76: Water, water…everywhere?

We can’t live without water, but who controls the supply, and who looks after it, has been a highly debated and contentious issue in the UK, particularly in recent years.

Matt, Becky and Fraser catch up on a hefty week of climate-related headlines before welcoming Hugo Tagholm, formerly of Surfers Against Sewage, but now Executive Director and Vice President of Oceana, to talk about the controversies regarding water ownership and how best to tackle them from a national, and local perspective.

Episode Transcript:

(Music Flourish)

Fraser:  Hello and welcome to Local Zero. We’ve got a great episode lined up for you today and I am, of course, here with Becky and Matt. 

Rebecca:  In this episode, we’ll be talking about water. We can’t live without it but who controls the supply and who looks after it has been a highly-debated and contentious issue in the UK, particularly in recent years. We are absolutely delighted that Hugo Tagholm will be joining us later in the show to chat about this. Hugo is the Executive Director and Vice President of Oceana in the UK and before this, he led the ocean campaign charity Surfers Against Sewage. 

[Music flourish] 

Matt:  Before we dive in, I should let you know that we released not one but two episodes a fortnight ago. One was a final episode of our Carbon Offsetting for Communities mini-series led by myself into natural carbon offsetting or nature-based and the other was a great chat with Kate Bradbury about how we can use our gardens to protect and enhance the environment, so you can check these out wherever you get your pods. 

Fraser:  And if you haven’t already, please do subscribe to Local Zero wherever you listen to your podcasts. Check out our website, LocalZeroPod.com, and follow us on Twitter or whatever it’s called now @LocalZeroPod where we’d love for you to get in touch with us. 

[Music flourish] 

Matt:  So, guys, we’ve had a flurry of messages and tweets following the chat with Kate Bradbury. I really enjoyed that. I’ve gone out into my garden and looked at it in a completely different light, so I’m hoping many of the listeners got that too. We had a really nice message from people like Akos Revesz who tweeted to say, ‘Listening to the latest episode of the brilliant @LocalZeroPod made me feel good about our overgrown little front garden.’ So thanks, Akos, and keep it up. 

Rebecca:  We really appreciate that and likewise, Matt, we went and got some plants [laughter] and a load of pots. Good advice. It did feel a bit like a self-help programme at times. We’ve got some lovely pots out the back and compost. We’re getting the plants in there now. Really exciting stuff. 

Matt:  Yeah, I like the key takeaway from Kate when I said, ‘If there’s one thing we could do, what should we do?’ She said, ‘Just plant. Where there isn’t green, make it green.’ [Laughter] Do nothing else. Just make it green. We’ve got a landmark birthday, have we not, to celebrate? 

Rebecca:  A very important one. 

Matt:  You’ll have to remind me [laughter]. It’s been a long time since we started this. How many episodes are we on now? 

Rebecca:  [Becky makes a trumpet sound] 75 [laughter]. 

Matt:  Blimey! 75. It happened in the midst of Covid and here we are two or three crises later, so well done, guys, for keeping it up [laughter]. 

Fraser:  75 episodes and Becky is still doing her sound effects for us [laughter].  

Matt:  We haven’t quite been able to stretch to a stable of computerised sounds. Becky, it’s absolutely essential. Thank you for that. 

[Music flourish] 

That’s the good news out of the way [laughter]. Deal with that first. We’re sitting here recording and it’s been a pretty heavy news week, has it not? What are the headlines that have caught your eye? 

Rebecca:  Well, there have been a few headlines that have caught my eye. Let’s start with the one about energy efficiency requirements in rented households. This actually caught my eye today but I think it’s been something that’s been talked about for a little while. We’ve seen that Rishi Sunak is planning to delay the energy efficiency targets in the rental housing sector. This was the requirement for all new private-rented homes to have an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating of C or higher by 2025. That, I think, is a really, really important element to protect some of the people who are the most vulnerable in society and to really make sure that people are able to live in well-insulated homes. I’m a landlord myself, not by choice but I’ve ended up in that position, and it is hard to find the upfront costs to make some of those changes but rather than just take away the stick, so to speak, there could be support put in to help people like me make those changes and progress this forward. Why are we spinning around as opposed to actually putting in additional measures to make this happen because we have to act? 

Matt:  Yeah, there are a lot of strong feelings on this. I think the first is about where this has stemmed from. The Uxbridge by-election, as we record, happened last week. It feels like a year ago [laughter] but it was relatively recently. Labour narrowly missed out. In my mind, I think a lot more weight has been associated with the reason that they failed to take this off what was Boris Johnson’s constituency. We have to remember that it was kind of the headquarters of the Conservative Party. Labour missed out by, roughly, 500 votes. One of the key reasons was ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone) which has been expanded into Greater London. We don’t need to go into this now but the emphasis was that this was a green policy and unpopular and so, by extension, all other green policies must be unpopular. The second point is the aim that these green policies are trying to achieve, which is a cleaner, greener and healthier environment to mitigate climate change, is extremely popular. All sorts of polling that we see from YouGov all the way through to the government’s own Public Attitudes Tracker show that this is popular stuff. To actually row back from this raises questions about the General Election. I’ll jump off my pedestal in a moment because the third point about your rental... 

