Ministers to appeal against river pollution ruling won by Yorkshire anglers
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High court had ruled government was not meeting legal duty to clean up Costa Beck near Pickering. The UK environment secretary, Steve Reed, is pursuing legal action against a group of anglers who are trying to restore the ecosystem of a river. Lawyers for Reed will argue on Tuesday in the court of appeal that cleaning up individual rivers and streams devastated by pollution is administratively unworkable.
The appeal was begun by the previous Conservative administration, after Pickering Fishery Association, a fishing club in North Yorkshire, won a landmark legal case against the government and the Environment Agency. The anglers successfully argued that the government and the Environment Agency had failed in their legal duties to protect the Costa Beck, a former trout stream near Pickering which has been devastated by sewage pollution and runoff from fish farms.
The judgment ruled that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Environment Agency had devised plans for the Costa Beck that were so vague and lacking in commitment to real, on-the-ground action they would inevitably be ineffectual. It followed more than a decade of action by Pickering Fishery Association over the failure of the agency to restore the health of the river.
Reed’s decision to continue the legal action flew in the face of Labour’s stated commitment to clean up rivers, according to Penny Gane, of NGO Fish Legal. “This new government came into power promising that cleaning up our rivers, lakes and seas was a top priority,” said Gane. “The fact that it is fighting our angler members in court to avoid doing the hard work necessary to bring about any improvements in the health of Britain’s rivers flies in the face of that commitment.
