What is the state of Britain today, as Labour sets out on its mission to turn the country around? Across a number of key policy areas we are exploring the mountain the new government has to climb. To better understand how this poor inheritance came to be, Fiona Harvey gets under the bonnet of the failures and missteps of Tory governments from 2010 to 2024 on environmental regulation, uncovering ‘how they broke it’.
Water companies poured sewage into English waterways for more than 3.6 million hours last year, making it the worst on record for untreated waste polluting rivers and sea. Since 2010, the incidence of hospitalisation for waterborne disease in the UK has risen by more than 60%. Before the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race in March, several of the Oxford crew contracted stomach bugs, suspected to be related to sewage spills in the Thames.
Nothing exemplifies the UK government’s failures on the environment as clearly and as strikingly as the floods of raw sewage fouling England’s rivers and beaches. It is a tragedy for the UK’s natural environment, a running sore that is killing rivers and could take generations to heal – and a stark case study in how not to do environmental regulation, a warning to other countries and to future parliaments.
Ministers by turns ignored the problem, obscured it within an opaque regulatory system, slashed funding to the regulator, failed to bring the water companies into line, and finally made inadequate attempts at solutions that merely muddied the regulatory waters. The result? A stinking mess, one that has not only sickened the electorate – literally, in some cases, harmed tourism and sport, and made Britain an object of international horror, but has become an emblem of systemic failure that has dragged on through long parliamentary years, featuring strongly in two losing by-elections, and haunted this year’s general election.
When the history comes to be written of the last Conservative government, along with crowded A&E wards and queues of ambulances, the abiding image of the last 14 years will be of rivers and beaches filling with dirty brown untreated waste water.
Sewage is only the most photogenic of the environmental issues the last government stumbled over. From cutting greenhouse gas emissions to reducing plastic waste; from the low-carbon technology race and green jobs to wildlife and farming; from international climate diplomacy to the air we breathe: on the widest possible range of green policies, and on the most generous of environmental measures, the Conservative government tripped up again and again, sometimes by design, and sometimes haplessly.
It was a government that vacillated on renewable energy, fracking, nuclear power and green innovation such as carbon capture and storage; that set up and then sold off a green investment bank; that truncated HS2 and other railway improvements in favour of more road-building and expanding airports; that banned onshore wind farms and largely abandoned home insulation; that presided over a rapid decline in the UK’s species; that vowed to “max out” the North Sea’s oil and gas reserves, and greenlighted the first new coal mine for 30 years.
Amid these mis-steps, it’s hard to discern any progress. Yet there has been some. The UK is now powered more than ever by renewables, which made up 40% of electricity generation in 2024, compared with 1% for coal, which made up a third of the power sector in 2010. Greenhouse gas emissions fell by 5.4% last year, adding up to a 50% reduction since 1990.
While few voters may have marked their Xs last July purely on the basis of a government’s perceived shade of green, environment consistently ranks among the top issues for voters. That shows in the way green policies have been a political focus – positive and negative – for the Tory party for the last two decades. From David Cameron’s husky-hugging campaign as part of his “detoxification” of his party’s brand in the mid-2000s, to Theresa May’s legacy of enshrining the net zero goal in law, and Boris Johnson’s vow to “build back greener” after the Covid-19 pandemic – Conservative leaders have embraced green motives, drawing on a deep well of green Toryism that identifies with stewardship and a connection to the countryside, and benefitting from a longstanding cross-party consensus on the need for climate action.
And just as quickly, prime ministers have ditched those same principles, every time they felt the need to tack to the right. Cameron, before the 2015 election, let it be known he wanted to “cut the green crap”, appeasing his disgruntled right-wing MPs by effectively barring onshore wind turbines; Liz Truss, a former Environment Secretary, managed to call into question the net zero target before she was ousted; and Rishi Sunak, ahead of what looked certain to be a testing party conference last September, shredded key aspects of his government’s net zero plans, and boosted efforts to drain the North Sea of oil and gas.
