George Monbiot’s article correctly identifies the sources of river pollution (At last, England’s dying rivers are an election issue – and the danger isn’t just sewage, 3 May), but his focus on water utilities as the villains of sewage pollution is too narrow. Water companies in England and Wales are, theoretically, highly regulated – but the Environment Agency and Ofwat have failed to perform, and thus facilitated the mess that we are now in.
The situation has been further aggravated by planning authorities approving new developments, knowing that wastewater infrastructure is insufficient to cope with the additional loads.
The government has allowed this to happen. It eviscerated the Environment Agency (reducing monitoring budgets by two-thirds) and prioritised low water bills over environmental improvements. For example, the government’s recent proposals to eliminate a major source of river pollution – combined storm overflows – amounts to a planned water bill increase of just 3p per day, with a target completion date of 2050.
Bill Kingdom
Oxford
• While agreeing with George Monbiot in taking water companies back into public ownership, mutualisation might be preferable to nationalisation along the lines of the old “water boards” model of the 1970s. Under this approach, ownership would be vested in the hands of the consumers directly, though with perhaps an option for a minority share to be held by local authorities. The model could lead to greater public accountability, and also provide greater resilience to any attempts to privatise by a future Tory government.
Dr Richard JF Bewley
Glossop, Derbyshire
• What’s the difference between fly-tippers and water companies? Answer: nothing. Except none of us have any choice but to pay the large sums that go into the fat cats’ pockets for dumping our untreated bodily waste into our rivers and seas, while on the other hand we are committing an offence if we pay a fly-tipper to dump any of our waste in the countryside – even if they dump it on the thousands of acres of land that were taken from us, along with our reservoirs.
Richard Davies
Scarborough, North Yorkshire
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