Hay's Way meets with a head ghillie and residents concerned with sewage leaks in the River Tweed

The Scotsman

Transcript

00:00 [Music]

00:19 Hi, Catherine A here, Rural Affairs Correspondent at the Scotsman.

00:23 Hayes Way has made it to Melrose in the Borders.

00:27 I'm just here on the River Tweed, which you can see and probably hear just behind me.

00:32 And I'm about to go and meet two guys who work on the river.

00:35 One is a ghillie, Scott, and the other, a concerned local resident, Cameron,

00:41 because they have issues with sewage leaking into the river.

00:46 We've got the... there's a sewage pipe that runs from Gattonside under the river

00:53 to the Melrose sewage works effectively.

00:56 And it has run and leaked for years and years.

01:01 Mostly there's a problem when there's lots of rain and there's lots of water coming down the pipes.

01:06 But this winter specifically, it ran from December through to March.

01:10 And I think, you know, one of the reasons we're talking to you, Catherine,

01:12 is because we're just concerned that... I'm not saying people don't take it seriously,

01:18 but certainly the responses we have been getting from the likes of SEPA and Scottish Water

01:24 have been less than satisfactory.

01:26 And very shortly, this... it'll be the summer holidays,

01:31 very shortly, not only will there be fishers here,

01:34 there will be hundreds of children and families picnicking and bathing.

01:38 And if it rains before that, there'll be sewage leaking out of here into the river.

01:42 There will be sewage coming down the storm outflow above the chain bridge.

01:48 And there'll be another one at the top of the beach.

01:50 And that's just in half a mile of one river, in one little bit of Scotland.

01:55 How big is that if one takes it across the whole of the Tweed and all Scotland's other iconic salmon lakes?

02:00 Scottish Water have a contractor who does something,

02:03 and then they have a subcontractor who does something else.

02:06 And the teams that turn up, yes, they do what they have been instructed to do,

02:12 even though we know that what they're doing will be less than effective.

02:16 And also, no names, no factual, they will also confess that they know

02:21 what they're doing will be less than effective or indeed fail,

02:25 but the fact is they are just doing what they've been asked to do.

02:29 There's no one willing to kind of take full responsibility for this.

02:34 That's exactly it. We've asked John Lamont,

02:37 "Can John put us in touch with or get us a meeting with somebody

02:44 who is accountable so that we can put this thing to bed once and for all

02:48 so it doesn't just drag on?"

02:50 And we don't want to be bothering our MPs and MSPs on a regular basis.

02:55 We just want it solved. And we want a clean river and a clean environment.

03:00 And if this was, you know, this is our lawn, this is our ghillie's place of work.

03:05 If this was your lawn outside your office, would you want sewage bubbling up through it on a regular basis?

03:12 To the extent that the puddle, the pond gets so big, little children see ducks swimming in it,

03:20 think it's a pond and come and paddle in it, which is just completely unacceptable.

03:24 Yeah. And as you say, with the rush of summer approaching,

03:28 what did you say to John Lamont in your last letter then?

03:31 We asked John if he might get hold of whoever at Scottish Water

03:39 was in a position of responsibility and accountability to come and sit down and tell us,

03:46 "OK, we have a plan to solve this." But as yet we've heard nothing.

03:51 You've heard nothing. OK, so what's the next move?

03:53 The next move is we will just keep bothering our MPs and our MSPs and the council.

04:03 We are not going to let this go because the situation is only going to get worse.

04:07 So it needs to be addressed.

04:09 We would like to see the whole river protected. The whole river needs it.

04:13 The infrastructure throughout the whole of the border towns is antiquated.

04:18 They've not really invested. They've done bits and pieces, but nothing major.

04:23 Villages are growing yearly. So please, please do something about the sewage problem.

04:30 And we're now just filling it with sewage on a daily basis.

04:33 There's kids in swimming in it. There's kids jumping in sewage puddles.

04:37 It's just, come on.

04:39 You've been a ghillie here for 21 years. How long has this been going on for?

04:45 21 years. You complain, they come out, they have a look, they clean it.

04:49 But the problem just keeps happening and keeps happening.

04:52 We've now got four places on this two-mile section that there's raw sewage coming in.

04:57 And we're one beat out of 60 or 70 beats. So we're having on most of it.

05:03 Should there not be legislation, as soon as there's more than five houses new getting built,

05:08 that either a very small treatment works or a very large septic tank or something,

05:12 to stop it getting discharged in these storm overflows and just straight into the river.

05:17 If people actually knew how bad the quality was, they'd probably never come here.

05:22 We need every river board, every ghillie, everybody just to non-stop bring it to the public eye, continually.

05:29 If it's here long enough, then they have to sit up and take notes.

05:33 Yeah, well you'd think 20 years would be long enough.

05:35 You would think so.

05:36 When I was up in the northeast, the River Dee is really steep decline in salmon there,

05:45 in Atlantic salmon, and I witnessed first hand the impact this decline in fishing tourism is having on local villages around.

05:53 Bancory was really struggling, fishing hotels closing, others having to fill rooms at cheap rates,

06:00 with predominantly workmen from cities further south coming up doing jobs.

06:08 It's certainly eye opening that this decline in this one species not only impacts the river ecosystem,

06:17 because obviously you have otters, I just earlier saw an osprey carrying a fish, it was huge, so I think it was a female.

06:24 And not only is the decline in this fish impacting the animals that feed off them,

06:31 but you have jobs and rural communities that have kind of pried themselves on the fishing community

06:40 and run really on fishing tourism, rely on it.

06:45 You see them struggling and it just makes you think, you know, what's it going to take for people in government

06:56 to act with more urgency than how they've been acting at the moment.

07:04 [water flowing]

07:09 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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