Double the Dosh for River Protection

Double the Dosh for River Protection

Started
28 May 2021
Petition to
The UK and Welsh Governments
Petition Closed
This petition had 64,536 supporters

Why this petition matters

Started by River Action

We are facing a freshwater emergency. Years of de-funding of the UK’s environmental regulators has been a major cause of the crisis facing our rivers leading to the collapse of environmental protections and enforcement against polluters.

England’s Environment Agency’s funding has been slashed by 75% over the last 12 years. In Wales, Natural Resources Wales has suffered similar cuts since its creation in 2013. The resulting picture is bleak. Agricultural pollution of rivers is rampant with farms almost never inspected, and even when they are, inspectors have no powers to enforce environmental rules. Water quality is rarely tested and water companies regularly pump raw sewage into waterways with impunity. In England alone, over the last three years sewage has been dumped into our rivers and seas 1.08 million times whilst prosecutions for river pollution are almost non-existent.

Polluters can dump waste into our rivers secure in the knowledge that they will be neither monitored, inspected nor prosecuted.

The UK government has committed to halt and reverse the decline of nature by 2030 both nationally through the Environment Act and on the international stage at the 2022 UN biodiversity summit COP15. We can't possibly meet these commitments without healthy rivers. Governments must restore the environmental protection budgets of their respective statutory environment agencies so that water quality monitoring and agricultural inspections can be increased significantly and existing regulations are enforced rigorously by the routine prosecution of polluters.

The total annual cost of doubling environmental protection budgets will be in the region of £60m – the cost of the construction of less than a quarter of a kilometre of HS2.

Petition Closed

This petition had 64,536 supporters

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Decision-Makers

  • The UK and Welsh Governments