Witney Against Sewage Pollution
WASP is a small Registered Charity populated entirely by volunteers with a core team of around a dozen people and a wider team of river watchers, water samplers and Riverfly Monitors. We have a strong following on Twitter and Facebook. Our team has a wide range of skills and experience that have been the key to WASP’s success in gaining the attention of the water industry, the regulators and government. We provided evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee inquiry and feature in its final report.
WASP’s strategy is built around investigation, communication and engagement. Our deep dive into the way in which the water companies are operating in England and Wales has exposed rampant criminality, principally through our analyst Professor Peter Hammond’s groundbreaking work. This completely altered the way in which campaigners across the UK now operate with the confidence that not only is sewage pollution wrong for the environment, it is also prevalent and wrong according to law.
WASP is pan political and that principle of universal support is still strong with local politicians from the County Councils through to the Parishes. However, currently there is an inevitable clash with a government that has declared and exercised a strong deregulatory stance while the water companies have been demonstrated to have ruthlessly exploited a lack of environmental and financial control, since privatisation in 1989 and worsening especially in the past 12 years.
The response of government to the exposure of reliance on criminality could have been to shut down the activity and require them to take all reasonable steps to end the dumping of untreated sewage. With the Environment Act 2021, however, government instead forced its MPs to vote out this option and we are left with laws which allow water companies to continue as long as they show some vague improvements over many years. Our own MP Robert Courts was one of those that supported the government in that disappointing response. Further up the Windrush valley, Sir Geoffrey Clifton Brown, MP for the Cotswolds ignored the instructions and abstained from the vote.