Pollution in Rivers and Regulation of Private Water Companies

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 29th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Addington, whose practical examples are extremely useful in this debate. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville on explaining so vividly why untreated sewage going into our rivers is an issue.

I will turn to something slightly different—treated sewage, or sewage sludge—and explain why it is still a problem for our rivers and land. Sewage sludge is recycled to land, where it can act as a useful fertiliser containing nitrogen, phosphorus and organic matter. The regulation governing this dates from water privatisation in 1989 and, appropriately, its acronym is SUAR, pronounced “sewer”—Sludge (Use in Agriculture) Regulations. Those regulations are over 30 years old, and were devised simply to deal with the human faeces element of sewage. But, in the 30 years since, the water companies have been selling more and more of the services to industry, so the industrial effluent element of the sludge has increased, as have the variety and toxicity of the pathogens, chemicals and heavy metals in the resulting sludge.

That sludge is spread on to farmland and, in theory, it should stay there, drilled into the grasslands that feed our livestock. Whether you think that toxic cocktail is a good thing in the grasslands that feed our livestock is a different issue, one I will not talk about today. But what happens as the ground becomes waterlogged, like it has been for these last few months? Farmers are given guidance to avoid run-off. The guidance says they have a responsibility to make sure that liquid sludge does not run off into roads, adjacent land, rivers or waterways. If it rains heavily enough to cause run-off, the spreading must stop. The guidance says that spreading must not take place on

“frozen, waterlogged or very dry ground”.

But, with climate change, the ground is nearly always either waterlogged or very dry.

The Environment Agency was very concerned about this growing issue of toxic chemicals, so it commissioned some consultants in the spring of 2015 to undertake a study of all this. They worked with about 50 farms and undertook a much wider paper trail review. The Environment Agency’s conclusion was that the trade in sewage sludge and other waste had changed radically, making it much harder for the Environment Agency, the regulators or farmers to know what was being spread on fields—microplastics, pesticides, residues and all sorts of other things.

The Environment Agency came up with a plan. It developed a strategy for safe and sustainable sludge use, which was published in 2020. It explained why the regulatory changes are needed—of course, there have been many changes in the supply chain industry feeding into the sewage sludge—and it identified the new hazards that were emerging. It said:

“Modern sludge practices may harm the environment”.


It proposed a number of things, particularly more soil testing and improved record keeping, and more upstream sludge treatments—such as the sewage treatment works and those through trade effluent controls, which are key—as well as better storage and pre-spreading control. It had a plan, because some of the elements in this sludge are very toxic—zinc, cadmium, mercury, chromium, selenium, arsenic, antibiotics, dioxins, furans, phthalates and microplastics. Is there a legal limit for the amount of sludge that can be spread on to farmland? Who sets the limit, and has it been changed recently?

As I understand it, there are no restrictions on using treated sludge on growing crops of cereals or oil seed rape, and treated sludge can be used on grassland so long as there is no harvesting or grazing within three weeks of use. Given the list of toxins that I have just outlined, it seems that three weeks is pretty minimal.

So there is a big issue here, and it is particularly an issue because all of those toxins can still wash out—and do wash out—into streams or get absorbed into the soil and so into the ground water. The water company or supplier of the sludge is responsible for the testing of potentially toxic elements in the soil. Can the Minister say how often that happens? Does his department actually see the results of this?

The noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, who is not in his place, said that this should not be party political. However, the party-political element of the issue that I have just raised is the fact that the regulator—the Environment Agency—did actually suggest the solution that we revoke the regulations from 1989 and bring them up to date with environmental permitting regulations. There was a deadline set of 2023. Well, that simply did not happen. Why not? The Government could have put all this into the Environment Act; or, as the Environment Agency suggested, it might need a small, additional legislative change. None of that has happened, however, and that was a purely political choice. So that toxic cocktail will continue to be spread on our agricultural land, and a large element of it will continue to end up in our waterways.