The Whinge before Christmas

I picked it up from a nature program in the Black and White ‘tele’ days when I was a kid. Spoken by some authentic old country chap called Phil or Cyril or Derek, with claret rosy cheeks and bulbous nose under a cloth cap. Spoken with a gentle country burr effected to his clipped BBC English voice. A country gent preaching to us semi-detached ‘townie’ folk, out there in Television land.

“When I go out into the countryside, I always leave it better than I found it.”

If only Colin Skellet of Wessex water or Sarah Bentley ex of Thames Water had watched that sage old gentleman and heeded that advice too., They would, no doubt be financially much poorer, but the UK much richer and cleaner.

“Better than I found it”…..In my roll now, becomes a subjective sentence, open to so many interpretations, better for whom and better in what way?

Better for this fishing club: for its members and guests; for the fishing itself? Better for the farmer; for the public on the banks; for me; for the environment; for future generations; for the catch returns? For my prestige and my fragile ego?  Better to justify the efforts, the investment in time and money? Better aesthetically, more beautiful, more ‘natural’, more photogenic?

The Answer is actually “None of the above” and yet indirectly “Yeah, all of the above, in a roundabout fashion”!

I want to leave the ‘habitat’, the flora, and those fauna, that live in and around the Brook a little better with each individual visit and task completed, even if that change seems teeny weeny, infinitesimally small in the grand scheme of things, as long as its pulling or pushing in the right direction.

‘Our’, or should I say more accurately. ‘My’, focus is the needs of that key species selected. That of a native population of breeding Brown Trout and the web of life and environmental conditions that promote its growth and develop a robustness within the population.

Working around that chosen hub, then all the above can be addressed and improved too. By selecting one of the above outcomes to work towards, often the benefits advantage and promote that key species too.

If we succeed, then it will follow that the integrity of the Trout population will be even suited to the rigours of life in the Willowbrook and I’ll have given something back of value beyond my yearly subscription fees.

Before I do any task there’s the question, I ask, “Are we doing this improve to the habitat”?  and if the answer is, “No not really, but it will make it easier to catch more fish”. Then I usually reject it.

“Not really but it’s what other fishing clubs do” is equally irrelevant as a compulsion to influence my choice...

That wild Brown Trout though is not the goal!  it’s the Trophy for scoring those goals, for winning the matches and the struggles, for the season long campaign. It’s the reward, the medal.

It is not, unfortunately, a trophy that you win and then get to keep.

Fishing club members get disillusioned with low catches, rained off seasons, forget the lessons of the recent past and wonder about supplementary stocking up stream. They get frustrated by fighting with the wilder areasof habitat, want more gentle manageable banks, want to keep fishing on hot summer days and nights, extend the season They tire of fish slipping off those barbless hooks before the net .etc, etc, et-bleeding-cetera!  “MY, how they can whinge!” … and what short, selective memories they possess it seems.

These are the simple everyday skirmishes that are easily supressed and silenced by showing the improvements in the catch returns or often just ignored and they go away. They are an irritation at worst.

Then, If Men keeps building up stream, Lots of plots of houses, and planting of crops, managing cattle herds. All adding to the burden of waste and abstraction, siltation and of run off.  

Then that’s your yearly campaign of defence strategies and habitat management and there’s rarely a let up in that assault on the habitat. 

Combine the local bankside problems with those from changes of Governance on a national level, the steady erosion of funding and support for helpful environment policies. The systemised running down and blame culture of the under-resourced enforcement and protection agencies. Or the environmental catastrophe that seems to have been unleashed on the UK with Brexit. 

That requires joined up work and campaigning on a national level and political lobbying.

BUT, then there’s shareholder driven water utilities!

Take Lex Luther and cross him with your average Bond Villian and that seems to be the scale of the problem faced with this formidable foe and moral vacuum .

They seem immune from realistic censor and those investors care not, nor consider the fortunes of a small Brook in the middle of nowhere. Nor of a small sandy bay in some Seaside town where mother’s wish to take their children and the surfers like to ride the waves.

The demise of some insect species or death of a few hundred Trout stranded stinking tassels along the bankside margins, do not figure on their profit reports, unless the fines are heavy enough to make a real dent. They don’t. And those fines really just become more debt which is serviced by the bill payer.

Those turds in the ocean will never affect the shareholder voting unless they who profit are held responsible for those decisions, directly and financially.

This is a huge battle that frankly feels insurmountable. Our battles at the WillowBrook in this sphere are directly linked to Canadian pensioners, British pensioners, and Australian government ministers as well as Abu Dhabi men who play with investments. None of them give a flying feck about the state of our redds or the lower numbers of shrimps in the Willowbrook.