Green policies present a conundrum for any right-of-centre party. Environmental problems cannot be simply left to the free market to solve – far from it, as most are directly or indirectly the result of capitalist exploitation of resources. Protecting and repairing the environment requires the enforcement of the “polluter pays” principle, perhaps using market mechanisms to put the costs of environmental degradation back on to the companies causing it, and relying on strong regulation, of the type that the right deride as “red tape” but that actually, in this case, is one of the cords that bind nature and society together.
All of these factors were at play in the case of the UK’s sewage calamity. An unnoticed and unglamorous area of politics – keeping clean water coming out of the taps must rank as one of the most basic tasks of any developed country government – England’s water was judged by many to be a successful example of privatisation, after 1989.
In reality, the privatised water companies were never investing enough in network maintenance and water storage, and arguably Labour when last in government should have paid more attention. But the problems really took off after 2010, when chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne embarked on his drive for austerity.
Caroline Spelman, then Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, enthusiastically signed up for the steepest cuts in Whitehall – a third of the department’s budget was slashed.
In a press conference to announce the cuts, Spelman was asked (by me) what would Defra do less of as a result? Nothing, was her reply. We will continue to do everything we did before, she told a group of sceptical journalists. (Press conferences are now rarer than ecologically healthy English rivers. We can only hope that Labour cares enough about democratic accountability to bring them back.)
Spelman was incorrect to say that Defra would not be doing any less. Of course the budget cuts had a massive impact on the Environment Agency’s ability to enforce regulations, on everything from farming to water to air and greenhouse gas emissions. Only 6% of sewage works were visited by inspectors per year to 2019, as water companies were largely left alone over the preceding decade to self-report any illegal spills.
As much as the absence of inspections, the cuts and the ongoing emphasis on a “bonfire of red tape” and de-emphasis on the environment carried a strong signal to water companies. They took advantage of low interest rates following the 2008 financial crisis to load themselves further with debt, up to £53bn by 2023, and continued to pay out almost all of their profits in dividends, amounting to more than £70bn paid out since privatisation. (For more on the defunding of regulatory agencies, see ‘Rebuilding the Regulatory Ecosystem’).
Water companies have been aware of the growing problem of raw sewage entering rivers for decades: the UK’s sewers were designed by their Victorian creators to outflow into rivers when overwhelmed in emergencies, but that supposedly rare occurrence was growing more frequent. But instead of tackling the issue, they built their profit models on exploiting their licence to pollute. Investment, meanwhile, languished: investment dropped by 15% each decade after 1989, and no new reservoirs have been built in thirty years, while ageing pipes have grown leakier and a growing population has driven higher demand.
It was only when massive public outrage erupted, from 2020 onwards, following investigations by the Guardian and others that showed the shocking extent of routine sewage pollution by the water companies, that ministers stepped in – and even then, instead of punishing the water companies, their first step was to make it easier for them to pollute with impunity.
Now, water bosses want to increase bills by as much as 40% for the investment needed to repair the damage. That will prove to be a scourge for this new government, left to clean up the mess, a process likely to take decades.
Government vacillation on green policy has had many more casualties. Soaring gas prices, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have exposed the long-running scandal of the UK’s leaky homes – the draughtiest in Europe – which a succession of ministers over the last 14 years have failed to fix.
The coalition government brought in a “green deal” in 2013, under which households could obtain a loan for energy efficiency upgrades. Take-up was slow, however, as the terms were still onerous for many households, and the scheme was scrapped in 2015. For years after that, there was no government help for most households seeking insulation.
Insulation levels fell drastically after the scrapping of the first green deal, and they have never recovered. This left households cruelly exposed when heating bills began to rise sharply following the Ukraine war. The lack of any insulation programme, along with the scrapping of generous subsidies for solar power installations, and the effective block on onshore wind – the cheapest form of electricity generation – have added about £2.5bn a year to household bills by 2022, according to Carbon Brief, leaving households at least £40 worse off a year on average.
The last government’s decision to delay to new homebuilding standards, initially designed by Labour to ensure all homes were built to low-carbon specifications with high-grade insulation and renewable energy, has also meant that more than 1.5m newly built homes will have to be expensively retrofitted in future, to meet the net zero target. Homebuilders have benefitted to the tune of at least £5bn, through savings on the cost of installing such measures, while homeowners have been saddled with the future costs of about £20bn to retrofit them, according to estimates by the Guardian. Homebuilders have donated at least £40m to the Tory party’s coffers since 2010.
