Number of sewage spills have increased by 41% since 2020

National World - LocalTV

The Institute of Fisheries Management is an international organisation supporting and promoting sustainable fishing practices - and Paul Coulson is their Acting Chief Executive.

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00:00So when we go out and do some ecological monitoring or biological monitoring and we're

00:05looking at these indicator species, when you don't see them they are an early warning system

00:12of what's going on. But according to Paul the impact on wildlife isn't just down to pollution

00:17in our waterways. He says climate change, barriers to migration and predation issues are also to blame

00:23but with an increase in the number of stories hitting the news around spillages

00:27he believes it means more people are switched on to the issue.

00:30Yes, we've got people like Fergal Sharkey to thank for banging the drum and really taking it forward

00:35and then it gathers that sort of groundswell of local interest doesn't it and then people can

00:40see particularly with sewage pollution and combined sewage outflows, you can go walk along

00:44the river and you can go to a pipe and point at it and you can see where the sewage is coming

00:49into your river and then you can track it back. You can complain to your local water company,

00:53they see their water bills going up and they don't see any increase in improvement in the

00:57environment and people rightly are annoyed. Do you think that this will lead to tangible

01:03improvements in water quality or do you share concerns that it might not address the sort of

01:08root causes of the problem that some campaigners are saying? I think it's good to see it. I think

01:13it's good that the new government's come in and grabbed it and you know and they've sort of

01:17identified it as a problem that the general population now see as being one of their key

01:22elements. Will it have an effect? Well potentially but then their argument's always going to be we

01:28need money. There's got to be some mechanism where we prosecute and we hold them to account.

01:35Who does that? Is it going to be the water companies? Are we going to let them self-monitor

01:40as we have done in the past or are we going to empower the environment agency to go and actually

01:44do the testing or is it going to be a yes this is something we can do but I can't imagine you're

01:52going to see that you know it's going to be quite a while till you see the first chief executive of

01:55a water company in the dock.

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