Thousands of blue-clad protesters have told the government to “stop poisoning Britain’s water” as they marched through London calling for action on the country’s contaminated coastal waters and rivers.
A coalition of more than 130 nature, environmental and water-sport organisations called supporters out on to the streets of the capital on Sunday afternoon, aiming to create the country’s biggest ever protest over water.
The broadcaster Chris Packham, the actor Jim Murray and Giles Bristow, the chief executive of the campaign group Surfers Against Sewage, led the march from the Albert Embankment in Vauxhall to Parliament Square, with banners reading: “Stop poisoning Britain’s waterways” and “Cut the crap, save our rivers”.
Behind them thousands of protesters clad in blue, many of them carrying the multicoloured flags of the climate activist movement Extinction Rebellion, followed dancing to samba bands and waving placards, most homemade.
Bristow said: “We’ve been campaigning for over 30 years – nearly 35 years, in fact – to end shit in our waters, because we are fed up of surfing, of swimming, of trying to enjoy our natural blue spaces but they’re being polluted in front of our eyes.
“So we’re joining in because it’s a march for clean water and we’re saying it’s time to cut the crap. We’ve got to get on, sort out this shit show.”
Charles Watson, the founder and director of the charity River Action, the lead organiser, said: “One of the key demands of this march is that this notion that it can be profitable to pollute has got to stop, that the laws have got to be enforced.
“And in order to enforce the laws, the bodies that are tasked to do that [have] got to be reformed, they’ve got to be taken to pieces and put back together again and most importantly they’ve got to be properly funded.”
The protest comes amid a crisis in the country’s water provision. Last year, raw sewage was discharged for more than 3.6m hours into rivers and seas by England’s water companies, a 105% increase on the previous 12 months. At the same time, mass deaths of fish in England’s rivers have increased almost tenfold since 2020.
The UN rapporteur for the right to clean water, Prof Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, last month singled out the privatised English water system for criticism, accusing the sector’s regulators of being ineffective and unaccountable.
Meanwhile, the water industry has extracted vast profits from customers, while saddling their companies with billions in debt. Last year, the Guardian revealed that more than a quarter of water bills in London and parts of the south of England have been spent paying the interest on the debt the companies hold.
Watson said: “The underlying cause of the problem is the fact the regulatory system that is there to enforce the law and hold polluters to account, has literally systemically failed.
“Ofwat, the water regulator, was supposed to be there to protect the environment, to protect customers from the privatised industry paying themselves too much. But they failed, over 70bn [pounds] of dividends has been stripped out of the industry, money that was desperately needed to be invested in making the system future-proof.”
The protest attracted huge numbers of supporters, affiliated to a diverse range of organisations including the National Federation of Women’s Institutes and the GMB union.
Melissa Green, the chief executive of the WI, said: “Our members have been calling for action against water pollution unbelievably since 1927. That was the first time we raised the alarm with government about the quality of the water in our communities, and then we raised it again in the 60s, again in the 80s, and again in 2023.
“Our message for government is you’ve got the regulation, you’ve got the regulators, you need to hold people to account. We know that our water is being polluted wantonly, knowingly, for profit, and we can’t understand why the government are not taking more action.”
