Violation Tracker UK adds water breaches to its corporate infringement database
- by Karma Loveday
- Nov 12, 2023
- 1 min read
Breaches of water regulation are now being tracked by a service which aggregates data on corporate regulatory infringements.
Violation Tracker UK, a free resource, has pooled data from economic, environmental and quality regulators from England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. In a blog on the Wildlife and Countryside Link site, outreach coordinator, Dr Maia Kirby, said collectively these agencies account for more than 7,000 entries in the Violation Tracker UK database, with around 1,100 enforcement actions issued to water companies, with total fines of around £522m.
Kirby continued: “Last year we analysed data on fines issued by the Environment Agency and found that enforcement action was down six-fold over the last decade. Despite this their regulation of the water industry results in more cases and fines than most UK regulation; water companies operating in England have received over 800 enforcement actions since 2010.
“In Wales, Natural Resources Wales has issued hundreds of warnings to Dwr Cymru (Welsh Water) but only a couple of fines in the past few years. Northern Ireland Water Limited have been fined at least 27 times by the Northern Ireland Environment Agency with total penalties of £319,250 since 2012 and Scottish Water have been fined at least three times by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency since 2019.”
She added: “The data shows that all major UK water companies have engaged in illegal pollution. Recidivism is common, suggesting that fines are not acting as deterrents. The question remains then that given regulations are broken repeatedly over many years by all major UK water companies, what needs to change to improve the state of our waterways?”
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