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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether his Department has considered using external bodies with (a) forensic accounting and (b) corporate fraud expertise to support investigations into alleged (i) deliberate misreporting and (ii) illegal pollution by water companies.

The Environment Agency (EA) is the enforcement body responsible for investigating illegal pollution and misreporting by water companies.

The EA has concluded 83 prosecutions since 2015, securing record fines of over £150 million against water companies. Furthermore, the EA have increased water company inspections to 10,000 per year from April 2025 as part of the government’s wider focus to hold companies to account and improve our water environment.

The Water (Special Measures) Act provides the most significant increase in enforcement powers to the regulators in a decade. This includes powers for the Environment Agency to recover costs for a much greater range of enforcement activities.

Additionally, all water companies in England and Wales are now under a statutory duty to publish annual Pollution Incident Reduction Plans. Chief Executives will be required to approve both the plan and the report and will be personally liable for their publication.