Rebecca:  Fraser is waiting to get up there [laughter]. 

Matt:  I’ll give way in a moment [laughter]. The third point is about the private rental sector. Have a guess how many people in England live in private rental accommodation at the moment in terms of what percentage or out of ten or five? How many roughly? 

Fraser:  It’s about a quarter, right? It’s something like that. 25-35%? 

Rebecca:  I’m going to say a fifth. 

Matt:  Becky is right. It’s a fifth, so one in five. One in five households, assuming they’re registered to vote and assuming they’re eligible to vote because the rules have also changed on that, are going to be voting at the General Election. Do they want to live in warm, comfortable, healthy, cheap-to-run homes or not? 

Rebecca:  Hear, hear. 

Matt:  I’ll leave it there. 

Rebecca:  Go on, Fraser. Up you get [laughter]. 

Fraser:  I think it’s useful, Matt, to have that context because they do pull together and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the announcement on the private rented sector has followed the Uxbridge by-election. I found myself really, really frustrated with the discussions around Uxbridge and around ULEZ because it is such a niche snapshot of a hyper-local issue that I’m going to say the vast majority of people don’t understand because the vast majority of people don’t live in Uxbridge. The extrapolation of that into conversations about whether we should be doing more or less green policies is nonsense and it’s so frustrating. I think it’s important for us to try and keep our eyes on the ball I guess but for better or for worse, it has pushed in that direction. What’s really troubling about it is the narrative now, and the media seems to have picked this up as a legitimate concern, is that as you go about doing green policies, you somehow are likely to burden people with additional costs and that you can’t do green policies at a time of a cost of living crisis. I think it’s really, really important to challenge any separation of those two things because the cost of living, green policies, the causes, the symptoms and the cures are very, very much wrapped in each other. We know that energy prices are through the roof and driving the cost of living crisis because of our dependence on fossil fuels. So long-term, we have to mitigate that. We know that the price of food is going up partly because of profiteering by corporates and supermarkets but also because crop yields are so low across Europe and around the world as a result of climate change. So you have to do the green stuff to mitigate the cost of living crisis long-term. People need support now but in the long term, green stuff is not a separate issue. I think it’s really incumbent on us to emphasise that where we can. Private rented sector energy efficiency is one of those actions that we do have to take. We can’t afford to be hanging about anymore, especially knowing that people need bills brought down. The Office for Budget Responsibility, just the other week, highlighted that if we continue our dependence on gas and continue to not do the green stuff like energy efficiency and all that, then this will keep happening year on year. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s own figures, the cost of mitigating that in 10, 15 or 50 years' time will be at least double the cost of doing net zero now. 

Matt:  When you hear a lot of this rhetoric about pushing back on all policies rather than just this one policy, there’s a temptation to dig so deeply into this and not actually listen to the kernel of truth that maybe lies within all of this. I think this goes back to the point about energy justice and a just transition where it is, in my opinion, unfair to expect the poorest and the most vulnerable sections of society, for one reason or another, who are very reliant on their vehicles which may not be compliant and to not have a sufficiently well-funded and easy-to-access scrappage scheme for them to then upgrade to a car which is, by definition, going to be newer probably because it’s cleaner. It might not necessarily be electric but it’s certainly going to be probably more expensive than their clapped-out, diesel-consuming vehicle. I think all of us need to be aware that the culture wars are pushing this debate into polar opposites but we must acknowledge where one another is speaking some truth. I think all parties, not just Conservatives or Labour, need to acknowledge that if you’re presenting a green policy, it can’t just be green; it has to be fair. 

Fraser:  I think that’s fair. I think that’s right and I think this is something that we’ve been emphasising on this pod for a long, long time. Generally speaking, if it’s not fair, it won’t fly. It’s essential to public buy-in and to public consent. What’s also important is the perception of fairness and that things are seen to be fair, that there has been due process and people have been worked with to arrive at solutions that meet needs and support people through potentially adverse conditions or situations as a result of those policies. It is about working with people and it’s about making sure that it’s fair. It’s easy to hide behind saying, ‘People might not like it. It might harm this person and it might harm that person.’ Actually, there are a lot of us doing a hell of a lot of work to try and make sure that this isn’t the case. It’s not a question of whether we slow down or roll back green policies. It’s about how we make sure they’re fair and that they do work for everyone as far as possible. This is where the conversation should ultimately be. 

Rebecca:  On that solutions-focused bit, at the moment, it feels like we have a lot of policies without pathways for how to effectively deliver those policies. Fraser, you were talking a second ago and you mentioned prices going up and crop yields going down and that we need to contextualise this in the longer-term climate change and broader impacts. What really scared me was another article I saw this week. In fact, it was only just yesterday and it was about the fact that some of this stuff could be not that far away and happening a lot quicker than we think. There was an article out recently that was published in Nature Communications which is a very, very respected journal and it talked about the fact that actually, we could start to see these warm ocean currents that have brought Europe warmer temperatures than we see at the same latitude... 

Matt:  Record temperatures. 

