Liz Truss allowed farmers to pollute England’s rivers after ‘slashing red tape’, say campaigners
Liz Truss is responsible for farmers being allowed to dump a catastrophic “chemical cocktail” of pollutants into Britain’s rivers, according to environmental campaigners.
This has meant agricultural waste now outstrips sewage as the leading danger to England’s waterways.
Truss boasted of cutting farm inspections in a parliamentary exchange in 2015 when she was environment secretary. This allowed farmers to dump waste, including pesticides and animal faeces, into rivers.
“We have seen a reduction of 34,000 farm inspections a year and an 80% reduction in red tape from Defra [Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs]. That is vital for our £100bn food and farming industry,” Truss, who held the environment post from 2014 to 2016, told parliament.
“A future Conservative government would continue to bear down on red tape. We are considering pilots for landowners and farmers to manage watercourses themselves, to get rid of a lot of bureaucracy.”
Because of cuts to the Environment Agency and Truss’s policy of trimming official rules and inspections, farmers were able to dump waste in their local watercourses without much fear of being caught and fined. Campaigners say this has had dire consequences for England’s rivers.
For example, in the Wye valley, home to one of Europe’s largest concentrations of intensive livestock production, Lancaster University found there were 3,000 tonnes of excess phosphorus caused by agriculture seeping into the valley’s waterways.
Other rivers polluted by agriculture include the Axe, which flows through Dorset, Somerset and Devon, the Derwent in Yorkshire, the Ehen in Cumbria, and the Test and Itchen rivers in Hampshire.
Louisa Casson, head of food and forests at Greenpeace UK, said: “Letting
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