Exclusive: How polluting water companies are escaping prosecution
The Environment Agency failed to prosecute any water company for a serious pollution incident occurring in the last five years, choosing a divisive alternative punishment instead, writes Alex Thomson.
Suppose a Martian landed next to an English river typically polluted by raw sewage, as so many are.
And imagine they asked an Earthling, “how come your rivers are so filthy?”
Well, if said Earthlings were allowed only one reason to answer, they might well choose two letters: EU - and no I do not mean our brothers and sisters across the water.
I mean Enforcement Undertakings (EUs) - a remarkable, dramatic and deeply divisive system which lies at the heart of how England’s water industry is currently run.
Channel 4 News can exclusively reveal that the Environment Agency (EA) has not completed a single prosecution of a water company for any serious pollution incident occurring in the last five years, despite almost two million sewage discharges.
Paying money to charity
Our investigation found none of the completed prosecutions by the EA relate to the thousands of serious pollution incidents that have happened since mid-2021.
The Environment Agency says this is due to investigations taking years to reach court and they claim there is a viable, quicker alternative - the Enforcement Undertaking (EU).
Rather than face prosecution, these undertakings mean water companies can offer to make payments, sometimes exceeding £1 million, to charities to “compensate” for their offence.
No adverse publicity, no criminal action for a crime committed - and still less, any chance of any water company director facing prosecution - as so many critics and campaigners demand in order to instill genuine deterrence, they argue.
‘Avoiding the criminal system’
Channel 4 News has been working with whistleblower Robert Forrester, pictured below, who worked for the EA for more than 20 years. Forrester appeared in Channel 4’s recent docudrama “Dirty Business”, portrayed as a female Environment Agency employee who, like Forrester himself, leaked data to sewage campaigners. He left the agency in January.
“It’s not like these serious crimes aren’t happening. They’re actually happening more and more…[EUs mean] the deterrent effect is no longer there…It’s a way of avoiding the criminal system,” he said during his first in-depth TV interview.
But the EA’s Director of Water Helen Wakeham defended their use:
“They are a brilliant tool for the Environment Agency. In the past year, the Environment Agency secured £8.5 million for the water environment through enforcement undertakings. The reason why we use them is they are faster than criminal prosecutions, so a prosecution can take us years to bring to court and take up a lot of our time,” Wakeham said.
Indeed, the EA’s own data in the past decade shows there have been very few prosecutions. In a recent letter to parliament’s Environment Committee, the EA’s Chief Executive Philip Duffy said that between 2015-2025 there were 11,474 water monopoly investigations, but only 58 of these resulted in a prosecution. That’s a prosecution rate of just 0.5%.
Many environmental campaigners say this entire system has no place with water companies. Forrester said EUs should be scrapped as an option for them.
The use of Enforcement Undertakings
It may appear that the law underpinning their use and the EA’s own regulations are being flouted when it comes to the water monopolies’ two key areas.
Both suggest you should not allow anyone committing a serious offence to offer paying an EU to avoid criminal action. Second, EUs should never be used for repeat offences and repeat offenders.
Critically this allows discretion, wiggle-room.
Channel 4 News has discovered there are many cases where a charity payment has been offered instead, when serious and/or repeat offences are in question.
The Agency’s rules state they would not normally accept an EU for Category 1 and 2 incidents - the most serious. But FOI data shows they downgrade thousands of reported serious incidents to ‘minor’ problems without actually visiting the site where the pollution occurred, effectively ruling out any prospect of prosecution. Between 2016-2025, this happened 5,998 times.
The EA says all cases are thoroughly assessed and a precautionary system means many incidents are automatically called in as serious, regardless of how dangerous they turn out to be.
Repeat offenders
We analysed publicly available EA data showing water companies paying EUs for the same repeated offence again and again - “water discharge activity” - and asked the EA why repeat offenders still get this option?
“I don’t believe that to be the case. We make those decisions in the public interest. We take prosecution action - we do that for the most serious cases where we’ve got evidence of poor practice and where there is criminal wrongdoing,” Wakeham said.
The EA data suggests otherwise. Spreadsheets show the water companies committing the same offence over and over again - then list the millions paid out to charities which avoids court.
National charity The Rivers Trust accepts millions of pounds in EU payments from the polluting water companies. So far this year they’ve already accepted almost £1.5 million.
“We are incredibly well placed to make sure the money goes to where it is needed the most,” Scott McKenzie, pictured above, Head of Rivers at Trent Rivers Trust, told Channel 4 News.
“The underlying issue with all of this is we’d rather the incidents didn’t happen at all, so it doesn’t preclude a wider clean up of the water industry,” McKenzie said.
But he readily accepts that the current situation where the more dead fish appear in a river, the more cash a river charity may get, takes a little bit of explanation.
‘Money for clean-ups’
Water UK, which represents the industry, told Channel 4 News:
“The Government’s independent review of the water sector concluded that the public interest was not always best served by years of court proceedings. Undertakings can ensure faster accountability and deliver funding directly into the environment.”
So both sides here are deeply entrenched in their views. One small charity which refused to accept an EU told us it was “blood money” and “morally questionable”. They took out a private criminal prosecution.
And they won.
But the water industry insists this is a great way to get money for the clean-ups where it is needed and fast.
Which rather begs the question - if this system worked and deterred water companies from being serial criminals in the first place, there wouldn’t be the crimes - so why would you need to get money where it is needed and fast?
The dirty secret behind England’s water sewage crisis
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Why waste money chasing private companies? Put them in public ownership in the name of accountability.
Excellent report. Thanks all.