Rebecca:  Record temperatures now but actually, if you look across the latitudes and compare the weather that we get to what they get in the US and Canada, it’s much warmer in Europe and the UK. This is due to these currents that flow but actually, climate models are showing that these ocean currents could be weakening a lot sooner than we thought that they might be. It could start as soon as 2025. Now some scientists don’t agree with that and some scientists are concerned perhaps about the methods of modelling in all of this but ultimately, I think what this shows is the impact that we’re having is not a long time in the future. I mean 2025 is just a couple of years away. It’s pretty terrifying. 

Matt:  For anybody who has been on holiday, read the news or has been awake for... well, not just three weeks but [laughter] it feels like three years, the South of Europe is on fire literally, whether you’re talking about Sicily and the Greek islands like Rhodes. I’ve seen some pretty horrific videos of the North of Europe which is experiencing some really extreme wet weather as a result of it being a warmer and more volatile climate. One thing I didn’t tweet but tooted on Mastodon was about whether people are connecting them having to return back from Rhodes because their villa is on fire with policies like ULEZ or landlord efficiency. For the everyday man and woman, is there a connection here between the two? I actually don’t think you have to be an expert to understand but I do also think that there needs to be more of an effort to connect the dots and help people... not push them but to lead them towards a rounder understanding that if they do fly to Greece or they resist Low Traffic Neighbourhoods or ULEZ, these things are going to be more likely and they’re not good. They’re tangibly awful. We’re seeing people camping out in gymnasiums like they’ve been displaced by some nuclear war and they’re on holiday. If that isn’t enough to wake somebody up, guys, I genuinely don’t know what is. 

Rebecca:  I think it can be challenging though, Matt, because if you go on holiday, you just look and think, ‘All these aeroplanes are going anyway. This stuff is happening anyway.’ Sometimes, it’s harder to put your own actions into that bigger-picture context. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be doing it but I can see how it can feel sometimes so intangible and so far distant connecting your actions to those wider impacts, particularly where you need that collective action. I know that today we’re talking about water and in a lot of ways, I feel like water can sometimes bring some of these pieces together. Matt, was it you who popped in this article in terms of what’s been going on in the Thames? I’m not sure I’m not going anywhere near that next time I’m in London [laughter]. 

Matt:  Sorry, it was the Seine in Paris. We’re mindful on this programme that we can’t just talk about the bad stuff. I think there was a piece today in The Guardian pointing to this saying that we can’t just be doomsters and gloomsters, terms often used by Boris Johnson [laughter]. We can’t. We have to focus on the good news stories. There was a really good one with regards to water about Paris and the Seine that runs right through the middle. If any of you have been lucky enough to visit Paris, what a river and what a location. For the first time in a hundred years, they’re expecting people, next year or the year after, to be able to swim in the Seine. It was actually banned in 1923 I think. There were a whole host of issues, not least pollution. With the Olympics coming to Paris, they’re wanting to run some events there and so they’ve invested a tremendous amount of money on underwater reservoirs to catch any run-off in terms of effluence. In terms of making these incremental changes and also big investments, they’ve seen the population of fish boom and they’ve got giant catfish there two metres long. 

Rebecca:  Wow! 

Matt:  They’ve got molluscs and dragonflies. They’re hoping not just to run these events like the triathlon and marathon swimming, which sounds incredibly painful [laughter] but probably exciting events but they’ll have three open-water swimming areas there. Going back to your point, Becky, take Glasgow and the Clyde that runs through the middle of it. If there were open-water swimming areas there, I would say that would be a big tick for the city and it would make it a much more liveable and exciting place to locate. So good on the Parisiens and well done. 

Rebecca:  On the flip side, last year in the UK, water companies discharged raw sewage into our rivers and seas more than 300,000 times. That’s pretty shocking. Thames Water was actually fined £3.34 million for dumping sewage and killing nearly 2,000 fish. Maybe we need to take a bit of a note out of France’s book. 

Matt:  I think so. This is, hopefully, a topic many people will be familiar with. If you haven’t watched Paul Whitehouse’s documentary on the BBC looking at the state of our rivers, seas and lakes, he’s a really keen fisherman... if anybody has watched Bob and Paul going fishing, he has really spotlighted how bad things are. Listening to the Feargal Sharkey podcast on Leading with Alastair Campbell and Rury Stewart, he said that England – I say England because Scotland has a slightly different arrangement – is the only nation to have a fully privatised water industry in the world. I’m borrowing facts or quotes from that episode. I think we need a bit of expertise and some ideas about how to fix this; hence, why we have a fantastic guest about to come in. 

[Music flourish] 

Hugo:  Hi, I’m Hugo Tagholm, the Vice President and Executive Director of Oceana in the UK but I’ve spent the last 14 years running the campaigning organisation Surfers Against Sewage. I am an ocean campaigner and environmentalist. I write for Oceanographic Magazine and I am a surfer, for my sins, which is my access point to most things ocean and water from sewage to plastics, from sustainable fisheries to offshore oil and gas. That is where I really draw my inspiration. I’m talking to you from Cornwall right by the ocean which is looking beautiful today but, sadly, quite flat but it does look very nice. 

