No! We all know what that word means. Your parents dutifully instructed you on it as a child; we have all had a lifetime of learning and experience re-enforcing its merits. Unless that is you just happen to be the UK government, Ofwat or the Environment Agency (EA).
In 2012, the UK government was taken to the European Court of Justice for allowing water companies to wilfully dump sewage into the environment. The government did at the time try to argue that water companies should be allowed to dump sewage during periods of “unusually heavy rain”; the court had a different viewpoint to that one. The law, they said, meant no, for that would be illegal.
Yesterday’s interim judgment by the Office of Environmental Protection (OEP) “that there may have been failures to comply with environmental law”, will rattle government and regulators alike.
It is, in reality, simply the next painful step in what was a totally unnecessary journey, to get to the truth, to expose precisely why English and Welsh water companies have been allowed to spend 7.5 million hours over the last three years dumping sewage into our rivers and onto our beaches.
As I have argued relentlessly over the last few years, scant regard, if indeed any, appears to have been paid to that judgment. The EA, it is alleged, did not review and amend water company licences allowing them to dump sewage during heavy rainfall, therefore allowing that abuse to continue.
The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs and Ofwat, it is alleged, did not intervene, as the law requires them, to ensure that water companies complied with the law – with that ruling – to build, operate and maintain sewage systems capable of “effectually dealing” with “the contents of those sewers”.
You have by the way, as a bill payer, already provided them with all of the funding they ever need to do that job, at least that is according to Ofwat.
The OEP has suggested this week that “there may have been misinterpretations of some key points of law”, around that judgment. Interesting. Misinterpreted? Might I suggest they collective go back and visit their mothers. They clearly need reminding what the word “no” actually means.
Feargal Sharkey is a former singer turned rivers campaigner
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