I don’t want to wander too far down this miserable Cul-de-sac, but its Christmas and we can’t talk about the habitat problems of our rivers and only bring up the agricultural policies from Whitehall and large farm accountants, or petty skirmishes in the AGM.

The Ten

My mum kept an empty section of her purse. “Mam, can we get some sweets, Mam can I buy a comic?”, she would pause silently then open the empty section, show us that void, and declare there was nothing left till the end of the month! And we would be silenced by this irrefutable evidence, deaf to the chinking change in the other section or what was stuffed in the Notes.

The British Government ministers have a similar technique for the teachers and nurses and junior doctors and, for the environment.

They love a saying when these plea for help and a little humanity and are to be ignored. “Theres no magic money tree you know!”

Well, here’s the news gentle reader!

They grew a Magical Money tree when they privatised the water utility companies. It’s a guaranteed payout cash cow that continues to be milked dry by some very obese cats. But none for the British public though, upon whose heads those free raindrops doth fall and whose houses those rivers doth flood.

The British publics roll is to service the debts and mismanagement with even higher bills, and when these Cows die, as they will, it will be for these taxpayers, to finance a new herd. Not taxes back from the governments who profited from this Money tree.

Britain’s water and waste is now managed by just ten regional companies. Between 71% and 83%, of those companies, depending on the source of the figures, are owned by overseas governments, banks, and investors from 17 different countries. While UK ownership is 10% (8% being pension funds). And the rest?

All of Wessex water is completely owned by the Malaysian YTL company. The Malaysian owner, the Billionaire Francis Yeoh, banked £80m in share dividends last year, £70.1m the year before. It must be doing brilliantly what a successful company!

It had been owned entirely by Enron which left it with £695m in debt on its balance sheet when they collapsed. (that sounds a lot…. Just you wait!)

The chief Executive of Wessex water, Colin Skellet steered through the change of ownership from Enron. It was expected to go to the British owned and registered Royal bank of Scotland in a £1.2b deal, but to the markets surprise, (although not to the Blair government of the time), he managed to force the sale of the 100% stake to the Malaysian company and was rewarded with an immediate £1m payment from the company YTL, on top of his proposed £980,000 salary.

He did briefly end up in a police cell, for this manoeuvre, but nothing was pressed or proven. As with anything to do with water companies and their many misdemeanours a wrist was slapped, and it was passed over.

The New Malaysian owners then immediately helped themselves ( or himself) to a £210m dividend from the debt ridden company,, and then over the next 5 years helped themselves to another £ 544.7m. By then they had steered Wessex water to a net debt of £1.15 billion. They now have that figure increased to a £2.47 Billion of loans and borrowings. £850m of that debt is index linked and hugely vulnerable to changes in interest rates.

(Honestly these figures twist my melon, they are as conceivable and boggling to me as number of the stars in the universe and age of the dinosaurs and the planet … it just doesn’t compute beyond sounds of words).

“Ah but”, I hear you say. “Stop pedalling these negatives, what about those profits and the obviously excellent service provided”?

In the past two years it has spent £139.6m just to service debts alone, more than four times its profits in that period servicing debts!

The year after Brexit according to the new method of taking official figures, (away from the previous scrutiny of the EU). They had 5 serious out pourings of sewage into the wider environment. Just 5, that’s all!

According though, to the Global Investigative Journalism Group. Wessex Water in that period released raw sewage into the Environment 14,000 times between the period of Jan1 and August 31 of that year. The equivalent of 108,000 hours of discharge.

( 89% of sewage outlets are monitored in England so the data is out there and can be collected).

Quite a different narrative from the Gov.UK figures, I’m sure you’ll agree.

But then the environmental pressure group Surfers against Sewage stated that the number for that year was actually 21,878 releases of raw sewage. That’s the equivalent of 129,952 hours of discharge sewage by Wessex water into the environment..

For that same period Wessex water was fined £300,000 for supplying water unfit for human consumption. 

£300,000 when the owner is taking out annual dividends of around £70m, that must have really stung him!

Wessex is only one of the Ten and not the worst, it’s just the easiest to trace a simple narrative.

The Cheung Kong group (Hong Kong’s richest man) own 80% of Northumbrian water.

JP Morgans owns 40% of southern water, a huge chunk is owned by the Australian Macquarie group, and yet another big chunk to the Zurich UBS asset management.

These people profit from the gradual poisoning and over abstraction of the Rivers Test and the Itchen. Those jewels in world fly fishing and prestige Environmental areas, the southern chalk streams of Halford and Skues, Marryat and Francis Francis.

