A tale of United Utilities

I never saw it though, where it left the lake, to then wander south through the long valley, its secret kept behind dense reed beds by the Devils Gallup, until it emerged in private fields and ran parallel, but unseen, of the road south that we often travelled along. Hidden from gaze in gentle homely woodlands.

Or it crisscrossed, as I could frustratingly make out on those maps, the roads that my father’s car never ventured down. For little me it was elusive and secretive until eventually, unseen,it slipped into the huge expanse of Windermere lake and out of trace, the magic gone!

In my rather highbrow scientific study book; The Trout by Frost and Brown, Cunsey Beck was mentioned often in reverential terms in comparisons with other waters. it had been subject of seemingly continual study  by the nearby Freshwater Biological Association. It started to take on a mythological status to me for this reason. A Neverland, a favorite celebrity that I longed to get acquainted with but would never likely meet.

Where we ventured achingly nearby and stayed in holiday cottages, there were no obvious footpaths that crossed the land to it, so I could only  imagine it based upon the many other tumbling freestone streams and rivers in the Lake District  that I had played in; fallen in; failed to catch fish in; or had just stared longingly at from the crowded backseat of a moving old Hillman car.  

Possibly because of being  titled a ‘Beck,’ typically a Lakeland term, it is usually awarded to what turns out to be an insignificant trickle when you finally get to meet them. I therefore imagined it was very small.  A thin ribbon of purity bursting with creatures, a precious vein of life blood enriching the land.

Those Lakeland Becks that I had met, where typically in sheep grazed hill pastures with little rocky shores and often a muddle of stark, iron like tree roots of the gnarly, stunted, weather whipped,  Mountain Ash; Hawthorn; or Crab Apple trees; holding the banksides.   Looking almost like the rocks they held, these chipped and scarred, bark covered knuckles, marooned  with no depth of soil to delve down into, exposed along these watery shores they gripped around the boulders, seemingly for dear life.

The Becks themselves were often skinny drains of always sparkling clear water running off the mountain sides and the fells. Hurrying, stumbling, and fumbling through large boulders and over beds of rounded pebbles. Creating for this child, miniature icy pools and rapids that fallen leaves and petals bobbled along, got stranded and beached in the back waters, or fascinatingly spiraled on unseen little whirlpools. They became mesmerizing , toy sized wild rapids to send twigs careering down as rafts, without smashing into the cavernous sides and all souls on board lost hopelessly in the turmoil. I’d occasionally explore under the surface digging over rocks and finding caddis larvae cases and the occasional Bullhead destined to live out the rest of my holiday in a Jam jar, until I was sent back to the local stream on the final morning to make an emotional and very reluctant, farewell to a no doubt very relieved and confused little fish.

Becks that cut across the rich baize of sheep nibbled sward of the Lake District fells with high bracken ferns around.  Their position in the land outlined with the bare shingle tide lines,marking the last swollen winter flood levels, the stones bleached grey now in weak sunshine and the drying breeze. The waters themselves often spanned with one good stride or leap. This was the Cunsey beck that I had conjured up in my imagination.

At the stage in my life’s journey I finally reached the Freshwater Biological Associations research laboratory on Windermere’s shore, to attend an Entomology  course  in around 2005. To my surprise it wasn’t the lake we were to sample, we were instead packed in a mini bus and delivered to the mythical Cunsey beck and at last I was to meet the legendary water.

They say don’t meet your hero’s, Cunsey Beck was however worthy of the acclaim, and some..

Unlike all other Lakeland streams and rivers that I’d met, here it was sat in a wide flat valley of deep rich soil. This was more like lush southern dairy country of a Constable landscape, than the frugal grassland of the often harsh sheep fells of Wordsworth’s poetry.

The woods we wandered through to greet the water were lower and the trees broader, seemingly more comfortable in the surroundings of this gentle valley away from the cruel winds and exposed slopes of the typical Lake District uplands. Trees beyond this valley often strive to lift above shadowed ground into weak sunshine,  desperately outreaching the competition, while huddled together, clinging to the thin soils on the slopes. Trees of those same species, here however, grew contently by Cunsey, in a completely different shape and habit, leisurely spreading out and taking more space, looking altogether more lush and green.

