The Environment Agency has not visited serious pollution incidents, disclosed files show

The documents and data shared with BBC News from the interior of Watchdog of the very critical environment of England show that an agency is struggling to monitor incidents of serious pollution.

Information shows that the Environment Agency (EA) has only sent investigators to a small fraction of the incidents reported last year and often based on water companies – which can be responsible for pollution – updates.

An internal EA document this year stipulates that all potentially serious incidents should be assisted by staff.

But in 2024, the EA did not go to almost a third of nearly 100 incidents in the water industry which were finally tried for having formed a serious threat to human nature or health.

The agency also demoted the environmental impact of more than 1,000 incidents which it initially decided was potentially serious without sending anyone to take a look.

The EA says that it “responds” to all incidents but has ways to assess pollution that does not involve going in person. He says that when reports arrive, he is “prudent not to underestimate the severity of an incident report”.

But the initiate EA who provided the BBC the data criticized the agency. “What does not present is that you are, you are essentially only evidence of the water company. And it is very rare that their own evidence is very overwhelming,” said the initiate.

Among the incident reports shared with the BBC, there was an opportunity where a chemical spread in a tank killing all its fish and which the EA did not attend. Another time, wastewater completed in a garden for more than 24 hours without deployment of the EA.

The BBC does not print the specific details of reports to protect the identity of the denunciator. But they show that an agency is often slow to respond and frequently copying the water company updates to the public word documents before downgrading incidents.

Other documents show pollution incidents that have been reported to EA by water companies after the problem, making the impact much more difficult to assess because evidence may have taken away.

The data show that overall, the agency went to only 13% of all pollution incidents, serious and more limited, which were reported to it in 2024.

“It is practically impossible to get them out,” the BBC group told Ashley Smith, an activist of the Oxfordshire campaign, Windrrrush Against Sewage Pollution (wasp), told the BBC.

“(When you call EA), they go through a scenario where they say” are there dead fish “. And generally there are no dead fish because often fish are able to escape.

“The EA then says – we will relate this to Thames Water – and it will be water from the Thames if someone who contacts you.”

Matt Staniek is a water quality activist in the Lake District and cited several incidents where he says that the EA has taken explanations from the local water company on wastewater spills at its nominal value, which, later thanks to its own data applications, proved to be erroneous.

“The Environment Agency did not keep UNITED Utilities responsible,” he said. “And the only way to bring them to present themselves properly to pollution incidents and try to do an appropriate investigation is to go with the media with him, and that should not be the case.”

A spokesperson from United Utilities replied by saying that “we are at the top of the industry to self-depressed incidents at the Environment Agency”.

As part of the historic examination of the government of the water industry, he promised to put an end to the “self-nursing” of incidents by water companies.

There is a general agreement that the current system does not work and that plans are established to merge regulators – including EA – which supervise different parts of the water industry – in one.

“The Environment Agency is so dug that it cannot investigate pollution crimes, actually saying to polluters they can act with impunity,” James Wallace, director general of the River Action campaign group, at the BBC.

In July, the BBC revealed that the staff shortages had led the EA to cancel thousands of water quality tests in its main Devon laboratory.

“We are responding to each water pollution report we receive,” said a spokesperson for the Environment Agency.

“To ensure that we protect people and the environment, we take care not to underestimate the severity of an incident report when it arrives.

The EA indicates that next year that it aims at more than double the number of inspections of the water company it performs. To do this, the agency says that it is recruiting five hundred staff members and improving the way it manages the data.