Professor John Robertson OBA
Thanks to Dottie for alerting me to this:
In the Guardian today, the above map, and:
England’s swimming waters five times more likely to be polluted than in EU, research finds Experts warn country is in danger of becoming ‘dirty man of Europe’ as it falls to bottom of bathing water leader board. The campaign group Best for Britain analysed the quality of bathing waters under UK and EU standards and found that across all four nations of the UK, holidaymakers are less likely to enjoy “excellent” quality waters than in the EU.
Their research found that while 64.2% of England’s bathing waters were rated excellent by the Environment Agency (EA) in 2024, 85.4% of the EU’s were excellent according to the European Environment Agency (EEA) in the same year.
England also had more bathing waters rated as “poor” quality than any country in the EU, with 8.4%. Scotland was on 3.4%, Wales on 1.8% and the EU on just 1.5%. Northern Ireland had no bathing water sites rated poor.
There’s a fundamental flaw in the above, with regard to the Scottish data, which Dr Simon Boxall of Southampton University, a leading expert on water quality, explained in the National, in August 2022
Scottish swimmers paddling in and around Scotland’s 18,743km coastline do enjoy cleaner water than those taking a dip down south, said Dr Simon Boxall, based at the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton University.
Looking at the monitored “bathing waters” in Scotland paints a slightly misleading picture of overall water quality in the country, he told The National.
Compared with England, Scotland’s monitored swimming spots are poorer quality: just 38% of the 85 identified locations were recognised as “excellent” according to EU standards, compared with 71% of those in England.
Most of Scotland’s waters are not cause for concern, he said, meaning they did not need the same level of monitoring as takes place in England.
He added: “I would say Scotland does a better job [of monitoring] than England does.”
“If we’re not going into some of the more remote parts, for example north-west Scotland, because there’s no need to, I know full well the beaches up there are phenomenally good,” he added.
“If they are focusing their efforts on areas which are likely to suffer from pollution, then they’ll get more positives – in terms of pollution – than if they are doing the fairly broad-sweep approach of looking at every 10km on the south coast of England.
“So, you are going to find patchiness – there are going to be parts of Scotland, if you look at the Clyde estuary for example where you’ve got a huge population, you’re going to have a higher level of pollution.”
“To be fair to Scotland, they’re actually not monitoring a lot of the areas which don’t need it,” he added.
“In England, they tend to take more of the, ‘we’ll do every, say 70km approach’.
“They’re bound to find more high-quality beaches because there are, particularly in the west coast of England, fewer potential inputs.”
Scotland has 18 743 km of coastline compared to England’s 8 982, only one-tenth of the population and, crucially far fewer areas requiring monitoring.
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There was a further issue of political ‘interference’ and defunding in England for ca 15 years with DEFRA/DoE ‘bending the rules’ – To what extent they’ve been allowed to do their job since Barclay’s time has yet to become clear, but there are hints of bad results being allowed publication in tranches under Labour
No such issues for SEPA, even in Labour’s time – With a long history of targeted sampling where the inspectors knew from experience the worst case was likely to show up, the were left to do their work without fear nor favour..
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Sounds very dodgy in England then…I wonder who was taking backhanders.
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I did write about it latterly as Therese Coffey’s shenanigans so offended me, now apparently Baroness Coffey in the House of Lards immune from personal prosecution over reducing England’s waterways to shite.
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I did encounter difficulty in finding the Wikipedia page I’d cited as example previously, but it was pretty obvious the Ministers appointed were on a bung or two, but not sure if that’s the appropriate term for when Gove was in charge, perhaps a bong – My point was there is no direct comparison to be made – SEPA were our environmental police, Therese Coffey et al were the roundabouts….
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