Speaker Prof. Becky Malby - Cleaning up our rivers, lakes and seas

Becky said that she had been an anti-sewage campaigner for 6 years. Her background is working in the NHS on securing change. She is a Visiting Professor, University of York, University of Huddersfield and London South Bank University.

In her self-appointed role of Rabble Rouser in Chief she has helped to create a situation where the story of Ilkley will be the template for the country. She found that few people were very keen on getting involved in clean rivers so she felt she had to get involved with National politics to try to get action on cleaning them up. In the UK we have now got 30% more pollution in the rivers in the last 5 years. This is much worse than other countries.

The Ilkley Clean River Group have joined forces with angling groups as well as groups such as Save Windermere and SOS Whitstable to form The Sewage Campaign Network. They have found that in order to save our local waters, they have had to step up and challenge the whole water system, campaigning to get the law enforced. They are also mobilising hundreds of community campaign groups, providing briefings, educational sessions, supporting the practicalities of water testing, campaigning and lobbying.

It was thought originally that the problem was just sewage but actually it became apparent that animal faeces and chemicals are also part of the problem. So just cleaning up sewage was not enough. Although it is a serious part of the problem. For example, Yorkshire Water discharge sewage 30% of time. OFWAT allow raw sewage to be discharged whenever there is more than 8mm of rain which is not a lot of rain.

Every year there are children in Bradford Royal Infirmary on drips with e coli infections. OFWAT claimed that the water in the Wharfe was good enough to swim in at Ilkley sewage works! In 2012 the European Commission took the UK government to court for failure to clean up the rivers sufficiently.

Becky was surprised to find that there was no standard on treatment levels before effluent could be discharged into the rivers and sea. So she went to see Environment Minister about the matter. In 2019 the point was proven but the department still didn't do anything. The minister promised to visit Ilkley but didn't.

So Becky took Yorkshire Water to task by getting the media involved at all levels. She found that the only way of getting action was to get bathing status for the river which then forced them to take action. Currently upstream of the sewage works in Ilkley the pollution levels are 10 times the safe status and at the sewage works it is 50 times the safe level.

The Ilkley group found that the only way to achieve change is to get data and then more data and use that to get the media to publish that data. The data demonstrated that on a sunny day in Ilkley 1700 people use the river.

Becky was told that it was impossible to clean up effluent but she replied there was no such thing as impossible, and they were required to do so by law.

Part of the problem is that no part of any water in the UK is owned by individual shareholders but by either foreign companies or by Private Equity groups. She had to start looking at their finances. She asked the owners what have you been doing with our money. They claim they never have enough money to upgrade the infrastructure. But they've self-certified that they had enough money. They claimed that they didn't contest OFWAT’s figures because they never won. The truth is that if they didn't self-certify they couldn't take dividends or extra debts. Yorkshire Water lent lots of money to overseas companies illegally. Now they are being forced to repay these loans but over a long term. They are also borrowing more from their holding company, so debt increases and which increases the interest payments to the parent company.

Yorkshire Water spilled sewage more than 68,000 times in a year. The Environment Agency said it was too difficult to solve and so permitted them to keep doing this as of today. The Ilkley Clean River Group got criminal action started. Now Yorkshire Water are putting in new reed beds further upstream. Also, they are installing a big pipe and a storage tank the size of an Olympic sized swimming pool. Currently there have been 3,000 pollution components going into river but only 40 have been cited as illegal. 

Becky finished off by saying that we need to reduce demand by using grey water to flush toilets and not letting the tap run unnecessarily. She also said that new developments must be made to include rainwater collection systems as well as grey water systems. The ownership model broken and in future a People’s Commission needs to be part of the problem solving.