[Music flourish] 

Rebecca:  So I’m just around the corner from you [laughter] as I’m also in Newquay. We should have connected. 

Matt:  Becky, you go with the first question. That’s too good a lead-in. You live practically next door to Hugo. Go, go, go! [Laughter] 

Rebecca:  I was looking at that ocean and thinking, ‘Oh, it’s beautiful today. I might go out for a little swim.’ You mentioned your amazing breadth of expertise working in the sector over the last 14 years but is surfing how you really got into this? Is that what brought your interest in water from the outset or were there other parts to your story? 

Hugo:  Yeah, I’ve talked about it publically a bit before but really, I started my love for water and nature as a kid. I was a mega-geek. I loved being out in the wild and finding stuff on the beach, rock pools, ponds, fields and under rocks. Anything that I could get my hands on, I was interested in in the wild world. Actually, back then, particularly reptiles I was interested in but then the ocean fascination developed. In my youth, I also got fascinated by sports, athletics, football, swimming and surfing; all of which took hold and environmentalism around the ocean really captures those passions for me being in the elements I want to protect. People sometimes refer to surfers and other sport and recreational enthusiasts as the canaries in the coal mine for some of these issues like a marine indicator species which I partially agree with but not fully. Certainly, it’s like a window for us to see some of these issues. Of course, people do say you protect what you love and I also think that’s partially true which we might dive into today a bit. I’m not sure it’s fully true but it is something that is interesting. For a long time, I’ve been a fan and follower of natural history. My childhood heroes weren’t musicians of the time, although I think musicians of the time were people like Bros, so that’s probably good [laughter] but they were naturalists. They were people like David Attenborough and others who I feel so fortunate to have been able to work with and alongside over the course of my career to date. 

Matt:  You’re a very important voice on this particular issue and one I’ve followed very, very closely over the last year or so. From your perspective, what are the main challenges we face with water in the UK today and just how big and severe are those challenges? 

Hugo:  The environment is now front and centre of people’s minds in a way that it wasn’t even a few years ago or a decade ago. Certainly, when I took the helm at Surfers Against Sewage on that big part of my career, people were interested but they weren’t that interested and it wasn’t a topic on the lips of people around the country. It wasn’t a dinner table discussion necessarily. It certainly wasn’t on Have I Got News For You. It wasn’t on the cover of Private Eye. It wasn’t on the daily front cover of newspapers. It’s great to see these issues now firmly at the top of the political, media and public agenda. It’s really important. Nothing else we do in our society can really happen without a healthy environment around us and that’s just a matter of fact. We all depend on a healthy environment and so it’s high time, if not a bit late, that we really start driving these things forward. I’m pleased that that is the case. There is no doubt that it’s taken a long time to get there. Back in 2010, people weren’t interested in the sewage issue particularly, which is what we’re talking about, and the water quality issue. It wasn’t really a thing. It was hard to get it on the front pages. The evidence wasn’t out there yet. All of these stats we see and these graphs with red crosses and dots on maps just didn’t exist. That’s the work that I undertook leading Surfers Against Sewage and building the team there to really expose the water companies for what they were doing to bring new evidence to the table. We were the champions of real-time information. We devised, developed and pioneered those maps and we started selling the stories. In the beginning, it was a slow burn. People didn’t want to put sh** on the front pages of newspapers, maybe apart from The Sun and The Star who were putting various other types of sh** on the front of their papers. Certainly, from the point of view of the mainstream media, it really wasn’t that much of a thing. To a degree, some of the reasons behind that was this sense – and even the environmentalists were guilty of this – that after the privatisation of the water companies at the end of the ‘80s in 1989 and that first decade of work, I think a lot of people said, ‘The work is done.’ I heard people in my close circle saying, ‘It’s all good. Water quality is all good. Everything is done. Why are you even campaigning anymore? Combined sewer overflows aren’t a problem. This isn’t an issue.’ But we knew in my team and we were trying to find the evidence and the smoking gun and build all of that portfolio of evidence from the health of surfers and swimmers through to real-time alerts on sewage and the water quality testing itself. We built that campaign and we made all of that happen in the face of apathy from some people, of challenge from others, of obfuscation of the industry and of distraction and delay from government. We made it happen and we got that information, particularly that real-time information. So it’s great to see it as headline news. 

Matt:  If I can just jump in quickly before we dissect what some of the challenges are, in terms of public awareness and concern around this, is this a function of the problem getting a lot worse in terms of water quality since privatisation and/or the fact that people are more concerned and... I want to use the word aware that our rivers, lakes and oceans are maybe being used more by the average voter and citizen, whether that’s swimming, surfing or whatever it might and that people are just confronted with this issue more? It could be both but from your perspective, what is driving this agenda? 

