Watchdog slates Northern Ireland's government over water quality regime

Northern Ireland's government came under fire this week from the UK’s national environmental watchdog for failure to publish an up-to-date river basin management plan (RBMP).

The latest plan, which is key to improving water quality across the region’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters, was due by December 2021 but has not yet been finalised. The Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) has just published a critical report on the implementation of the required water quality legislation, which is the responsibility of Northern Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) and the Northern Ireland Environment Agency.

OEP chief executive, Natalie Prosser, said its report painted “a very worrying picture”. She added: “Unfortunately, we don’t have far to go to see the serious consequences when water quality is neglected, as the ongoing crisis at Lough Neagh shows”. The lough is the UK’s largest freshwater lake, the source of half the region’s drinking water and is currently plagued by toxic algal blooms.

She went on: “Our report identifies the urgent need for the department to publish the latest river basin plan and put it into action”.

The watchdog wants the draft RBMP to be strengthened with specific environmental objectives for all individual water bodies, “with a tangible and detailed programme of measures to meet these objectives in practice and the scale of funding needed to do so”.

According to the latest data, some metrics are getting worse rather than better with just 31% of surface water bodies in Northern Ireland in a good ecological condition, and the region likely to miss its target of 70% of water bodies achieving “good status” by 2027.

Environment minister, Andrew Muir, insisted he took the report’s findings “extremely seriously”. He added: “We  recognise that there is much more work to do. Lough Neagh has been a wake-up call for water quality issues and this report is a timely reminder of the work required” he said.