Environment Agency (EA) staff have downgraded thousands of serious pollution incidents by water companies in England without visiting to investigate, data unearthed by freedom of information (FoI) requests suggests.
The figures were obtained by Robert Forrester, a whistleblower who left the agency in January and has spent nine years shining a light on the state of the water industry. His identity was revealed in the Channel 4 docudrama Dirty Business this week, and he has vowed to carry on fighting to expose the truth.
The data shows 2,778 serious pollution incidents by water companies were reported in 2024. Of these, 2,735 (98%) were downgraded to minor incidents by officials, FoI data shows. Officers only attended 496 of these before downgrading the pollution event; the rest were deemed minor events on water company evidence alone, the data suggests.
This represents nearly a 1,500% increase on the 174 downgrades in 2021, of which 60 were attended.
Out of the initial 2,778 serious incidents that were provided by water companies, the EA officially recorded only 75 serious incidents, which it said was a rise of 60% from 2023.
“There is a significant increase in the serious incidents received by the agency but a huge increase in them being downgraded with no attendance by an officer,” said Forrester. “The key thing is that water companies are still controlling our attendance. As an officer with 21 years’ experience I saw it change from 12 to 15 years ago when we would actually get out on site, and we were encouraged to protect, investigate and enforce.”
For the 2025-26 financial year, the EA expects to receive approximately £149m in income from water companies through permit charges and a new enforcement levy, out of a £189m total budget for water regulation.
But Forrester said this model of water companies paying for the budget of agency enforcers created a conflict of interest.
“The regulator is in too close a relationship with the water companies. They are being funded from the money the water companies pay for their permits and as a result the regulator appears to be loosening its regulatory hold over them,” he said.
Forrester left the agency in January after several years during which he was put under suspension, and given restricted duties, following what he believes were suspicions that he was blowing the whistle.
In 2021, while Forrester was on a 12-month suspension, the then chief executive of the agency, James Bevan, warned all staff against speaking to the media.
His warning was condemned by Andrew Pepper-Parsons, the head of policy at Protect, a UK whistleblowing charity, who said at the time: “Regulators have an important role to play in encouraging whistleblowing to staff and the sector it regulates, and it is not in the spirit of promoting speaking up to warn staff against speaking to the media.”
Forrester first started to expose what he saw as a cosy relationship between the industry and the regulator in 2017, when a report on the toxicity of sewage sludge was kept from public scrutiny.
The report was eventually published in 2020 in an investigation by Greenpeace, revealing that sewage waste destined for crops in the UK was contaminated with dangerous “persistent organic pollutants” such as dioxins, furans, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons at “levels that may present a risk to human health”.
The report, which was never published officially, said that the task of regulating the “landspreading” industry was “becoming more difficult” because staff responsible were being hit with “increased time pressures and reduced budgets”.
Forrester, who had seen the findings of the toxicity sampling for the report, said: “The results were horrendous. It was like scrapings off a gasworks. It was going to be published in four months’ time but then it never happened and that set alarm bells ringing. So I spoke to Greenpeace.”
Now unemployed, Forrester wants to engage with campaigners to help as they continue the work to expose sewage pollution and hold water companies to account.
An EA spokesperson said: “We receive 100,000 reports a year and respond to every water pollution incident, all of which are carefully assessed. We focus our resources on the most serious incidents using all our investigative tools, from real-time data to on-the-ground inspections.
“Using our largest ever budget for water enforcement and compliance, we have fundamentally changed our approach. More people, better data and increased powers mean we are taking action and this year we are on track to do 10,000 inspections of water company assets, rooting out wrongdoing and driving better performance.”
