Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether her Department has undertaken a cost-benefit analysis of requiring all water company incidents to be attended.

The EA already operates a robust, risk-based system to respond to pollution incidents. The increase in inspections, including unannounced inspections, will allow the EA to conduct more in-depth and independent audits to get to the root-cause of incidents, reducing the reliance on operator self-monitoring.

Government has committed to ending ‘operator self-monitoring’ so water companies will no longer mark their own homework on pollution incidents. Initial cost information on ending ‘operator self-monitoring' has been provided by the Environment Agency, and we will do further work to develop a detailed and comprehensive assessment as we move to Open Monitoring.