Hugo:  Look, that’s a really good question. It’s not just both but it’s a combination of factors. Privatisation was a financial con. It built an environmental Ponzi scheme for people to extract money from the country whilst polluting our rivers and our seas. In the 1990s, they took what was largely a visible coastal problem and hid it upstream in rivers and streams to become a visible river problem that became, again, a visible coastal problem. It was new data. People often talk about 2016 when there was this sudden jump in the levels of pollution. There was a sudden jump in data as well and that was data that we pressured the government and water companies to give us to make sure people had that real-time data. The data came out. As you say, Matt, more and more people are also using the sea for surfing, wild swimming and river swimming. All of these things have become boom sports. Stand-up paddleboarding is one of the fastest-growing sports in the country I believe. All of those things took people onto our canals, rivers, lakes and the ocean from the tip of Scotland right down to Cornwall. All of those things came together. Fundamentally, at the heart of it, you had water companies who weren’t investing enough. Over the course of time, maybe the first decade was okay and they got away with minimal investments in the grand scheme of things but got away with saying they had done well and then they’ve quickly taken out more and more cash whilst not investing enough. The very systems they’ve got are creaking and causing more problems. They’re being overwhelmed by things they could have provisioned for like the growth in housing and population and the change in weather patterns. You’ve got a composite of impacts that have led us to a place where we’re told at times by the industry that it’s almost intractable. It will cost too much to do anything about it. Well, if they’d just acted in time... it’s a bit like me going out on a night out, continuing to drink all night and then telling my boss that it’s impossible for me not to be drunk when I come to work [laughter]. Do the right thing at the right time. Finish drinking at 10 o’clock. Don’t drink too much [laughter]. 

Rebecca:  Is this something where you can see there being a positive change or do we need to see stronger regulation? Do we need to see more data being collected to help really ensure that this doesn’t get worse in the future? 

Hugo:  That’s another good question. Look, I think we’re definitely on the cusp of change. There’s no way the status quo can carry on and that the water companies can get away with this. It will lead to renationalisation if there isn’t dramatic reform within the industry. We’re going to need much tougher regulation. We’re going to need much tougher enforcement. People band around various things on prison sentences for CEOs and other stuff. Maybe that is alright. What we’re seeing with the water quality issue is a perfect combination of issues in this social media age. It’s a very binary issue for people to understand. There’s sewage or no sewage in our seas and rivers. No one wants sewage to be in our seas and rivers. It’s not like, ‘Well, maybe a bit.’ No, absolutely not. We’ve got very rich companies with opaque financial systems to avoid tax and offshoring their profits who are extracting vast sums of money from a country where people are struggling to pay their heating bills, pay their shopping bills and look after their children. We then have this depleted environment that people are using, so they see the issue live and direct. They’re like, ‘How the hell is this happening in this day and age?’ The government they see as complicit with it because of the votes that happened during the Environment Act and actually, an apathy towards the environment which even their own environment ministers, with Zach Goldsmith, are resigning about. 

Matt:  I’d like to pick up on that because it feels like water quality is one of these bipartisan issues, at least from the voter base, and it’s actually something that could really unite people in the forthcoming General Election which, rumour has it, could be as early as May 2024. Your average, if there is such a thing, Conservative voter versus average Labour voter might actually be unified around both wanting good quality water on their beaches, rivers and lakes. The point about how we’ve arrived at this problem actually is deeply political and you’ve pointed to privatisation but from your perspective, are we looking at a voter base at opposite ends of the spectrum that might both want the same thing? If so, that feels like a ripe area for policymaking. 

Hugo:  Yeah, that’s a really good point. I do think this unites people across the political divide. No one can be for sewage in our rivers. I think the solutions are challenging and complex which may unite people in a weaker way because there are some trade-offs and compromises people are going to have to make around it. Fundamentally, and I think it’s relevant to the audience and people listening, this is really about people responding to a very local issue about what they can do. It’s about what they see in their local stretch of river. It’s what they see along their coastline. It’s what they might see on a holiday or become fearful about, whether they go to Brighton for a bucket-and-spade weekend, whether they go to Cornwall to one of the beautiful campsites or caravan parks for a week or whether they go elsewhere around the country like Scarborough or wherever. It’s something that they’ve picked up on as impacting their experiences in their day-to-day lives. It’s a very local issue which people have acted on locally. They’re starting to get that information locally and connect with their politicians locally too, demanding more of their local constituency MP and getting in touch with local water companies. There’s a lot of local action that’s going on around this and it is uniting people. I think, if I’m being honest about it, there’s a sense of being really careful that the solutions don’t become the preserve of the elite because there are very many privileged people who do these sports and have time to do them like surfing, certainly and sailing, stand-up paddleboarding and probably wild swimming. There are many people who are just up against it in this cost-of-living era. It’s very important that the people who are as lucky as me and many people I know who use their privilege to campaign to protect these areas for everyone no matter how frequently they can use them and if they can use them at all. A clean environment and a thriving environment is important whether you use it or not. It’s not in the gift of big companies like water companies to use it to pollute. To finish that, I’ll go back to a quote from one of my marine heroes, Jaques Cousteau, from 50-plus years ago which is that ‘air and water, the two essential fluids on which all life depends have become global garbage cans.’ That quote remains the same to this day. Carbon dioxide has been pumped out year on year since the first COP meeting with water companies polluting our oceans and our rivers. Plastic pollution is endemic in all water courses, in our air and in everything. So I think it’s fundamental that anything impacting air and water is really a human rights issue and it’s for everyone. The access point to that is often with a bit of privilege but it’s being able to use those spaces. We’ve got to use our privilege to do good for everyone. 