The thick boughs here, reahed out sideways, covered in mosses, with thick drifts of real Ferns, not coarse Bracken, bedded underneath. The banksides of the Beck itself were wild flowers  and grasses, yellow flag irises and reeds, through which the stream twisted and meandered its way in dappled sunlight. Easily large enough in some areas to have been christened, River.

As refreshingly crystal clear as I had imagined but unlike any Lakeland stream I had encountered, the bed was gentle gravels and occasionally swards of waving Ranunculus weeds. The banksides softened with greenery and fringed with life right down to the water’s edge. The air above the surface was busy  with Dragon flies and Butterflies and a richer variety of small mayflies and caddis than I had seen before. There were frogs and newts in the water and the kick sample turned up, not huge numbers, but a rich variety of life, including native crayfish: swan muscles: Bullheads; Stickle backs; Minnows; Trout fry and dozens of other creatures I couldn’t even guess the name of, or had known existed.

This was the river’s that had existed in England in the times before mankind had managed the landscape and had now long been lost to us, it was a glimpse back to an innocent unsullied past, the aspiration for every tarnished stream and river in the land. Not so much a bench mark of excellence but a timely reminder. Quite rightly it was given the status of a Site of Special Scientific interest. The place demanded it, and thank goodness it was not easily accessible or sullied, and those who lived around it cherished it and seemed to keep the secret close.

That valley through which it flowed contained a few small villages and the occasional farm in the Centre of the National Park. Apart from the appearance of the people visiting the valley and the cars that brought  them into it, time had not changed the place that much. No new dwellings it seemed had been built since Victorian days. The houses, cottages and farm buildings of stone,  mostly had been there since before Beatrix Potter had lived in this valley and wrote books about the animal characters and then used every means at her disposal to preserve the area and its community.

United Utilities took over the management of the water supply and utilities service, as North West Water when the British water industry was privatised in 1989, supposedly as a solution to raise the investment needed to fix and update the crumbling infrastructure of ancient treatment plants and the leaking pipes , and prepare the UK for the increasing population.

 They have in the North West  since they took over, reaped £72 billion in dividends and bonuses as reward for the  good services they have provided. How much they have actually updated the crumbling infrastructure with the funds they have been generously paid in nearly 50 years of payouts, is open for debate.

They bought out the local electricity supply in 1995 and a year later  distanced themselves from the previous poor reputation and failings of North West Water by giving themselves the shiny new name; United Utilities.

Then in 2001 like with the other UK water companies,  they were bizarrely given the responsibility of testing themselves and investigating any problems reported.

In the UK if a sewage plant leaks illegally into the environment there is a fine of £400,000 for the company involved, so now the likely perpetrators get to investigate and police their own crimes. When they have their monthly monitoring of outflows checked, by their own teams. Often United Utilities simply turn off the pipe before the testers arrive, so no sample can be taken and that is marked up as ‘no problem detected’ and a pass for that plant. Last year they passed 191 tests where there was no flow coming out of the pipes to sample.

United utilities are so good based on what appear to be  ‘rigged’ results that they have the reputation of being one of the best water utility companies in the UK on an environmental level. This is important for them, not only does it avoid the fines, but it means they are also awarded for this good practice by the water regulators on behalf of the Government. They are permitted  to put customers’ bills up as a reward for good service, and therefore award themselves bigger bonuses and dividends to the shareholders.

Last year they awarded themselves £300,000,000, This year they are hoping to raise the customers’ bills, and also cash in  bonuses of £340,000,000.

One of the many facilities they took responsibility for was a small sewage pumping station near Sawry that had an out flow for the supposedly clean purified water trickling away from the sewage works by a long hidden pipe that came out into Cunsey Beck. Slowly over recent years though people studying and monitoring Cunsey realized that the samples of life in the Beck where losing diversity and numbers. 76% of the species were lost from the waters under the United Utilities/ EA stewardship of this SSSI. 