There are only 200 chalk streams in the whole world.160 of them in England, the vast majority in southern England at the mercy of these investors, despoilers and environmental wreckers.

Half of Yorkshire water is owned by Duetsche Asset management. (I’ll bet they are ‘reet’ chuffed about that up in them Dales).

The US hedge funds; Black rock: Lazard; and Vanguard. Investment fund companies from the Arab Emirates, Kuwait, China, and Australia. All own significant chunks of Thames water and enjoy those hefty regular payouts.  

They employed the fragrant Sarah Bentley with a £3M golden hello to the company and she then picked up a bonus of £727,000 on top of her salary.

As she ran up £14M of debt for Thames waters customers, in this unusual case of the Rat jumping onto the sinking ship. But then after gnawing away to a further £2m in bonuses, she suddenly announced she quit and was gone! Leaving Thames water rudderless and paddleless on its executive luxury cruise up shit creek.

Looking at Anglia (our area) and Severn Trent, United Utilities and Southwest water. These 4 crippled and expensive failing utilities paid out £6.5 billion pounds in dividends in the past 5 years while failing to supply or protect to any acceptable measure.

 The ten CEO’s of the Ten companies pocketed £58 million in salaries and bonuses while consumer bills rose 40%. All together the Ten have now combined debts totalling over £65billion….. and still those dividends and bonuses are cashing out.

Then there’s the other figures:

2.4 billions of litres of water is leaked through faulty systems every-day. A fifth of all the water collected for supply is leaked and wasted away. Damaging roads; causing flooding; rising ground water levels; creating hazards;  blocking traffic; damaging other utilities; exasperating drought conditions: damaging property.

Last year 301,091 sewage spills were ‘reported’ discharging into just the English streams rivers and seas. Added to 74,066 in Wales and 14,066 in Scotland.  That’s an onslaught of 390,000 spills in the UK in one year, where there are monitors available, and in what was a dry year. If you dare imagine what happens at the outlets and overflows that aren’t monitored and a blind eye can be turned, and Scotland has only a small percentage of out flows monitored.

During 2.4 million hours of malfunction in systems unable to cope in last year, they can still pay out the ten individual CEO’s running the show millions of pounds in salary and millions more in bonuses.  (I’m sorry gentle reader , here I can no longer be bothered researching the sickening figures it just makes me so angry).

I don’t wish to get into party politics or criticise political systems. Each to his own and I really don’t want to criticise anyone else’s life experiences and beliefs.

There seems to be two narratives on why the British Government sold of these publicly owned utilities and how they ended up in these few grubby, grasping, hands, wilfully despoiling our waterways and given licence and direct permission to largely by this Government.

One narrative is that systems of reservoirs, pipes, and sewage works were mostly Victorian and completely outdated and needed massive investment in infrastructure during Thatcher’s era and she decided this was the best way of efficiently funding the improvements. Raise some capital.

The other is that Mrs Thatcher’s government systematically sold off the family silver to balance the books and rid the UK of its nationalised industries and those pesky unions that she feared and hated so.

Television adverts at the time, with a soothing background of Handel’s water Music, informed the British public that, “You can become a H2Owner”!

Inviting us all to all buy shares in our own water companies.  

Unlike with the earlier selling off of the Gas board by Thatcher. This water sell off was hugely unpopular, with much of the UK, against this sale and a few months later Thatcher was gone, not soon enough to spare the water utilities though..

Still 2.5 million Brits applied to buy some shares. They were 6 x oversubscribed and the share price rose 40 % overnight. Over the next few decades, the companies ran up huge depts, the forecasted proceeds fell and in three months £6billion was injected by the tax payer (not from those dividends). While at the same time paying out £57 Billion in dividends to those lucky, lucky, shareholders.

As a model It succeeded in being quickly lucrative for the public that bought into ‘Thatcherite Shareholder Democracy’. The problem was too many small shareholders couldn’t resist a quick cash in. So, they sold their shares, and the companies were bought up mostly by private equity, institutional investors, and large foreign infrastructure companies and we thus we get to the state we are in today. Facing a monster down and feeling overwhelmed and generally doomed.

The welfare of our Trout, and the Flora and fauna of our Brook, in the Anglia water region are in the hands of state pension fund investments from Canada and Australia, UK private pension funds and investors from Australia and Abu Dhabi. We can’t invite them to our AGM and strangely, they don’t invite us to theirs.

And then there’s the fix. Create a new narrative.

I mentioned above about ‘reported’ numbers and how multiple events are now counted differently to reduce the numbers then published to the public, slimmed down and almost respectable.

