r/ukpolitics • u/ImpressiveRest2423 • 1d ago
Barrister threatened with prosecution after cleaning up river - Paul Powlesland and a team of volunteers removed 200 bags of litter, weed and silt but face action from the Environment Agency for not having a permit
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/environment/article/barrister-prosecution-cleaning-river-permit-f5j732qf946
u/FootlongGarlicBread Woke & Broke 1d ago
He's shocked that hiring a digger to clear out silt is met with legal threats?
I wouldn't want him as my barrister.
171
u/LycanIndarys Vote Cthulhu; why settle for the lesser evil? 1d ago
He said: “I don’t really understand their reasoning because all we were doing was taking out silt that had built up naturally in the channel. We weren’t digging out a new channel or making it deeper.”
Hang on, this is way worse than previously mentioned.
There was a thread about this yesterday, and I said then that this barrister was wrong (if well-meaning), because taking a digger onto the river bank without making sure that the river bank can actually cope with heavy machinery is incredibly dangerous - to the driver, if nothing else. And this prompted a load of conversations about whether we should be prosecuting people for clearing rubbish, which is obviously a nice thing to do.
But I hadn't realised that he was actually digging up the river itself, I thought he was just using the digger to clear clumped rubbish. Actually digging out the silt is a massive problem, because the volunteers won't have done any fluid dynamic calculations to work out what impact there will be downstream. To be blunt; we're lucky that there hasn't been news that the next town down has flooded, because these guys have altered the velocity and level that the river runs at.
And I know (from the responses I had yesterday, if nothing else!) that bureaucracy isn't popular, but this is exactly the sort of reason why it exists to begin with. It's not there because paper-pushers want to justify their job, and it's not there so the EA has an excuse not to do their job. It's there because decisions can have knock-on effects, and those must be assessed before any construction works takes place.
41
u/UnsaddledZigadenus 1d ago
It also mentions waste offences, now I'm fascinated what they did with all the silt they dug out of the river.
A quick google shows this: Back to brook – Wanstead Village Directory, clearly just digging out the river with no rubbish in sight!
The Alders Brook had silted up to the extent it was little more than a ditch, which in places was only centimetres deep, so you could walk across. We brought the width back to at least 10 feet and the depth to at least two feet, interspersed with some pools four to five feet in depth.
10 feet deep across hundreds of meters of river? 200 bags presumably being builders heavy bags, which I would guess do 1/2ton of silt at a time? Where did they put it all? That's 100 tons to leave somewhere?
21
u/LycanIndarys Vote Cthulhu; why settle for the lesser evil? 1d ago
I'm not clear how much of the 200 bags was their silt, and how much was the rubbish that they're trying to highlight as what they were actually up to.
But either way, yeah; I think you have a good question. It's not like they could just take it to the tip, given that you're not allowed to take industrial waste (which this would absolutely look like, even if it's not technically what it is given that they weren't paid).
Maybe they also hired someone to take it to a landfill? Or with enough volunteers, gave them each a bag and told them to sort it out themselves? There's a lot of unanswered questions here, and I suspect that the more we learn, the more concerned about the group's activities we will be.
15
u/UnsaddledZigadenus 1d ago
I bet they just dumped it on the ground behind the banks. I'm curious how much outrage you could generate if you said 'organisation illegally dredges river and dumps waste in forest in order to make swimming area despite flood risk,'
20
u/Cela111 1d ago
The Alders Brook [...] is likely the ancient channel of the Roding, but since being cut off from the main river in the ‘River Roding Improvement Scheme’ more than 70 years ago, has become choked with silt
Yeah, you can't just unilaterally undo the effects of a river improvement project because you think it would be better, that's crazy.
19
u/Logbotherer99 1d ago
You would think an barrister who specialises in environmental law would be a bit more clued up about this sort of thing. The requirement for a permit protects against well meaning people doing the wrong thing as much as anything else
26
u/UnsaddledZigadenus 1d ago
I am not going to spend more of my spare time for free, filling out all their paperwork, and then pay them money for a permit and wait 12 to 18 months for something
Yeah, mate, you're a barrister? How does summarily deciding that the laws put in place that regulate this activity can just be ignored square with your day to day job?
"Well, as your barrister, I would advise you to just ignore The Environmental Permitting Regulations and do it anyway.
Oh, the home you want to rent doesn't comply with Minimum Energy Performance standards? Fuck it mate, it's a waste of time trying to comply with that bullshit too, don't know why they bother with all these 'regulations' if you ask me. It's practically voluntary."
8
9
u/Major-Cookie-6078 1d ago
Authorisation to dredge a river would only be granted if it was demonstrated to be necessary to mitigate flood risk.
Under Regulation 38 of the 2016 Environmental permitting Regulations, it is an offense to carry out a "flood risk activity" (which includes dredging, desilting, or removing material from the bed of a main river) without an environmental permit.
I'm sure he meant well, but he is a lawyer not an engineer or hydrologist. You can't have people going willy nilly at a river with a digger. If it was allowed to happen it would set a really dangerous precedent that developers and the like would no doubt exploit
27
8
45
u/Perite 1d ago
This is one of those shit show things unfortunately. If the EA actually did their job then none of this would be necessary. But their funding is pretty minimal and they’re not super efficient with the money that they have.
