The regulations in place to protect people swimming in rivers and lakes in Northern Ireland could better protect the public if they were updated, a report by the Office for Environmental Protection has concluded.
The report finds that the regulatory regime in place is being followed but it is outdated as the regulatory requirements have not kept pace with the changing ways in which society uses rivers, lakes and coastal waters for recreation.
The report says that the regulations focus on swimming, and any future review should consider expanding that to include surfing paddle-boarding, wind-surfing and the like. The regulations also focus on a fixed ‘bathing season,’ which does not reflect the year-round nature of the activities.
Any review should also consider the approach to sampling water quality, with a view to increasing the number of sample points on long stretches of water and being more open about monitoring decisions.
A separate and recent OEP report on a related topic, the implementation of the Water Framework Directive NI Regulations found that progress is not on track to meet the environmental objectives set for most identified waters. This is due to a range of factors including a lack of clear objectives, or specific and certain measures to achieve those objectives.
Bathing waters have the status of ‘protected areas’ under the WFD NI Regulations. Despite this, the OEP finds the same implementation issues apply to them too. There is a lack of site-specific information on measures to meet the required standards, and no clear indication for what overall levels of bathing water quality DAERA aims for or expects to achieve.
Dame Glenys Stacey, Chair of the OEP, said: “Healthy rivers, lakes, and seas support a healthy economy, and allow nature to thrive. Good quality open water is also increasingly important for human health. With more people participating in outdoor water pursuits, it is ever more necessary to make sure that enjoying Northern Ireland’s waters is not just fun, but good for us, rather than a risk to our health and wellbeing.
“We have taken an in-depth look at the Bathing Water NI Regulations and found that they have fallen out of step with the needs of today. They originate from developments in the 1970s and 1980s and have not kept pace with the evolving ways in which waters are now used for recreational purposes, or with public expectations.
“It is fair to say that the regulations have led to significant improvements in bathing water quality since they were introduced around three decades ago, and we can see that important elements of the regulations – monitoring, classification and reporting requirements – are being implemented.
“Nevertheless, the lack of overall improvement in water quality observed in recent years, combined with a number of bathing water sites failing to achieve sufficient or better standards, is a cause for concern and has been widely reported.
“For the public to be better protected and enjoy the significant health and wellbeing advantages of being active, closer to nature and more connected to their communities, the regulatory regime needs to be more expansive and more effective.”
The report makes 11 recommendations to DAERA, including:
- To consider whether wider categories of water users should be taken into account, not just those whose intention is to swim, but also those who would normally or frequently expect to be immersed (such as surfers).
- To review the current identification criteria for bathing waters to ensure it covers sites where large numbers of people bathe, based on a properly representative assessment of current use, rather than a fixed number of bathers.
- To consider options to expand the bathing water season to better match the actual usage of bathing waters by significant numbers of people. This could include considering the possible use of different season lengths at different locations.
- To pursue the further development of short-term pollution risk forecasting systems so that health risks can be better understood and communicated to the public with greater speed, including for inland sites which may be increasingly identified as bathing waters.
In the on-going implementation of the WFD NI Regulations, ensure that:
- The objectives set for bathing waters in River Basin Management Plans are sufficiently ambitious.
- Back-up those objectives with clear, specific and time-bound measures to achieve them at the level of individual water bodies.
- The identification of those measures considers all relevant pressures, including from agriculture and other sources, as well as the water industry.