Fraser:  I’m really, really glad to hear you bring up that point, Hugo. I’m not someone who is on the inside of the water conversation or involved in those sorts of sports and activities in communities but I do live in the Northeast of Scotland where the connection to local lochs, rivers and glens is very, very personal. It might not be necessarily the same sort of leisurely reasons but they are very, very personal and I’m very proud of it. Do you see a need to try and broaden the base of people involved in action like the action that you’re taking around this issue? If not, why not? Beyond that, more generally, what is it that people can do locally if they’re concerned about the use of their rivers, lakes and whatever else it might be? 

Hugo:  That’s a really good question and that broadening of the base is interesting. Of course, you want to bring as many people along on a journey as you can, particularly when it comes down to big, political changes. The crucial question is what is the tipping point to actually get that political change over the line? It’s not that you take everyone with you because sometimes that’s just impossible. The beach isn’t for everyone. The river isn’t for everyone. These issues aren’t for everyone. Many people don’t have the time to actually dedicate or pay attention to these things. They might just be struggling to put food on the table or heat their house. They might be struggling with childcare issues. We can’t be arrogant in thinking that we can get everyone to come along on these issues. We’ve got to try and convince them that they’re important, of course, but we’ve got to take the right people along to create the change and make sure elected officials and big business see that. You want to create an inclusive movement and make sure that it’s open to everyone but you’ve got to be aware that it’s probably fanciful to think everyone will care. I sit here near you, Becky, in Cornwall and many people down here do care about the ocean but as I travel to and fro from London and I’m on the streets of Camden, Islington, Soho or wherever, it’s less relevant to people’s day-to-day lives and we’ve got recognise that. It feels very relevant to me every day because I see it and I’m here but it’s not necessarily relevant. It’s great to see it getting onto Radio 4, Private Eye and onto the front of The Times. It’s great to hear Feargal talking about it on Twitter. All of that is great and even the cut-through to the much more mainstream things like Good Morning Britain or whatever but that’s still a niche. There’s still an echo chamber amongst all of it. The good thing is it’s cutting through politically and it’s becoming an election issue. I think you mentioned it, Matt, or maybe it was Becky who mentioned it. It’s going to become a really important election issue because it’s so understandable. It’s not actually the biggest environmental issue. It’s one of them but it’s a way of people understanding the environment. It’s a way for people to understand the injustice and a way of people engaging with it very personally. That’s why it’s important. 

Matt:  In many respects, the effect, as you say, is simple enough to understand. If you have poor-quality water, it’s often visibly bad. In terms of the causes, you’ve mentioned privatisation and lack of investment in our water infrastructure. I’d like to push you a little bit more on that if I may. The quality of our water is a factor of many different influences. Some of the information that I’ve consumed around this points to intensive agriculture, poor town planning, lots of surfaces and not enough natural catchment and a general reduction in our natural spaces like mudflats, reedbeds and these types of natural ecosystems that can clean and catch our water. I just wanted to ask you the question because I think before we get on to what each of us can do and how this election issue should translate into manifesto policies, what is actually driving it beyond that lack of investment and privatisation? 

Hugo:  You describe it very well there. We’re seeing an overarching depletion of nature and natural spaces. We’re in one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. We’re right at the bottom of the league tables for that and for water quality incidentally. This is the age we live in and we’re at that tipping point between whether society can carry on on its current trajectory. We’re using up our forests, land, seagrass meadows, estuaries and everything and now we’re seeing the true impacts of that. There has been some pretty devasting news this week on a wider scale. Look at what’s happening across Europe with wildfires and floods. This is all part of the same problem; too much consumption, too much industrialisation of our land and increasingly our sea, too many hard surfaces, not enough nature, the straightening of our rivers and the depletion of our uplands, so forests not absorbing enough water and water flowing down into our streams and rivers and into our sewer systems too quickly. There’s a real compound effect of that. There are more people and we can’t begrudge more people. We can’t say, ‘Let’s draw up the drawbridge.’ Water companies and other industries aren’t necessarily provisioning for that in what they’re doing. For me, there are so many access points to this. There are so many contributing factors to it. It’s very complex with something that’s very binary in the communication space because, believe me, at the moment with the media certainly, I think it’s quite straightforward to achieve some of the headlines because it’s so easy to understand but the solutions are very complicated. We’re going to see a whole new wave of protesting against some of the sewage solutions potentially as water companies propose digging up beautiful villages in Cornwall to put in new holding tanks for more rainwater but not all of the rainwater. People will start fighting against some of the proposed solutions as well; so this green-on-green fight which we’re seeing more and more. 

Matt:  Before you came on, we were talking about the recent news about ULEZ in London and the pushback on that, even from folk who maybe do agree with better air quality. Here we’ve got better water quality and what some of the solutions are. From your perspective and some of your fellow activists, are there two or three things that we really should be seeing in some of these manifestos coming out?  

Hugo:  Yeah. 

