Britain's Dirty Rivers
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 7 October 2021
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
According to campaigners, Britain has some of the dirtiest rivers in Europe. Sewage, slurry from farms and chemicals are all a problem, too often ending up in our rivers. The parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee estimates that the discharge of raw sewage accounts for 55% of rivers in England and Wales failing to reach good ecological status. Not one river has good chemical status. So what's going wrong and what can be done to fix it? Joining David Aaronovitch in the Briefing Room are:
Olivia Rudgard, Environment Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph Peter Hammond, retired Professor of Computational Biology at University College London Rachel Salvidge, Deputy Editor of ENDS Report Steve Ormerod, Professor of Ecology and Co-Director of the Water Research Institute, Cardiff University
Producers: John Murphy, Kirsteen Knight, Soila Apparicio Sound Engineer: Neil Churchill Editor: Jasper Corbett
Photo: Chemical Pollution from Industrial Outfall Pouring into River Mersey UK. Credit: Avalon/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:08.1 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Aronovich, to briefing room, |
| 0:12.0 | 28 minutes in which you and I get the top experts to explain a big issue of the day. |
| 0:17.6 | This week, just how sewage-filled and chemically polluted are our rivers, canals and |
| 0:23.6 | lakes. And why? Imagine it's been raining overnight again, but the new day is warm and bright, |
| 0:35.6 | nice enough to take a walk beside the river, maybe even take a dip. |
| 0:40.9 | You've got one foot in when you notice a change in water colour and then a whiff of sewage. |
| 0:50.5 | This is exactly what wild swimmers were complaining about this summer, that waters all over |
| 0:55.5 | the country are not the pristine natural watercourses we imagine them to be. |
| 1:00.8 | Why is there so much sewage in British rivers? |
| 1:04.1 | What else is in there and what could be done about it? |
| 1:07.7 | Step into the briefing room and we'll find out. |
| 1:16.6 | Parliament's environmental audit committees in the middle of an inquiry into water quality in rivers. |
| 1:20.4 | Next week it will hear evidence from the CEOs of some of the main water companies. |
| 1:25.4 | According to the charity, the Rivers Trust, |
| 1:29.1 | more than half of England's major rivers are polluted with sewage. Not one river has what's known as good chemical status. |
| 1:36.6 | Joining me in the briefing room to discuss the state of rivers is Olivia Rudgard, the |
| 1:40.7 | environment correspondent at the Daily Telegraph. Olivia Rudgard, how bad are British rivers in terms of water quality? |
| 1:50.3 | So the most recent figures that came out towards the end of last year make for some pretty |
| 1:54.9 | grim reading. So what they found was that a waterway, so that includes rivers canals, all types |
| 1:59.9 | of fresh water. Only 16% were of |
| 2:02.8 | good ecological status, and none of them were of good chemical status. So what that means in |
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