The water company denied there was any issue with the facilities at Cunsey or above Esthwaite water at Hawksheadand that; ‘they operated in line with environmental permits’. They should know, as it was up to them to mark their own homework after-all and it was regularly monitored by the companies own employees. And it seems the local Environment Agency kept out of the way and largely turned a blind eye. 

They have been caught out lately, after years of denial, for the state of the decline of Windermere; England’s largest lake, a UNESCO world heritage site. It’s a complex tale of deceit, smoke and mirrors, and invented narrative, including  a cover up and denial of a pipe they had put out into the middle of the lake from which they  were dumping a supply of  raw sewage directly into the deep. A BBC report estimated that they had dumped 140,000,000 litres of sewage into Windermere in the past three years.

In a lake with an average depth of 75 feet of water, hoping I guess it wouldn’t be noticed within the 12,250,000,000 cubic feet of water. But people around the lake noticed the decline and kept complaining. Water researchers kept monitoring and showing the decline in life and the increase in phosphates. Campaign and pressure groups grew and their protests became louder, and United Utilities, when it became obvious that the problem existed, went into Public Relations over-drive to show they shared the concerns of the public, and actively deflect the blame elsewhere. 

The water company denied responsibility, fudged the figures in their press releases and claimed to be working for the environment. And then the algae bloomed one August, and this popular holiday resort became dangerous to man and beast, a line was crossed, and people really took notice and started digging deep into the reports and figures when they could find them, to discover the truth.

United Utilities admit some problems with the lake, they denythat raw sewage is ‘dumped’ in, but claim the ‘failing’ is the result of one ancient treatment plant in Windermere town(Glebe road) which is in need of up-grading now. This they claim is due to the excessive pressure of the huge amount of tourists, spinning the figures to the incredible amounts of between 300,000 and 700,000 per day, and insinuating over 100,000,000 tourists now visit a year ( London by comparison has officially only 30,000,000 in a year) the towns of Windermere and Bowness are not even the size of a London suburb.

They release Press releases claiming there is a direct causal link between the number of Tourists and the algal blooms and plead they will need extra investment to raise the £200 million to upgrade the old Sewage works over the next 5 years, that they claim is sometimes overwhelmed and seem to feel it is for the Government or the bill payers to stump up this cash!

This facility needed upgrading at the time of privatization, but despite the £72 billion taken out of the pot, and the projected £340,000,000 in dividends and bonuses to be paid out this year,  they have only spent £75 million in upgrading the system, and yet cannot find the funds to upgrade this facility. A facility for which they have already been paid to upgrade, generously.

And thus the old Glebe Road sewage pumping station and its crumbling facilities amidst the tourist boom has becomeUnited Utilities patsy for the problems of Windermere.Something they can admit to as being their regrettable contribution to a problem caused by farming and run off in the catchment area, but is hardly, so the narrative goes, something they can reasonably be held responsible for. And which the bill payers and the government need to help them out and fix.

The suspected illegal spills from the Glebe road facility are 42.

Up the road at Ambleside where the United Utilities sewage treatment works are sited on the banks of the River Rothay, that directly flows into Windermere lake, had 90 illegal spills in the same period.

Meanwhile Hawkshead pumping station above Esthwaitewater had 213 illegal spills, and the Sawrey pumping station on the banks of Cunsey beck further downstream, had 83 spills. All ultimately ending up in Windermere after wiping out the life in the Beck. Those plants serve only 370 people in that valley.

They deny the word ‘dumping’ itself and prefer to use the word ‘failing’ in their PR.

They claim that in the pollution of Windermere lake (in a narrative backed by the EA) that the problems are due to underinvestment in this one old facility at Glebe Road, to some extent. But quickly state that equally that the pollution of the lake is caused by the Farming and Septic tanks in the valley. They all share responsibility it is claimed.