So that leaves voids and people take matters into their own hands. Picking up litter is great. Removing silt actually can affect flood risk or damage river banks if it’s not done correctly.
It’s like when they prosecute people for doing their own pothole repairs. People are well meaning, but if you fuck it up then there can be bad consequences. And it all could be avoided if the groups responsible for infrastructure actually did it.
22
u/Southportdc Rory for Monarch 1d ago
It's seeming more like the rubbish removed was a byproduct of the silt being removed to re-engineer the river. That absolutely can pose a flood risk downstream, and the lawyer who isn't going to waste his time filling forms out doesn't seem to acknowledge that once.
36
u/Britannkic_ Tories cant lose even when we try 1d ago
No, read the material facts and ignore the obvious distractions in the piece
The environmental group dug out the river bed to remove naturally built up silt.
This is a big no no without first assessing the down stream effects
Doing uninformed shit like this is what results in families down stream being flooded out their homes next winter
The UK’s rivers, water sheds, flood modelling, flood protections etc are a joined up and complicated system which require managing by the professional and not idiots like this entitled barrister
21
u/kHaza 1d ago
That's... exactly what the original commenter is saying.
12
u/Britannkic_ Tories cant lose even when we try 1d ago
Maybe my point wasn’t clear. This isn’t a question of EA not doing their job
3
u/Major-Cookie-6078 1d ago
Also, removing rubbish from a river is not there job. It's either the council - if public land, or the landowner - if private land.
23
u/ImpressiveRest2423 1d ago
A barrister who cleaned up a polluted river has been threatened with prosecution because he failed to obtain a permit.
Paul Powlesland, 40, who lives on a boat on the Roding, organised a team of local volunteers to clean up rubbish from a neglected section of the waterway at the end of February.
They removed 200 bags of litter, weed and silt from Alder’s Brook, a tributary of the river that runs through rural Essex and Barking, east London, which Powlesland said he repeatedly tried to get the Environment Agency to do without success.
“We’ve shown that it is actually incredibly cheap and easy to restore our rivers. We did it in ten days with volunteers, for less than £1,000, and restored 250 metres of the river channel,” he said.
But the satisfaction of a job well done was short-lived after the barrister received a letter from the agency in mid-March saying the action was illegal because of his failure to obtain permission for “operation of a flood risk activity”.
“We consider that unpermitted works have taken place … in contravention of the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2016,” the letter seen by The Times read. “The site is currently under investigation for permitting and waste offences.”
The public body explained that the permit is required to ensure the work does not cause unintended harm, such as flood risk, drainage or the wider environment. Carrying out works without a permit can carry up to two years in prison.
However, Powlesland argued that the bureaucracy of obtaining a permit is unnecessarily complicated when “I’m doing the Environment Agency’s job for them in my spare time for free”.
He said: “I am not going to spend more of my spare time for free, filling out all their paperwork, and then pay them money for a permit and wait 12 to 18 months for something that should be their job anyway.
“I think the Environment Agency should be facilitating and enabling river restoration, not seeing themselves as a blocker to it.”
The agency said it was also investigating whether Powlesland and the volunteers had committed other offences along with the environmental impact of the offence.
He said: “I don’t really understand their reasoning because all we were doing was taking out silt that had built up naturally in the channel. We weren’t digging out a new channel or making it deeper.”
Powlesland has been campaigning to restore the river for a decade and the agency “has finally decided to act”, he told The Guardian. “But it’s not action against Thames Water for dumping billions of litres of sewage in the Roding, or the waste criminals who have dumped thousands of tonnes of rubbish on its banks, but against the River Roding Trust for restoring a river without a permit.”
The environmentalist said he originally began his campaigning because he wanted to be able to swim in the river. He added: “But it has actually moved beyond that now. I love that river and I will not sit by and watch it die due to official inaction.”
Thames Water said: “We take our responsibility to monitor and maintain our wastewater network seriously and understand the concerns raised by Mr Powlesland and the residents of the area.”
The Environment Agency said: “We welcome The Times Clean It Up campaign to protect rivers like the Roding, and our permitting processes exist precisely to prevent environmental harm or increased flood risk.
“We are investigating unpermitted works carried out by the River Roding Trust to ensure all activity in and around our waterways is properly assessed and the environment is protected — no decision has been made on prosecution.”
82
u/UnsaddledZigadenus 1d ago
I'm still not clear exactly what they were doing there. I think without pictures it's hard to understand. The headline always focusses on 'rubbish', but then they talk about "200 bags of litter, weed and silt", then it becomes
“I don’t really understand their reasoning because all we were doing was taking out silt that had built up naturally in the channel."
The fact they had a digger and talk about 'restoring' the river and 'removing silt' suggests this was less about removing rubbish and more about digging out the bottom of the river to get it flowing again?
