The Sunday Times 02.05.10 - Charles Clover

‘Water rats’ sit silent in a pool of dirty secrets

We oyster lobster lovers have always know we were taking our lives in our hands every time we squeezed on the lemon juice and took a slurp. The oyster has an appetite for filth that can do you harm if the water it comes from in is not clean. But as a proud resident of the borough of Colchester, which once supplied the roman empire with oysters, I have until now been inclined to reach for the Tabasco and to dismiss fear as for wimps.

After all, haven’t the rivers and beaches around these islands been transformed by the £85 billion that has been spent since 1989 on cleaning them up? Nobody who remembers the state of our waters in the 1980’s, let alone the 1960’s, could dispute that a transformation has been wrought.

But it does worry me when no less an authority than Dr Tom Pickerell, director of the Shellfish Association of Great Britain, says he is concerned that the chance of eating a bad oyster may be rising – although I must emphasise that the risk is still vanishingly low. What is worrying his members is he norovirus, or winter vomiting bug.

This virus was identified as being responsible for the outbreak of food poisoning that affected 529 people last year at the Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant in Bray, Berkshire, regularly named as one of the best in the world.

The norovirus is found in human sewage. It happens to have been found in the beds in the Colne Estuary run by the Colchester Oyster Fishery, which supplied the Fat Duck. It cannot be proved that the company’s oysters were to blame for the poisoning, because an investigation by the Health Protection Agency mentioned other shellfish and the possibility that the contamination might have come from the staff. But the contamination of the Colne oyster beds is worrying.

The question that concerns Graham Larkin, operations director of the fishery, which also supplies the Ritz, Le Gavroche and Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants, is how sewage was allowed into some of the most famous oyster beds in the world. You might think this was the kind of thing that kept the Environment Agency and the local water company awake at night. Think again.

I was astonished to find that water-quality rating of the Colne estuary was downgraded a couple of years ago because of an increase in sewage and farm run-off, which means that Larkin’s company has to spend a fortune taking oysters out of the Colne and allowing them to purge themselves for months in clean beds before they can be sold. Since the Fat Duck poisoning, Larkin has had to spend even more money on testing for the norovirus and does not let the oysters out of his sight unless they are clear.

What irks Larkin is that his company is paying the price for someone else’s pollution. Whose? He blames Anglian Water’s sewage plant in Colchester, one of the fastest-growing towns in the country and due to increase by 19,000 homes by 2023. Anglian Water says there is no evidence that it is at fault and blames other potential sources such as pleasure boats and wildlife. The Colne Estuary Partnership, which represents local councils and anglers, suggests another potential culprit: the obsolete system of “combined sewage overflows” built by the Victorians to channel both sewage and rainwater. Designed as release valves to prevent sewage from backing up into people’s homes, overflows have been observed to deposit raw sewage on beaches at Campbeltown in Argyll, Combe Martin in Devon, Looe in Cornwall, Llanelli in Dyfed, Helensburgh in Dumbartonshire and Aberdeen to name a few.

As this newspaper reported last weekend, the “water rats” – Britain’s giant utility companies – have won an appeal giving them permission to go on polluting beaches and estuaries through 4,200 overflows. The problem is that because overflows were not regarded as polluting in the past, when they paled into insignificance beside our main sewage plants, they exist outside the funding and regulatory system that has brought improvements to our beaches and rivers over the past 21 years. The water companies’ successful appeal against the Environment Agency’s attempt to regulate them means that they will in effect stay outside the system.

This is mad, particularly at a time when concern about the norovirus in shellfish is rising and the European Union is tightening its standards on bacteria and viruses in bathing water in such a way that Britain looks unlikely to meet them. To make an unsatisfactory situation worse, water companies are refusing to tell the agency which emergency overflows are a problem. The agency says the lack of clarity about where pollution comes from means it can’t do anything about the Colne estuary until 2027.

Any new government is going to have to bang heads together. We also know it is going to cut public spending harder than in the 1980’s, which will mean reducing the Environment Agency’s staff. I have a suggestion: force the water companies to disclose which overflows are malfunctioning and let angles, bathers and shellfish farmers ban together and sue them it they don’t clean up. Otherwise Britain is going to return to something else we remember from the 1980's: being called the dirty man of Europe.

Source: Charles Clover 02.05.10 The Sunday Times