Stormwater pollution

Stormwater runoff is unregulated, yet is one of the main reasons London’s river have poor water quality. Every time it rains pollution is washed off roads and areas like car parks. Larger paved areas are meant to have interceptors to clean the water before it reaches a river. If they don’t they are breaking the law. But the Environment Agency isn’t using the Environmental Permitting Regulations to control this contamination. We also asked the regulator if it checks whether car parks have installed these devices or if they are maintained, but they don’t. For rivers to stand a chance of being healthy we need to cut the amount of dirty water that flows into them. This is preventable pollution and we need to see greater action.

Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee in 2022 said “Diffuse pollution from highways, towns and cities can lead to chronic impacts on the quality of aquatic life in rivers as it accumulates in sediments.”

We want to see compliance with the law. The companies that are making greater efforts should be recognised, and the polluter pays approach applied to those that send their runoff to rivers.

We are developing the next phase of this campaign, based on our research.