An independent report into an investigation by the Environment Agency into serious pollution of a stream feeding into Windermere has found a series of errors by the watchdog.
As a result, the agency never identified the cause of the toxic event which killed all life within the waterway.
The report, obtained under freedom of information legislation by the group WildFish, concludes that the EA failed to properly investigate the serious pollution in the summer of 2022 that devastated Cunsey Beck, a site of special scientific interest, leaving hundreds of fish dead.
The campaign group Save Windermere says the revelations provide crucial evidence of failings of regulation. Launching a petition on Monday, the campaign is calling for an independent inquiry into regulation by the Environment Agency in the Cumbria and Lancashire region, the resignation of the board and action to properly regulate and scrutinise the water company United Utilities.
The pollution of the beck feeding into England’s largest lake and an area of outstanding natural beauty was considered to be a category 1 pollution event by the EA, the most serious level. The EA said it was suspected that 100% of life within the river had been killed.
But the damning findings of the independent review by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, commissioned by the EA but never published, highlight serious failings in the way the agency investigated. These include:
No clear, systematic approach to the investigation with regards identifying and eliminating potential sources.
The absence of documented witness interviews.
A limited number of sampling locations on Cunsey Beck.
A failure to carry out postmortems on the dead fish.
The SEPA team could not rule out that the cause could have been identified had the EA investigation obtained more evidence and added: “The investigation was not carried out in the way SEPA would expect for an incident of this type.”
The beck feeds directly into Windermere, which is suffering from the impact of pollution from many sources. A large proportion of the phosphorus entering the lake comes from wastewater treatment works releasing untreated and treated sewage.
The Guardian revealed last month that suspected illegal dumping of raw sewage into Lake Windermere took place on up to 70 days in 2022, a year in which campaigners said the lake had its worst summer of harmful algal blooms.
The EA investigation into the pollution was unable to find the source of what it labelled an acute toxic event. But the EA ruled out as the source a discharge from the wastewater treatment outfall at Near Sawrey, a United Utilities treatment works that discharges into the beck.
In its independent review SEPA concluded there was insufficient evidence gathered by the EA investigators to be able to exclude discharges into the beck from the water treatment works as contributing to the incident.
It concluded that once the EA had found which part of the stream was affected, which was at Eel House Bridge, 1.5km downstream of the UU treatment works, the investigators should have systematically gone upstream to pinpoint the source.
Matt Staniek, founder of the Save Windermere campaign, said: “It is symptomatic of the Environment Agency’s continued failure to adequately regulate United Utilities. Our opinion is that they have been negligent in performing their statutory duties to protect Windermere and its tributaries and as a result our lake is being exploited … they open themselves up to accusations of incompetence and worse.”
The SEPA report found that the EA had not taken any evidence, such as photographs, videos or a witness statement from the person who identified the pollution. They also failed to take any evidence from an individual who saw an unidentified blue tanker in the area or from sludge removal tanker drivers that day. The report also found that environmental evidence, including sampling, was not taken by the EA investigators from Cunsey Beck and Out Dubs Tarn between the wastewater treatment works outfall and Eel Bridge.
Details of where hundreds of dead fish were found were not recorded in the EA investigation documentation and no dead fish were collected for analysis, the SEPA report said.
James Overington, water policy officer at WildFish, said: “The agency’s handling of the Cunsey Beck investigation was careless, irrational and unscientific. The number of basic errors uncovered by WildFish’s FoI request was shocking. Concerningly, this is not an isolated incident, with the agency routinely failing to do its job all over the country.
“In the absence of a properly resourced EA, pollution events, like the one on Cunsey, will continue to happen with polluters able to operate without fear of prosecution.”
A United Utilities spokesperson said: “We carefully checked all our wastewater systems in the area at the time and we are satisfied this incident was not caused by any of our operations.”
An Environment Agency spokesperson said: “We take our responsibility to protect the environment very seriously. We will always investigate serious pollution incidents and take strong action against those that do not follow the rules or are deliberately obstructive. In June 2022 our officers responded to reports of dead fish and water decolourisation at Cunsey Beck. Having fully reviewed the evidence, the Environment Agency officer’s professional judgment concluded an algal bloom in Esthwaite Water was the most likely cause.
“Due to the seriousness of this incident, and the fact we did not identify a definitive source, we asked SEPA to review our response to the incident. We recognise there are things we should have done better and that is why we have made improvements to water quality monitoring in the area, including installing sensors that monitor river quality in real time. We have also shared our learning within the Environment Agency which is now informing our approach to incident response and water company regulation.”
