 Hi everyone, this time last year I reported a sewage spill to Wessexwater and this was their response. Now after that phone call and the YouTube video that I made and the BBC points West getting hold of the story, I had a phone call and an email from a chap called Julian Ochillier from Wessexwater who tried to assure me that 95% of the waste that I'd seen was just general waste and not sewage. So at the beginning of January 2024 we had storm, and consequences were considerably worse. I reported the pollution incident and I'm pleased to say that this time Wessexwater have actually acknowledged it. So this isn't a fishing video, this is about anglers looking after rivers and specifically focusing on the issue of sewage in the Bristol Avon. Two weeks ago at the beginning of January I reported a serious pollution event to Wessexwater and the Environment Agency. It is absolutely everywhere. This stunning bit of river looks like a shanty town. And it goes on for miles. Instead of catching fish anglers are reeling in wet wipes. It snags off in the wet wipes, I don't have to take it off my hook. As an angler I suppose I'm also concerned about what's happening below the surface. Like I say, winding in these wet wipes is a concern. You've got the wet wipe island already known in the Thames and I'm worried that we're going to get one here in Salford, right there on that. And plenty of other things flushed down the toilet have ended up here too. You can see it's actually pad. When the river swelled the sewage waste became mixed with litter. This stuff visible here, it's just the tip of the iceberg. I've got friends at Fish on the Bristol Channel that are finding the sewage waste on the reefs on the Bristol Channel. So it is the whole entire river course where the problem exists. The rainfall we've had recently has been absolutely exceptional. Very unusual, very intense and the whole system was overwhelmed. So more than usual went out and some of the sewage solids, things like wet wipes were discharged in higher quantities than normal. The water companies set aside £3 million a month to upgrade storm overflows with plans to double that spending in 2025. We're already improving some overflows upstream of Salford. So a couple of examples. We've got work going on at Lamberidge in Bath and at Bradford on Avon at the moment. So that's good news, but it's a big problem and it's going to take a long time to fully resolve. Bristol Radio, Gloucester Radio have all covered it. And once again we find ourselves just two weeks later looking at the river rising quickly. So I thought I'd come down here and just talk a little bit more about these pollution incidents and the unusual amounts of rain using Wessexwater's words that are apparently causing their sewage systems to be overrun and emptied into the river. Now this week, Salford Parish Council put a thank you out to Wessexwater for sending men out on their boats to clean up the river. They obviously haven't made it down here yet. Nappy down there, look. And you can see the sewage waste in the tree behind me. Now the issue environmentally with these is that you have got an awful lot of plastics in the materials, particularly sanitary pads. That gets broken down, turned into microplastics and into the food chain. One in three fish for human consumption has these microplastics in them. So you're eating your sewage waste. There's a lot of pressure at the moment on the manufacturers to reduce plastics in wet wipes, far less on sanitary pads. And an industrial wipe. I think since COVID, people have gone into the habit of using these wipes for pretty much anything and everything. Not just wiping babies' backsides. People shouldn't be flushing this down the toilet in the first place. So aren't the Environment Agency doing anything about it? It is an environmental crime in my books. And the simple answer to that is that they're fairly toothless. The regulations are in there, but they can't afford to do the monitoring and enforcement. And in fact, in 2015, the Home Secretary at the time gave himself a big pat on the back for reducing their budget by a whopping 54%. Imagine if you did that with the police. Spend all this money on fish passes. They cost tens, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds to put these fish passes in for migration of salmon and sea trout. My friend Ian caught the sea trout here just before the floods. And then we go and fill the river. Learning my trade, so to speak, in southeast London made me quickly realise just how much we abused the rivers. That was in the 1990s. Now where are we now? So there's two combined sewage overflows between the Riverside Inn and the Jolly Sailor at Saltford. But what we've got to bear in mind is there's another 50 between here and the other side of Bath. You get an idea of the force of the water when you look at this on this lock gate at the Riverside Inn. It's actually taking away the block paving. This is an area used by swimmers, kayakers, boaters, anglers. And what we're seeing