The Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) has submitted a response to Defra’s consultation on reform of the Bathing Waters Regulations.
This response builds on the OEP’s own report published recently on the implementation of these regulations, addressing a number of additional points.
Dame Glenys Stacey, Chair of the OEP said: “I am pleased to see that Defra has launched a consultation on reform of the Bathing Water Regulations. These regulations are in need of updating to reflect changes to recreational water use since their introduction, and better protect the public.
“Although we published our report shortly before the consultation, we completed it before we had seen Defra’s proposals. As a result, our report does not address all the issues in the consultation and we have submitted additional information to provide a more complete response.”
The OEP’s report on the implementation of Bathing Water Regulations, published last month (November), found that the requirements to identify, monitor and classify bathing waters are being implemented broadly as required, but the requirements are outdated.
The consultation response states that the proposed reforms and the OEP report recommendations are generally aligned in a number of areas and comments on how these changes should be made. These are:
- Removal of the ‘automatic de-designation’ provision from the regulations
- Including assessment of the feasibility of improving a site’s water quality to ‘sufficient’ as a criterion for final designation
- Removal of the fixed dates of the ‘bathing season’ from the regulations
- Clarification and expansion of the definition of ‘bathers’ to include other water users
- Provision for use of multiple monitoring points at bathing sites where useful to classify water quality
The OEP response does identify concerns in some areas:
- The consultation does not acknowledge or link back to the Water Framework Directive (WFD) Regulations, which provide the wider system within which action to improve water bodies should be pursued.
- The OEP disagrees with the proposal to remove retrospectively the 2015 deadline for bathing waters to be ‘sufficient’. This would not accurately reflect that this target has been missed in some cases and would remove the need for remedial action.
- There are opportunities to improve governance and transparency in some areas of the proposed changes. For example, some significant decisions under the current proposals could be determined without clear justification, through non-statutory rather than statutory guidance, or without reasonable appeal routes.
The OEP’s response to the consultation also points to some issues covered in its report that are not included in the consultation on proposed reforms. For example, the OEP report considers how the regulations interact with bye-laws, the classification standards associated with different outcomes and bathing environments, and the need to improve public information.
Dame Glenys added: “I trust that Defra will find this response, alongside our previous reports, helpful as it considers how to proceed.”
The OEP report on implementation of the Bathing Water Regulations can be found here: Updating Bathing Water Regulations could better protect the public | Office for Environmental Protection