Matt:  It’s one thing to say we need investment but then the question is what are the solutions and, as you say, how bitter will that medicine be? 

Hugo:  I think that takes us nicely into the broader context of what we need to do. There are a few things we can unpack there. Ultimately, we are in the ocean decade at the moment. This government has a commitment under the Kunming-Montreal protocol to restore and protect 30% of our land and sea by 2030 which is a big biodiversity target. Some of that will be really good for water quality because, of course, we’ve got to be restoring forests. We’ve got to be restoring rivers. We’ve got to be better protecting some of those coastal ecosystems you mentioned like seagrass meadows, mudflats and those nearshore environments. How can we do that if water companies are pumping out sewage that suffocates those habitats? There is some really big, high-level stuff that we should be championing which is positive. People do need some hope because it can’t just all be doom and gloom. Where are the solutions? How are people in control at a time when they feel sometimes out of control and hopeless about the future? This is what political parties should be doing. They should paint a vision of hope for people and not a vision of doom. It should be about what this new economy is that we’re creating. Where are those jobs coming from? How are you going to swim in clean rivers? What are you going to get when you go on holiday to the coastline in Newquay or Scarborough? It’s all of those things that we can actually paint a new picture for people and be ambitious around which is not what we’re really hearing from anyone, maybe apart from the Green Party at the moment. It’s a really interesting time around that. What are the other big pledges? The climate issue is a really interesting one in terms of the rainfall patterns that we’ve got which are also driving more flash flooding and incredible weather events in the summertime and across the year and putting massive pressure on our sewer system. A lot of those maps you see on the sewage issue will be driven by massive events like that. You’ll know, Becky, at the moment, it’s raining down here and all of the maps are going off the charts and that’s also climate-linked. We’ve got to make sure that the government is actually ambitiously delivering its commitments under the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change and reduce emissions. It shouldn’t be opening up the Rosebank oil field. It shouldn’t be opening up any new oil and gas in this country or anywhere in the world. We should be making this ambitious transition to green jobs in onshore and offshore renewables. We should be talking about how we create that future for our children and their children beyond them. On water quality, I think that there is a really big reshaping of how the industry is run to really protect the environment and that could be renationalisation. Some parties are calling for that already but certainly, capping these excessive dividends and bonuses until the work is done really needs to happen. There is some quite granular stuff in there. Overall, I don’t actually think that our water should be in private hands. It should be a national thing. It’s just so crucial to life. We do not want certainly other countries to own our water and I wouldn’t say it matters which. We just shouldn’t have any other foreign entities owning our water supplies. It’s too risky. 

Rebecca:  I don’t think you’ll hear any disagreement from the three of us and probably not from anyone who listens to the pod either but I suspect a lot of our listeners might not have known about some of the things you’ve talked about. As we said at the beginning, this is our first deep dive into water. Probably a lot of folk are listening and thinking, ‘Absolutely. What can I do now?’ I live on the coast and I would say we go along and do beach clean-ups, we get the influx of tourists and there’s a lot more to do but beyond some of the more immediate and tangible things, it can sometimes feel a little bit like, ‘What can I do to create that change? Is it all in the hands of government and big industry?’ or ‘How can I really take action to support my community or my area and do things differently?’ To all of our listeners out there who are thinking, ‘Yes, I want to get involved,’ maybe have you got a few key top tips of what folk can do? 

Hugo:  It’s a good question. I think that’s part of this hope and empowerment. I think when people are taking action, they feel hopeful. They feel more in control. They feel like they’re doing something and people need to do that. That’s what inspired me back in 2016 to found the Plastic Free Communities movement in my previous role and we had a lofty ambition of it being a hundred or so communities and now it’s hundreds and hundreds up and down the country representing millions of people. Those people are coming together on single-use plastics and other wider issues like climate and water quality. It’s amazing to see. I’m all for individual action. I think it’s good and it does have an effect. Some people argue and say, ‘Is it top-down or bottom-up that you need to make change?’ I don’t believe it’s either/or. It’s a toolkit and you’ve got to some of each of those things and other things coming in from the side to deliver change. What can people do? On this issue particularly, they should inform themselves about water quality in their area with some of the apps out there which often help connect them with elected officials or water company CEOs to voice their discontent, take action and demonstrate how much pollution is going on to those in power. They can even meet their local MP quite easily. In Cornwall, I think we’re used to that but you can do it anywhere. You can go along to surgeries on a Friday in the local constituency and you can find out about that quite easily online. You can see your local MP about these issues and you can talk to them about your concerns on climate, water quality or plastic pollution in your local park or on your local beach. Go and have a direct conversation. These politicians are just people. They’re no more special than you or me. They’re normal people, so go along and talk to them. Challenge them. You don’t have to say something you think they want to hear. Tell them what you think they don’t want to hear and tell them that. Keep going. Think about your consumer choices and your footprint but I don’t think it is about individual action as a wholesale thing. I think we’ve all got to be conscious of the industry playbook. We see it from the water companies in saying to solve the problem, what they need us to do is not flush wet wipes down the toilet and then everything will be right. They’ll spend millions on these campaigns. They’ll tell you not to leave the tap on when you’re brushing your teeth because you’re wasting so much water from industries that are wasting millions and millions of litres every day because of leaks. This is what we saw from the plastics industry before and what we see from those people who are responsible for big carbon emissions. For me, I think it’s important to recognise that your biggest tool is voting. We may, as Matt said, have an election in May. Definitely, by the end of next year, we’ll have election and you should inform yourself of who is doing the most for the planet and for people genuinely because at the moment, the news we hear from this government is that they’re trying to dial back on environmental initiatives and policies. That’s very retrograde. I don’t think people will buy it. What people need to do is actually paint a new future because business-as-usual is destroying the planet and destroying our children’s futures. We’ve got to see where we get to. I’m sorry to ramble but this is a bigger issue about what we’re prepared to accept individually too. I think governments are often concerned that if they make big, radical decisions, we’ll all be annoyed as the electorate but we saw, during the staged rehearsal of the pandemic and despite its tragedy, that we could all adapt very quickly to new things and new ways of being and that governments could act very quickly. We need to demand that they act really quickly on some of these environmental issues now, mobilise funds in a different way and create a different future for us all and voting can help us do that. 