with the wet wipes and the sanitary pads is the tip of the iceberg because really they just indicate the sheer amount of raw sewage that ends up in this river. As an angler it's what's going on below that surface. All those wet wipes, they're heavier, they're kept below surface, get washed out to sea or smother the riverbed. There's a micro habitat down there where invertebrates, catechin, sex, thrive or did. And if we carp it over the top of it, there's not going to be anything for the fish to eat. There's no fish, there's less kingfishers, there's less otters and so on. This recent fish survey shows how the fish abundance drops below the weir that I'm stood at now which is the first red line at the bottom of the map. Once you get past the jolly sailor, past the sewage works, the fish abundance drops to just nought to one fish per thousand cubic metres. It is a big problem and it needs to stop. We would like to see off what having stronger powers to make them focus on developing the infrastructure, not lining their own pockets or indeed paying out those dividends. Sir Robert, this seems to be in some ways a metaphor of the last few years, isn't it? The boss is doing rather well and the rest of us swimming in the poo poo. Well, the reality is that, you know, about eight years ago, only about 800 of our overflow pipes were being monitored. Now 12,000 of the 15,000 are being monitored and we're seeing the full extent of this problem that has been going on for years. Now what this gentleman is forgetting to acknowledge is that those 800 that were monitored in 2008 were done by the Environment Agency. Now it's the water utility companies marking their own homework. All of us hate to see this happening, including me, but we now know the full extent of this problem and the idea that somehow it's related to, you know, private water companies is nonsense in Wales, which is a not-for-profit arrangement. There are double the number of discharges than in England. Right, let's put some clarity on that straight away. Wales originally was a private company, Hyder, and they went into financial crisis when the Labour Party put a windfall tax on them in 1997. The emerging Welsh water was born out of the execs that were at Hyder, one of whom was an ex-merchant banker. And the CEO, Dr Mike Jones, gave himself a £100,000 bonus and a salary of £311,000. Fast forward now, that salary is now £525,000. So it's all about creaming off the money and not investing. Just because they're not playing shareholders doesn't mean they're not fleecing the public. Now that we see the scale of this problem, what to do about it? This is why the Plan for Water, which has got £1.7 billion of resources to go into dealing with storm discharges, will make a difference. I'll interrupt you there because the whole idea of privatisation was that things would improve. Yes, and they have. The amount of investment... This is an improvement. No, this particular issue has now become really apparent because we're monitoring it. And we wouldn't have known about any problem if it wasn't for the privatisation. So things are better. Where did they get him from? Let's bring in Bill from the Liberal Democrats. It's an absolutely disgusting situation, isn't it? We've had some serious incidents with flooding, very similar to the one that you've shown there in recent years. But we go back ten years. We had significant flooding in my patch and we saw sewage effluent go into the homes that were flooded there. It's taken ten years for Wessex Water to be able to start working on the solution towards that. Wessex Water is now owned by a Malaysian multinational... Do you think they're getting the message? People are making it the message, aren't they? Robert says it's starting to do the work, but it's actually the exposure that people have made to happen. Absolutely. It's organisations like Surfers Against Sewage and Fergal Sharkey that brought this to the public's attention. But it is absolutely disgusting. If you can pump sewage in, that's fine, that's legal. Perfectly legal if it's unusual, extreme weather. But have we really had 50 extreme weather events over the course of the last year? That's where I'd like to see off what an Iran agency doing more to prosecute, because in my view, we haven't. We've all had the long-term forecast models, warmer, wetter winters. And yeah, it could have been planned for, couldn't it? It could have got more screening in place on these overflows. If you want to see where your local combined sewage overflows are, go onto the Rivers Trust website where they've got an interactive map where Sixwater funded the local wildlife trust to get water guardians or river guardians out spotting pollution. Are they having a laugh? Are they seriously having a laugh? It worries me that when these bodies like the Environment Agency that are charged to look after our environment have all their responsibilities passed over to charities and trusts to engage the public, it becomes a pierce, done. Nothing actually gets done.