BBC: Environment Agency failed to visit serious pollution incidents, files show
Documents and data shared with BBC News from inside England's much criticised environment watchdog show an agency struggling to monitor incidents of serious pollution.
The information shows the Environment Agency (EA) only sent investigators to a small fraction of reported incidents last year and often relied on water companies - who may be responsible for the pollution - for updates.
An internal EA document from this year states that all potentially serious incidents should be attended by staff.
But in 2024, the EA didn't go to almost a third of nearly 100 water industry incidents that were eventually ruled to have posed a serious threat to nature or human health.
The agency also downgraded the environmental impact of more than 1,000 incidents that it initially decided were potentially serious without sending anyone to take a look.
The EA says it does "respond" to all incidents but has ways to assess pollution that don't involve going in person. It says when reports come in it is "careful not to underestimate the seriousness of an incident report".
But the EA insider who provided the BBC with the data was critical of the agency. "What not attending means is that you are you are basically only dealing with water company evidence. And it's very rare that their own evidence is very damning," the insider said.
Among the incident reports shared with the BBC were an occasion when a chemical spilled into a reservoir killing all its fish and which the EA did not attend. Another time, sewage bubbled up into a garden for more than 24 hours with no deployment from the EA.
The BBC is not printing specific details from the reports to protect the identity of the whistleblower. But they show an agency often slow to respond and frequently copying water company updates into EA documents verbatim before downgrading incidents.
Other documents show pollution incidents that were reported to the EA by water companies hours after the problem had already been solved, making the impact much harder to assess as the evidence may have washed away.
The data show that overall the agency went to just 13% of all the pollution incidents, serious and more limited, that were reported to it in 2024.
"It's virtually impossible to get them to come out," Ashley Smith a veteran water quality campaigner from the Oxfordshire based campaign group Windrush Against Sewage Pollution (WASP) told the BBC.
"(When you call the EA) they go through a scenario where they'll say 'are there any dead fish'. And, typically there are not dead fish because often the fish are able to escape.
"The EA then says – we'll report that to Thames Water – and it will be Thames Water if anyone who gets in touch with you."