“It’s the farmers fault”! is a handy narrative, as the Farmers are taking much of the blame in other regions of the UK quite rightly, where there is factory based Chicken production and intensive Dairy Farming. The animal waste those produce, often ends up as direct run off into the rivers or treated as slurry on the fields which then diffuses into the water courses.

The Farming in the Lake district is mostly very low density sheep farming. There is no researched, nor anecdotalevidence, of it causing any significant damage to the waters in terms of enrichment. In fact in the valleys in the Lake District where the sheep are farmed and there is no United Utilities management, the waters are usually full of life and you would happily and safely drink them. Once they run into a United Utilities affected water course that all changes as does the appearance of the waters.

In the whole Windermere catchment area there are 2000 private septic tanks. It does not necessarily follow that these are failing or blocked up and polluting the lake. It has been calculated by the south Lakeland River Trust, that these could conceivably contribute to just 20% of the phosphates in the Lake. Leaving the rest of the contribution with the United Utilities failing and under-invested facilities, and that blind eye of the Environment Agency.

The Environmental Agencies official spin on this is that since the 1990’s all the key major pollutants have declined in Windermere lake, but more works need doing to tackle ‘all’sources of pollution.

When in years past you Googled the words, Cunsey Beck, you would get a wealth of information about wild life and ecologyand descriptions of a very special and unique place. Nowsadly you just get pages about pollution and mismanagement.It has sadly become a figure head for polluted water, the state of Britain’s rivers now and the scandal of the privitisation of Britian’s utility companies, I’ll come to that next.

What happened at Cunsey beck, that  Site of Special Scientific Interest, is a simpler tale than Windermere, and sums up howbroken and failing the system is with the Utility companies in the UK and the safeguards of the Environment Agency.

A land owner downstream of the Sewage works on June the 20th 2022 noticed the margins of the water were full of hundreds of dead fish, including a rarely seen Atlantic salmon, and there was a strange odour around the water. Then noticed the Beck had a cloud of oily grey water that when traced back came out of the United Utilities pipe at Sawry. It was suspected to be ammonia. The beck above the pipe wasrunning clear.

He immediately rung up the Environment Agency and described the scene and then filmed it. They registered it as a serious category 2 pollution event due to the dead fish and the obvious detrimental effect on the environment.

The EA rang up United Utilities to inform them, they decided to not attend themselves to view the scene or investigate.( It was shown on a BBC Panorama investigation that people working for the EA have stated that United Utilities actually tell the agency which incidents they can investigate and when).

United Utilities sent their own team there to investigate and clean up the dead fish. Witnesses, walkers out on the local footpaths and local environmental volunteers,  stated that there was a cloudy effluent and bad smell below the outlet pipe and that the water was clean above the pipe. It was noted by witnesses that fish kill was below the pipe, one fish, an eel was found just above the outlet, probably it had survived long enough to escape that far. No one knows what it died of, nor do they know what any fish died of. No fish were taken away as samples for toxicology or post mortem. United Utilities claimed there were dead fish all the way up stream to Esthwaite, none of these however were seen by any of the witnesses.

United Utilities then told the Environment agency that there had been no problem with the sewage pumping station and that it had not let out any sewage, suggesting the problem came from Esthwaite water, the stocked Trout fishery and was from the toxins produced from an Algal bloom.

The environment agency turned up at Esthwaite water 3 hours later and took samples of water. People were fishing the lake that day and there was no sign of any concern from the fishery or anglers. They did not visit the sewage works or take any samples below the out flow.

A day later the Agency returned  to Cunsey beck and took a water sample 50 yards above the sewage works and another about a mile downstream of the outlet. The water samples sat on a window sill for weeks degrading before anyone tested them and found they were clear of any problems.

Two days later the Agency then finally kick sampled the invertebrates at the outlet of Esthwaite water; 50 yards ‘above’ the Sawrey outlet; and then nearly a mile downstream of it, and found nothing but a strange increase in worm numbers at the lower sample.