Brexit has also had a major impact on environmental policy. For more than 40 years, most of the UK’s environmental targets were agreed in Brussels, often with the UK playing a leading role in insisting on higher standards across the bloc, on issues such as animal welfare, food safety and pollution.
But withdrawal from the EU put those regulations into play. Although the Conservative government insisted that it would maintain EU protections, by putting them into UK law, that did not happen.
For instance, the UK government was repeatedly taken to court in the late 2010s over failures to clean up the country’s filthy air, particularly in cities, including London. By 2018 the government had lost three times, and the high court ruled that government plans to tackle the problem had been “severely flawed”, inadequate to meet the EU’s air quality targets, and must be revised.
That should have meant stronger action to reduce the causes of air pollution: diesel vehicles; increasingly, wood burning; and ammonia from farming. Instead, the government set out plans for new UK air pollution targets, promising that they would be as stringent as those in the EU. And technically they were right: the new UK rules requiring air to contain no more than 10 micrograms per cubic metre of PM2.5, one of the most harmful pollutants, are the same as those of the EU.
The only difference is that the government gave itself an extra decade to meet these new targets. EU member states will be required to reach the targets by 2030; the UK, not until 2040.
Therese Coffey, Environment Secretary at the time, explained that she had decided against a tougher target. “Now, I would have loved to have made our target to achieve 10 micrograms by 2030, not 2040… but the evidence shows that with the best will in the world we cannot achieve that everywhere by the end of the decade, particularly in London,” she said.
Air quality experts disputed this claim, saying it was possible to cut pollution to the lower level, with more stringent restriction on diesel vehicles and wood burners, more attention to ammonia pollution from farming, and a higher uptake of clean technology. About 36,000 preventable deaths in the UK each year are attributed to air pollution, and many millions more people are harmed, sometimes irrevocably.
Withdrawal from the EU has also meant the UK has quietly diverged from EU law on a wide variety of other environmental measures. The Guardian found that on areas including chemical regulation, pesticides, battery recycling, deforestation rules, rare materials, and waste, the UK had diverged – for the worse – from EU standards. The last government did not even manage to put in place a long-promised scheme for return deposits on bottles.
When questioned on their government’s environmental record, Tory ministers liked to point to the growth in offshore wind as a clear example of how the UK is attracting investment – more than £30bn in offshore wind alone since last September, and more than £200bn in green investment since 2010, according to them.
However, even offshore wind has not been an unmixed success story. The government’s attempt to run an auction for new developments last year produced not a single bid, after ministers failed to gauge prices correctly. That has been changed, and more bids may be forthcoming in the next round.
When it comes to onshore wind, Cameron’s effective ban in 2015 has prevented all but a handful of new turbines in England. In 2022-23, fewer wind turbines were erected in England than in Ukraine.
For several years now, some on the right of UK politics have tried to turn the green agenda into a culture war issue, breaking the cross-party consensus on the climate that has endured since the days of Margaret Thatcher. This risks leaving behind evidence-based policy and a commitment to meeting international obligations, in favour of some weakened form of the climate denialism that has scarred and ruptured US politics. If those forces succeed, the consequences will play out far beyond this next parliament.
Fiona Harvey is an award-winning journalist who has covered the environment since 2004, first at the Financial Times and subsequently for the Guardian newspaper. She has written extensively on every environmental issue, from air pollution and biodiversity to ocean plastic and climate change. Her assignments have taken her as far afield as the Arctic and the Amazon, and she has attended almost every UNFCCC Cop since 2004. She has twice won the Foreign Press Association award for Environment Story of the Year; the British Environment and Media Awards journalist of the year; the 2022 global Society of Environmental Journalists outstanding beat reporting award for Cop26; a prestigious Covering Climate Now award in 2024; and in 2020 she was named in the Woman’s Hour Power List of 30 top UK women, focusing on Our Planet.
