The poor ecological health of North Devon's rivers and streams was highlighted at the latest full meeting of Torridge District Council.
Data from the Environment Agency (EA) reveals that almost 80% of streams and water bodies across the region are classed as not having good ecological status.
The EA divides North Devon into three water catchment areas - one includes all the streams feeding into the Torridge, another covers Clovelly and Hartland, and the other the Taw and Exmoor area.
Out of 98 streams, lakes and reservoirs in the three catchments, only 21 are judged as being of "good" ecological status, with 59 labelled as "moderate" and 18 as "poor".
The Torridge catchment only has one stream - the East Okemont River - which is judged as being good.
Wendy Lo-Vel, from Torridge Green Party, drew attention to the EA figures, after fellow councillor Dave Brenton first raised the issue.
Wendy said a big problem is that the figures are not even up to date. The last official measurements were made in 2019.
She said: "The Environment Agency is supposed to police our rivers and deal with pollution. But their funding has been slashed by successive Tory governments and they simply no longer have the staff to even carry out regular measurements, let alone deal with the problem."
Wendy added: "Sadly the district council doesn't really have any powers to deal with this. But as Green Party councillors we want to make the public aware of the situation and call for action before the quality of our rivers deteriorates further."
UPDATE July 2023
The latest figures for sewage releases into the rivers and coastal waters of Devon show that some 200,000 hours of ‘spills’ were recorded. Around Bideford the fine screening plant at Riverbank saw 24 ‘spills’ whilst the Buckleigh pumping station experienced 31 which added up to the equivalent of 17 days. The Waste Water Treatment Works (WWTW) at Abbotsham which handles most of our local sewage saw 144 spills. All this is bad enough but these local ‘spills’ are exacerbated by others further up the Torridge. Thus the Weare Giffard WWTW saw 117 events lasting a total of some 45 days with the Torrington WWTW experiencing 25 or the equivalent of 13 days. On top of all these are the hundreds of historic ‘private’ licences to dump stuff into the Torridge and Taw which are unmonitored - all this whilst at the same time South West Water has been paying out huge sums to its corporate shareholders and running up huge debts. Given these figures it only reinforces my comments at Torridge’s Planning Committee querying the bland ‘Yes we can handle it’ statement submitted by SWW when asked about their capacity for dealing with sewage from all the new estates planned around Bideford.