There have been a few instances recently of what look like Independent, scientifically researched data showing that the state of British rivers is in fact improving, the insect numbers are increasing, Britain’s beaches are getting cleaner, the number of pollution spills reducing. Announced by the Government ministers and/or, reported as successes in the Tory press.

With a general election looming it’s a narrative they need to own.

They are not lying. A very recent Article with the headline “River species diversity increases 300pc despite raw sewage dumps” in the Daily Telegraph Is a fresh case to look at.

Picking positive un-related snippets of research that “Mayfly, Stonefly and caddis trebled in species diversity”!. “A 66 % increase in the families of invertebrates”. That “despite breaches by the Department of rural affairs, the Environment agency and Offwat over regulation of sewage overflow and scandals” (No mention of the offending water companies just the poor souls expected to police them!)…” and despite the slowing growth rate, British rivers have reached the ecological standard for populations to survive”! (whatever that Orwellian Newspeak means?).

They cobbled the factoids together into some loose ambiguous narrative that left you feeling blinded by science yet quietly comforted in your utter confusion.

So unfortunately for the Habitat, according to these newspapers and politicians, and the assessment of this study, was that… “Yes, there are some sewage problems but No, it’s not so bad, things are generally improving in British rivers. In fact, better than ever”.

And that’s the feedback I was getting from older members of the club and from clients who know of my interests in this area who read these papers or listen to interviews with those particular politicians primed to spout this publicly.

The Study that the article was based upon in ‘Science of the total environment’, looks perfectly credible to me and the data doesn’t surprise me. They are independent researchers without political or industrial links as far as I am aware. But crucially this is not a study about the state just now in 2023, it’s a glimpse of a period of time.

Much like the “Our beaches are cleaner “claims by the government and the agencies it has created to get these claims out, and to counter the other negative narrative from the environmental groups and local residents.

And dear reader they are cleaner! There is less litter picked up on them than there was in previous years. full stop! It’s the absolute truth. 

Measured by the number of items picked up per hundred yards it has gone down from 425 items to 385 in 4 years! Amongst these items counted are plastic bags and cigarette butts, it has nothing to do with micro plastics and turds in the ocean and the pollution levels.

It probably says more about how health consciousness the type of people who still walk on the beaches are and of their modified smoking and shopping habits, and the fewer people willing to risk a walk or a swim now due to the health perils waiting in those waves and beyond te breakers.

10 years back we (the UK) were some of the better beaches in Europe in terms of cleanliness and certainly seemed to be a huge improvement on what they were like when I was a kid on the coast just south of Blackpool. They had improved. But it is a time scale thing. We are now, at this moment ranked the worst in Europe and they are getting worse due to those water utilities.

So, if you are looking at a 50-year picture it shows improvement over the period, but its propaganda to ignore this precipitous downturn of the recent years and ignore that the issue is not just litter on the shoreline, but pollution of the water. The same befuddlement technique was employed with that report on river species diversity beloved by the Daily telegraph..

The time scale of the research is from the 1980’s, when many of the rivers running through our cities and industrial towns in te UK were toxic beyond imagination of any recovery, and there was very little research regularly done on species numbers.

In the rural areas the farmers were tripling the amount of phosphates on the fields, Nitrate usage went up 10 fold in the UK in the 70’s and 80’s. And to combat the problems arriving from monoculture, there were new generations of broadscale herbicides and insecticides to clean up the problems. Seeping a toxic soup into the ground water and the surface run off. Those Water courses across fields, the rivers and streams, the policy was to encourage and reward farmers to straighten, dredge, and clean off the bankside herbage.

This was where that research started, From the lowest ebb and darkest moment for Britain’s rivers. By 2000 when I joined the Willowbrook, the European Union was giving grants to British farmers to set land aside on the banks of rivers and hedge rows to encourage wildflowers and grasses and create habit for insects’ animals and birds. A no-spray zone and no vehicles.

This, I am sure is what exploded the numbers of Mayflies from tens to tens of thousands on our banks. The EU also in 2000 brought in the Water Framework Directive (WFD) committing Member states to achieve a ‘good’ qualitive and quantitative status for all water bodies, even the basket cases, by the year of 2015. This was crucially important.

We marvelled that Salmon where again moving through major cities even London and Manchester  and Trout were appearing in the shadows of the now derelict factories and the former black satanic mills.

It meant for a club like ours we didn’t need to worry about the farmer anymore, his hands were tied, and his pocket rewarded. if we needed some help from the EA or Natural England for a habitat project concerning either preserving/ repairing Water Quality or monitoring the water Quality. If things looked like official feet were dragging, we would quote the WFD and suddenly doors opened, and grants flowed through. 

