The head of the Environment Agency has called for the government to reinstate a £120m grant to help increase surveillance of water companies and cut pollution in rivers. Sir James Bevan, the chief executive of the agency, told MPs that water companies and the farming industry, the two main polluters of rivers, were not doing enough to protect the environment. The limited resources have also affected monitoring of water companies and their discharges of raw sewage into rivers. But Philip Dunne, the chair of the environmental audit committee, pointed out that there were about 15,000 combined sewer overflows – which discharge raw sewage into rivers after heavy rainfall. Bevan said his agency believed that storm overflows were spilling raw sewage more frequently into rivers.

Source: The Guardian June 23, 2021 15:39 UTC