No water sample or  invertebrate kick sample were done below the Sawry out-flow pipe and the United Utility plant, or in the kill zone downstream of it. Maybe the EA people didn’t want to risk getting in that stretch of water?

As a result this pollution event was then  downgraded to a category Four. “Of no impact on the environment” by United Utilities, and then this was signed off and officiated by the EA.

Officially no incident happened at Cunsey Beck and still aclean bill of health for United Utilities despite all the life downstream of that outflow pipe in Cunsey beck being wiped out and the many witness statements, photographs, and the filmed evidence to the contrary.

When a report finally came to light after many delays by the EA, it concluded that no problem was found. None of those witness statements taken, were included, nor referred to, in this report.

In a leaked internal report the lead investigator of UU wrote “When we go public we will need to have a convincing case. In reality we have no idea what happened.”

United utilities responded by putting up a new security camera covering the outflow pipe to watch if anyone was monitoring what was coming out of it.

They had  failed to invest in the capacity needed for the amount they reasonably expect to receive at the plant. And this it seems is the case with their management throughout the North West region. They wait it seems, not until it fails, but when they are caught out; before they belatedly, try to address the management they have already been paid for.

In 931 reported cases of pollution from United Utilities plants last year the Environment Agency investigated only 6 of them.

Of the 3,500 incidents last year the EA visited 5%  of them.

66 cases were initially registered by the EA as category 2,’serious environmental impact’ when reported. Including one incident of dumping 5,000,000 litres of raw untreated sewage directly into the River Mersey.

That, with all the other 65 incidents investigated by the company itself, were subsequently down-graded to category 2 “Of no significant damage to the environment” and then signed off by the Environment agency.

United Utilities as a service provider, officially had no serious incidents last year and didn’t dump any sewage raw or treatedinto the environment, and are appealing against a ruling to disclose to the public, data on the phosphorus monitoring at the Glebe Road plant, and other data from the Cunsey Beck plant.

In all the rebuttals and denials of independent research carried out on the pollution of the lake and the Beck they have never published any of their own analysis.

One little personal observation.

A year back I visited the Freshwater Biological Association and discussed the problems of Windermere with Simon Johnson the chairman. Asking what measures they and the Environment Agency were doing about it.  He described a recent meeting with the Environment Agency when he had decided to not share anymore research with them and refuse to cooperate with them on this issue.

This seemed to me an extraordinary course for natural allies in the fight for clean water.

He described how they kept finding that research they had shared with the EA of the damage caused by United Utilities, instead of being used to build a case against the perpetrator, had then been supplied to United Utilities. Who had then cherry picked through it and distributed press releases making a positive spin on their practices and policies and of the extensive research they claimed they were doing to improve the problems in their region and, wherever possible, deflecting the blame elsewhere.

It seems that throughout the North West of England from Liverpool up for some reason the two are hand in glove. With the Environment Agency this non-departmental public body,sponsored by the UK government with ‘responsibilities relating to the protection and enhancement of the environment in England’, actively turning a blind eye and being complicit in down grading toxic discharges, and categorise them as harmless discharges or non-events. Go figure!

When I read up about the exploits of these water utility companies in the UK and the direct dumping of sewage while stripping out large bonuses it reminds me of a strikingly similar parallel situation with Garbage disposal in Italy and it seems in Ireland. Only those seem a little more honest and transparent as they are managed by the Mob and there is no pretense that its legal or endorsed by the government.

 A former Camorra boss told investigators, “I don’t deal with drugs anymore. Now I have another business. It pays more and the risk is less. It’s called garbage. For us, garbage is gold” (DeRosa, 2016). It was estimated that in one year theillegal disposal of garbage and toxic waste generated 16.3 billion euros for organized crime syndicates throughout Italy.

It seems that compared to what United Utilities are getting away with in a small area of North west England and turning Windermere lake into an open sewer, the Mafia are it seems,just  the rank amateurs at this kind of hustle.