Responding to reports that the shadow chancellor, Andrew Griffith, will announce at today’s Conservative Party conference that the party would scrap Natural England and the Environment Agency if elected, River Action’s head of public affairs, Erica Popplewell, said:

“Scrapping the Environment Agency and Natural England would be a deeply damaging move for the UK’s rivers and the wider environment.

 “Our rivers are already under sustained attack from sewage pollution from water companies and agricultural pollution, while the Environment Agency has been stripped of resources by governments of both left and right for well over a decade. It is now unable to investigate environmental crimes and pollution incidents at anything like the scale required.

 “There are many dedicated people within the Environment Agency who want to tackle pollution, but they cannot do the job properly without the resources to do it. The answer is not to scrap the regulator. It is to properly fund it, give it the powers and capacity it needs, and enable it to investigate and prosecute those responsible for polluting our rivers.

 “If politicians are serious about improving the health of our rivers, they should be strengthening environmental regulation, not dismantling it.”