Matt:  Hugo, that’s absolutely fantastic. We’ve many, many more questions to ask but we’ve run out of time. I just want to say a huge thank you. That was a really, really important overview I guess of all the key issues and solutions, so thank you. Maybe down the line and as we see the General Election on the horizon, it would be great to have you back and to hear a little bit more about some of the progress that’s been made. 

Hugo:  I’d love to. Thanks, Matt. 

[Music flourish] 

Matt:  Right, folks, we’ve had the inspirational Hugo Tagholm on the pod. I really enjoyed that. What were your immediate reflections and thoughts? 

Rebecca:  I think to start, I didn’t realise quite what a situation we were in with water. It’s quite a new topic to me, so it really shone quite a light just to see, interestingly, how the issue of water is quite similar to some of the issues that we’ve been talking about for quite a while with energy as well. 

Fraser:  Yeah, I think that really, really jumped out. I think there are connections, particularly the local connections but also across all the themes that we talk about so often with energy. They are so pertinent. It’s a big issue and I’ll admit that I’m not heavy into the water debate. I don’t know everything about it but I appreciate the scale of the problem now but on the back of that conversation, I feel somewhat hopeful. I don’t know if you left with that same sentiment. 

Matt:  I was kind of hopeful in the sense that I think we’re achieving cut-through on this topic. As I mentioned before, it’s increasingly or hopefully bipartisan. Hugo kept talking about the fact that this is an easy enough issue to grasp and that’s why people are concerned about it which made me hopeful for water and much more concerned about climate change [laughter]. You can’t grasp a molecule of CO2 and bridge that gap between cause and effect. I think there’s a lot more work to be done in terms of communication of other environmental and sustainability issues to make that make sense and become more tangible to people. 

Rebecca:  I thought there were some really nice points that came through. If you can bring people along and, as you say, it is an issue where a lot of people feel strongly in the same direction, we can push for that shift in better data, more information, better regulation and stronger rules around what is and isn’t okay and really enforcing that with the water companies. Just what they’ve been able to get away with over the past years seems absolutely unbelievable. I think there are a lot of potential solutions in there as well which is quite refreshing. 

Matt:  What are the chances that two doctors and a professor are going to agree that we need more data, please? [Laughter] But we do. Hugo, we agree [laughter]. 

Fraser:  A hundred per cent. I agree with all that, Becky, and I think the point about solutions and the information that we got there, things feel tangible within that conversation. I was really, really heartened by the conversation around inclusion and bringing people along which is one that we’ve had often and that is this an issue that a lot of people care very, very passionately about. You don’t need every single person in the country to join the frontline of the issue but it does have to be open. We have to recognise that an issue like water, and when you broaden that out to the environment, does have direct impacts on everyone. We all have a stake in it. I love the idea of that inclusive, diverse movement-building but very much a focus on taking action and getting things done quite holistically in a lot of different ways. Yeah, a really, really positive and proactive episode I thought. 

Rebecca:  Importantly, that action is not just about not flushing things down the toilet or whatever but it’s also about getting out there, talking to people, voting, reaching out to your local authority and all of that. Absolutely brilliant. 

Matt:  Write angry letters and go and vote. 

[Music flourish] 

You’ve been listening to Local Zero. A plea once more to subscribe to the pod and if you know anybody who might enjoy it, then word of mouth is also a very powerful tool. Why don’t you suggest our podcast to them? 

Rebecca:  If you’re feeling generous, please also leave us a review. This helps boost those important algorithms that mean we reach new potential community changemakers. 

Fraser:  And if you haven’t already, please take a minute to find and follow us on Twitter @LocalZeroPod to get involved with discussions over there. Also, email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com if you want to share some longer-formed thoughts and we’re always open to suggestions for potential new episodes but for now, thank you again and goodbye. 

Matt:  Bye, bye. 

Rebecca:  Bye. 

Fraser:  Bye, bye, bye. 

[Music flourish] 

Produced by 

BESPOKEN MEDIA 

Transcribed by 

PODTRANSCRIBE