regulator for Environment and Decommissioning investigating the circumstances of the incident. 

They added that the EA had worked with these agencies to ensure the right guidance was given to reduce the environmental impact of the spill.