The Pollution of the River Wye – A Scandalous Tale

The pollution of the River Wye, the same Wye that inspired the works of Turner and the writings of Gilpin – how has it come to this?

Let’s start by playing a game of word association. I’ll go first. Water Companies – Scandalous.

Now can you imagine watching one of those mindless ITV daytime quiz shows. The game is basically the same, but this time to win you have to match the top 10 responses made by a representative sample of the Great British public. I think the lucky contestant wouldn’t be too far away from winning the big prize if they came up with these answers.

Scandalous, Greedy, Shameful, Immoral, Dishonest, Unscrupulous, S–t, Filth, Bankrupt and to finish off a two word answer – National Embarrassment.

With a sense of BBC like balance I tried to come up with some positive associations, but could only bring to mind an extended list of pejorative adjectives.

I fear that with the horrendous conflicting pressures the world and our government are facing, the protection of our environment is not just slipping down the list of of political priorities but is currently plummeting to the bottom.

I have genuine sympathy for Starmer, but wouldn’t it be stunningly revolutionary, and in this case universally popular, if for just once a politician did what was right and faced down special interests and the markets. Of course the right thing in this case is to bring the industry back into public ownership. I don’t think there is even an ongoing political ideological debate on this one.

So what’s triggered this rant?

Well, I’ve just come home from a three hour session organised by Cardiff University, the subject being the state of our watercourses, specifically in this case the River Wye.

They showed  a beautifully emotive film of interviews with people affected by the atrocities perpetrated on the once pristine Wye. The emotions on display ranged from heart rending sadness at the river’s plight, through to phosphorous anger against the perpetrators of this obscenity visited on their beloved jewel of a river.

The audience comprised a myriad of local groups all doing their bit, well intentioned, motivated, caring, engaged.  I don’t want to be dismissive of these worthy efforts, that would be wrong and condescending, as they have made a difference in bringing the plight of the Wye and other rivers to national attention.

I wanted to be uplifted by this engagement, filled with hope, so why were my overarching emotions helplessness and futility? Why am I so frustrated?

I’ve given this a lot of thought and have come to the conclusion that it’s because everything I see being done is bottom up, organic and disproportionately ineffective for all the passion and effort being expended.

There are elephants in the room which we can see but are all flitting around. We are like fleas nipping away at the pachyderm’s impenetrable hide, irritating but harmless. We fleas need to be shooed to one side so that a blunderbuss can be brought to bear to blast the elephants squarely between the eyes.

So let’s consider the elephants.

Elephant Number 1 – The Water Companies.

THEY KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING, AND KEEP LETTING THEM GET AWAY WITH IT!!!

Firstly let me declare my pre-retirement past.  I was a Director of a stock market quoted automotive supplier working in an environment of raw unbounded capitalism, red in tooth and claw. So let’s get some capitalist facts straight about our Water Companies.

Free market rule number one – you cannot privatise a monopoly and expect consumers to gain any form of free market benefit.

The management of these companies are beyond all normal levels of market restraint.  They break the law with impunity (levied fines don’t affect Executive Pay), dissatisfied customers cannot move their business, the general population’s revulsion with their business practices has no impact on their sales or pricing. To add insult to injury, as these companies are 90% foreign owned, the abhorrence that the public feels towards them is easily ridden out in the major shareholder offices in Abu Dhabi, Qatar, USA and the like.

Free market rule number two – the market has rules with which companies in that market must comply. Every industry has significant regulatory demands – if you can’t afford to meet these demands you go bust.

The water companies are not meeting their regulatory and statutory commitments, they are constantly breaking the law and claim they cannot meet the cost of meeting these legal requirements. If this is true, they are declaring that they have a business model which is fundamentally unprofitable. They do not have sufficient funds to meet the demands of the market. These companies are bankrupt and therefore worthless. 

How can they be paying dividends when they are declaring profits made by breaking the law?  Let me stress this point, if they were made to comply with the law they would be bankrupt.

Free market rule number three – the shareholders invest at their own risk. Shareholders bought these shares with full knowledge of the financial facts and regulatory failings of these companies.  They made a bad investment and should lose their money – they gambled on governments not enforcing the law. The same can be said to the debt providers, they’ve knowingly lent money to financially non viable companies in the belief that in the last resort the government would bail these companies out.

Elephant Number 2 – Avara.

THEY KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING, AND WE KEEP LETTING THEM GET AWAY WITH IT!!!

And they do know – their parent company Cargill have been convicted in the US courts for exactly the same form of pollution they inflicted on the Illinois River.

The devastation of the Wye was the story that propelled the state of our rivers up the news agenda. Roughly speaking 70% of the river’s problems can be put down to phosphate and nitrogen washing into the river as result of chicken waste being excessively, and often illegally, spread on the catchments’ fields.

These are not truly independent chicken farmers, we need to understand the controlling hand of Avara in their farming practices.

We know these intensive poultry units are frequently breaking the law in terms of farm wash off. So, how many convictions have there been? Go on – I’ll let you have an approximate guess. The exact answer is easy to remember – it’s ZERO!!!

Once again we are back to a lack of enforcement of existing statutes. There should be a simple maxim – the polluter pays – in this case the not so invisible hand behind these units – that of Avara.

I am a lover of elephants, but these twin bulls are marauding through our environment, trashing and laying waste to anything that may reduce their ill gotten profits.

To return to my blunderbuss analogy, I want to take it off the wall and load it with three balls of lead shot:

Ball 1 – Enforcement – let’s apply the letter of law and enforce these existing conditions on the Water Companies and other polluting companies. Is it too much to ask that the regulator does its job! If that doesn’t work then further regulation may be necessary.

Ball 2 – Public Ownership – if Ball 1 hitting its target brings a collapse of the Water Companies, so be it – privatise at market value, i.e. zilch.  I fully understand that major investment is necessary, but nobody can borrow cheaper than government, and this is investment for infrastructure – it’s what governments should borrow for.

Ball 3 – Accountability – the Directors of these polluting companies are not accountable. If they break the law, so what? Their companies may on occasion pay a fine, which is much less than the additional profits generated from their law breaking activities. Regulations need to be in place so that Directors become personally criminally liable for their companies’ illegal activities.

So, my blunderbuss is loaded, primed and cocked – so who is to pull the trigger?

Of course it should be the government, but Labour has already shown itself to be a disappointment – once again a government sees these companies as too big to be allowed to fail. I think we’ve heard that one before!

Back to reality – so what have we got? A makings of an army drawn from the ranks of the brave individuals making a stand, the likes of the indomitable Angela Jones (the Wild woman of the Wye), Feargal Sharkey, Paul Whitehouse, Robert Macfarlane, and the hundreds of citizen scientists weekly sampling the Wye. Then there are the platoons of the Rivers Trust, River Action, Friends of the River Wye and the Marine Conservation Society. 

Tragically this is a fragmented rag tag of an army. It seems to me we need some overarching structure to bring everybody together, so that we have one integrated organisation taking the fight to the polluting companies and to the governments – both central and devolved.

Make no mistake, we are fighting big money, with big influence funding grubby lobbyists and apologists for this indefensible destruction of our environment. To go into battle we need co-ordination, influence and money. We need to have the clout to bring major court action and ongoing campaigning. We need someone with the vision to bring us all together – please, someone step forward.

In the meantime, I will do my bit, however small. On returning home, I submitted my application to volunteer as a citizen scientist. I will join my rag tag army, and wait and pray for a significant leader of our movement to emerge. When they do, I will gladly go into battle with them.