Report raps "enforcement-stifling initiatives" leaving Environment Agency "muzzled"

The Environment Agency has, according to a recent report, been subjected to “all manner of deregulatory, enforcement-stifling initiatives, all designed to place economic growth above the environment,” during its 25 years in operation.

The report, by Salmon and Trout Conservation (S&TC), says progress in improving quality of rivers in England has, during the past ten years, “plateaued with no obvious sign of an improvement in the EA’s performance to address that plateauing.” ST&T calls on the government urgently to reform the regime under which the EA operates, to one that is “unencumbered by deregulatory, overly business-friendly, or pure economic growth agendas.”

The report, Doing its job? levels criticism at government and the agency itself and describes the system as “broken.” The government, it says, “has starved [the agency] of funds, with its dwindling staff confined to barracks and shackled to their desks.” Author of the report, the conservation group’s solicitor, Guy Linley-Adams, said the agency has been, “beaten, chained up and muzzled.”

S&TC condemns the agency’s enforcement and prosecution record reporting the number of prosecutions as having “dwindled dramatically over time with the rate of decline increasing rapidly since 2012/2013 and the introduction of civil penalties.” It says that despite admitting that it is “over-reliant on water companies reporting their own pollution and breaches,” the agency defends the process as encouraging companies to admit to beaches before being found out through leniency.

The agency’s monitoring efforts, says S&TC ““have withered on the vine,’ and it claims inspection rate of English farms means that “farms can only expect to be inspected once every 263 years.”