What’s the point of Yorkshire Water paying £1m to Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and Yorkshire Dales Rivers Trust? - Yorkshire Post Letters

The £1m payment by Yorkshire Water to Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and Yorkshire Dales Rivers Trust is a payment to pollute.

The two bodies concerned have no authority to carry out works on our rivers without the consent of the landowners and riparian owners. The Environment Agency could of course, if it wished, do such work as it felt necessary.

The truth is we have in the UK a policy of mass uncontrolled immigration and population growth. People are leaving the cities to move into smaller towns and villages, with the result that green fields are concreted over to provide housing, resulting in overloading of sewers and a faster runoff into our rivers.

The result is increased flooding and flooding with sewage from overloaded sewerage systems.

If local authorities were to refuse planning permission for housing, the house builder appeals, an inspector comes up from London, and the Secretary of State is advised to approve the development to meet the housing needs of the growing population,

Yorkshire Water should of course enlarge the sewerage system and the sewage treatment works, but it will not pay the £multi-million costs involved. House builders could be required to install a separate system for sewage and surface water, where the sewage goes to sewers and the surface water to the nearest river or stream. But it all costs money. It is cheaper to pay a piddling sum to organisations which masquerade as charities but live off the taxpayer and the captive customers of the water companies.

The Environment Agency is there to legalise the pollution and that is what it does.

Readers might be interested to learn that the chiefs of the nine water companies between them take home around £15m a year.

When the Tories sold off the publicly owned water companies the buyers bought two liabilities…the water and the sewerage systems each requiring considerable expenditure. They bought one asset….the captive customers who have to pay up and see the aquatic environment polluted.

People who should be paid for the damage done are the riparian owners and angling interests who own and protect our rivers as best they can.

So what should be done? Well one option is to take the water companies back into public control, keep the water companies just for water, give sewerage and sewage treatment to the local authorities and get rid of the EA and restore the river boards.