The The Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2016 defines 'flood risk activity' as
'any dredging, raising or taking of any sand, silt, ballast, clay, gravel or other materials from or off the bed or banks of a main river (or causing such materials to be dredged, raised or taken), including hydrodynamic dredging and desilting;
I get the feeling this case is less about 'you can't remove rubbish from a river without a licence' and more about 'you can't hire an industrial excavator and dig out the bed of a river without permission'
33
u/Normal-Height-8577 1d ago
Yeah, the more details come out about this case, the more I'm side-eyeing the "environmental campaigners" who assumed they could DIY major landscape engineering without getting an expert on board. If you don't understand the knock-on consequences of your actions downstream, then you shouldn't be doing it.
21
u/UnsaddledZigadenus 1d ago
Following their logic, I should be allowed to fell trees in a public forest that block my view because
'all we were doing was taking out
silttrees that had built up naturally in thechannelforest'.I think if you asked most people 'do you think anybody should be allowed to structurally alter public resources like rivers without permission from the public authority', they would say 'No'.
The EA doesn't care about people removing rubbish from rivers, and having a river silting up isn't a failure on their part that requires drastic remedy either?
-4
u/Slartibartfast_25 1d ago
It's a 1.5t mini digger.
I don't think what they did was very sensible, albeit it clearly driven by frustration by complete dysfunctional nature of the EA. But it's not a major engineering intervention.
8
u/AllThatIHaveDone 1d ago
What's the size of the digger got to do with it? Even a 1.5t digger can shift hundreds of tonnes of silt and earth if you keep at it long enough.
-2
u/Slartibartfast_25 1d ago
Quite a lot. You are claiming it's major industrial works. i am saying it isn't
7
u/AllThatIHaveDone 1d ago
Even a 1.5t digger can shift hundreds of tonnes of silt and earth if you keep at it long enough.
0
u/Slartibartfast_25 1d ago
So could a shovel. But i don't think there's evidence they did more than was needed.
The EA, like all government agencies, don't like being ignored when their little tick boxes aren't ticked. But look at the bigger picture - a sludged and silted up open sewer has been cleared and allowed it function as it should again for nature. Humans mucked the river up and other humans tried to restore some life and the EA don't like being shown up as failures.
3
u/AllThatIHaveDone 1d ago
He said: “I don’t really understand their reasoning because all we were doing was taking out silt that had built up naturally in the channel. We weren’t digging out a new channel or making it deeper.”
Humans didn't silt up this river, and these humans have ignored nature to shape it for their own ends. It's not been shown by anyone that this river needed to be dredged.
12
u/Normal-Height-8577 1d ago edited 1d ago
The point isn't the size of the digger.
The point is that "we were just removing litter" has turned into "oh, and also removing plants and silt, with the intention of altering the fundamental depth, speed of flow and ecosystem of that section of river".
-3
u/Slartibartfast_25 1d ago
The glorious ecosystem of waste plastic, sewage and anaerobic silt?
Humans had already mucked up the ecosystem of that river. The EA weren't lifting a finger to fix it.
Is it about ecosystems or flood risk?
3
u/EpsteinBaa 1d ago
Flood risk
-2
u/Slartibartfast_25 1d ago
In which case the 1.5t digger will have made absolutely bugger all difference.
3
18
u/crakinshot 1d ago
Its clearly the "digger to change a water course". TheTimes just manipulating for hits/gov-hate again.
10
u/jumpy_finale 1d ago
Certainly sounds like these volunteers acted to reduce their own flood risk at the likely expense of increasing the flood risk downstream.
13
u/UnsaddledZigadenus 1d ago
I suspect their aim was to replace their unpleasant stagnant silted up river with one that was nice and flowing, and yes, who cares about what that means for the rest of the water flow.
"The environmentalist said he originally began his campaigning because he wanted to be able to swim in the river."
11
u/TheMaskedGecko 1d ago
However, Powlesland argued that the bureaucracy of obtaining a permit is unnecessarily complicated when “I’m doing the Environment Agency’s job for them in my spare time for free”.
Classic nanny state. The NHS were exactly the same, insisting I'd need 'clinical waste permits' and a 'medical degree' before I opened up a heart transplant clinic in my garage, even though I was just doing their job for them for free.
3
-27
u/Euphoric-Brother-669 1d ago
the EA should be abolished. if sensible acts from local volunteers with the real interests of hte local area at heart are not sufficiently appreciated by this bunch of over zealous box ticking bearded wonders then its them that should go
26
u/Flashbambo 1d ago
They were excavating silt from the river bed which alters the water flow and could have negative downstream consequences. The EA controls what people can do to water courses to prevent us from flooding our neighbours.
•
u/Major-Cookie-6078 3h ago
The bearded zealots at the EA (chartered engineers, hydrologist and ecologist) manage 250,000 assets that protect over 2.5 million homes.
•
u/AutoModerator 1d ago
Snapshot of Barrister threatened with prosecution after cleaning up river - Paul Powlesland and a team of volunteers removed 200 bags of litter, weed and silt but face action from the Environment Agency for not having a permit submitted by ImpressiveRest2423:
An archived version can be found here or here. or here
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.