 The Freshwater Biological Society and the Salmon and Trout association created a Citizen science project, the Anglers Riverside Monitoring Initiative. Where people were trained to kick sample and identify bugs on a regular basis. 1000’s of people trained and 1000’s of ARMI sites monitored monthly through the UK, collating figures on insect numbers adding greatly to the data available. All waters were scrutinised yearly by the EA to keep them in line with the WFD expectations.

By 2010 when I was at my peak of driving through changes at the Brook. The EU realised that the 2015 figure in the WFD was an unrealistically optimistic figure to achieve its goals so they extended the target year to 2027, which was great for us and looked positive for the future.

We were at the stage around 75% into the time scale of that report and many British rivers hadn’t been so good since the industrial revolution and never had so much monitoring been practiced.

With Brexit however the WFD was ‘transposed’ into British law which to all extent and purpose can be read as severely diluted and its teeth pulled out. The yearly monitoring of water course to assess their status of quality was immediately dropped from annually to every 3 years, if carried out at all. If a Pollution event occurred, then you would be lucky if the now the severely under resourced Environment agency turned up at all. Farmers could dump slurry in rivers on a wet night because the chances are if they did kill a load of fish, no one would trace it back now. And if they did you would just get a warning.

A farmer fined for pollution is national news , its so rare and occurrence now.

As we neared 2015 the rivers in the UK were unrecognisable from the toxic drains of the 1980’s, and with the increased research and researchers. That report was right in the fact’s, and made perfect sense to me.

But the facts cherry picked by the politicians and the Right wing press a few months ago to present to the British public was a different narrative, the impetus is now downwards again. The reporting was out of context and wilfully misleading.

It was a revised viewpoint, a new narrative presented of the success of water quality, the companies a rosier future for the public than the one portrayed by those doom mongers of Surfers against Sewage, The Wild Trout Trust, Green peace, The Angling trust, Friends of the Earth, the wild swimmers and various celebrities that seem to hog the news .

( incidentally: I thought Fergal Sharkey of The Undertones great input to society would be the song ‘Teenage kicks’, and that, in its self, one of the greatest pop songs of all time, would have been a pretty exceptional legacy.

His quiet persistent eloquence and encyclopaedic knowledge, his ability to recall the facts and figures of the Utility companies on the hoof in front of industry execs and politicians on mic or on camera, makes him a brilliant and unlikely ‘mouth’ of the cause for Britain’s waters. It’s a staggering transformation from scruffy Ulster punk to the Champion of the Chalk streams).

“It’s not so bad under our watch after all, in fact it’s better than you think!” Say those politicians in reply, desperately fudging the facts. 

From my personal perspective since around Brexit its gone worse, nay, its nosedived.

Whether that’s the lack of EU regulation and funding at fault. Whether the natural consequences Thatcher’s privatisation of the water companies is coming home at last to roost.?

Whether Covid forced our eye off the ball and the 3 years of unstable government and how many prime ministers since?.

A government that has kicked the stone Further down the road and stated that 2040’s is now the new distant target to improve our water courses to ‘good’. No impetus for sudden change but granting a stay of execution for the poluters and issuing a licence for inactivity and a right to carry on polluting the streams and rivers and seas while keeping the dividends and bonuses flowing into the overseas accounts and foreign taxation.

So, how does a little old ’Us’ counter such fearfully rich, influential, and connected people, armed with the most persuasive legal teams and PR departments?

The same way we will deal with local Builders, Councils, farmers, and factories. Facts.

The answer is to monitor in the times of peace and plenty. Monitor what you can for as long as you can and build up a real picture.  

Don’t create facts, that’s for the others side building an argument on sand. Collect real concrete facts and data. If and probably when ultimately it must come to some legal ‘dust -up’. Someone is given the responsibilities to judge right and wrong. Anecdotal stories aren’t evidence, decades of carefully collected data are, and they are compelling in a courtroom. They are the facts and the measures of change and of the actual damage caused.

Monitor everything possible; insect species; insect numbers; plant species; temperature ranges; phosphate readings; nitrate readings; catch returns; visits to the bankside; Farming practices; field usage; Flood events; Use your imagination! Migratory bird species might even be useful, Just monitor everything!... (and leave it better than you found it ).

We’re not so Doomed after all, 

Happy Christmas from the Willowbrook, and a much better next year to all you flora and fauna out there in sexy loops land. 

(Santa says I’ve still not been good enough for a Hot Torpedo…the Barstool!)