Dear fellow swimmers
This won’t come as a surprise to regular readers, but achieving bathing water status does not mean the water is clean.
I’ve been involved with the campaign to get bathing water status for the River Thames at Ham and Kingston. We’ve been blown away by the amount of media attention this has
attracted – but some of the commentary gives the impression that achieving bathing water status means the water is clean.
In fact, there is no requirement in the application process to measure water quality.
What bathing water status achieves is a requirement for the Environment Agency to monitor the water quality and publish the results, grading the spot as “Excellent, Good, Sufficient or Poor”. If
it’s found wanting, the EA will require polluters to put in measures to improve things. For the first year then, we therefore don’t have any classification.
12 out of 14 river bathing sites rated 'poor'
The BBC recently reported that 12 out of England’s current 14 river bathing spots were rated as poor, with advice against swimming. This sounds bad, until you look at how classification works. It’s an attempt to
capture a season’s worth of results and nuance into a single word.
The thing with rivers is that the water quality can change in a matter of hours. Heavy rain washes pollutants off the land into the water. Prolonged storms can lead to sewage spills. Bacteria levels can rise from almost zero to scarily high very quickly.
Due to the way classification works, a small number of bad results in the testing could be enough to get
a spot classified as poor, even if the water quality is excellent for the rest of the year.
What we would really like is something that tells us what the quality of the water is at the time we swim – not an average across the season. But at least those classifications should eventually make a difference as the real aim is to get polluters to clean up their act.
And yes, we do see the irony in swimming in potentially
polluted water as a lever to get it cleaned up. We’d rather rivers were cleaned up first, to encourage people to use them. But that’s the system we live in.
One way you can help bring about change is to sign the petition below calling for a debate on improving the performance of our sewage treatment works.
→ Sign to “ensure new sewage treatment infrastructure meets higher standards as in the EU”.
