Unbelievable?

Who should be better informed about the widespread criminality propping up the profits of water companies than the Environment Agency?

Yes, the Agency took a while to catch on to the widespread criminal pollution exposed by WASP's Prof Peter Hammond in 2021. It had either failed to spot that or been actively covering it up but by the end of that year it was very well known and the Agency had started its own investigation which still rumbles opaquely on.

So who would the Environment Agency Pension Fund invest in?

The Agency has a Pensions Committee made up of various trained staff and its accounts were signed off in 2023 by the CEO of the Agency. It is a big fund with many investments across the world and big claims about responsible investment.

Remarkably, among many others, it invests in the privatised English water industry - the one it has failed to regulate and the one that is making money out of criminal pollution by short-changing on investment going into the company and maxing money going out to shareholders.

This chart was created by Andy Tyerman of campaign group ESCAPE in Devon. He had to work hard to capture the component investments and thinks he may have missed some but it believes it is reasonably complete.

It seems quite remarkable that the Agency bosses must know how these companies behave, breaking the law on an industrial scale and only profiting from such activity because the regulator - that will be the Environment Agency, does absolutely nothing about most of it. Pollution stays profitable and the Agency's pension fund benefits from it.

The fund is not something farmed out to managers who might make mistakes by investing in criminally active companies regulated by the Agency - it is tightly wrapped with committees. The fund is a big one and this is a small component but the principles littering the annual report look like mere window dressing in the light of this example.

Here are some of the relevant sections of a very long report on the fund for 2023.

And signed off by the boss

Philip Duffy is the CEO of the Environment Agency.

And for anyone who wants to look further - maybe take a strong coffee..

https://www.eapf.org.uk/~/media/document-libraries/eapf2/policies/2024/eapf_stewardship_code_report_2024-v3.pdf?la=en&hash=C7FBEE06AD9EFC7A345001A7B6FF7AEF1A6E8BBF

The tick-box culture of responsible investment is laid bare.

We wonder if anyone actually reads this stuff? More meaningless claims, it appears from the evidence

And a comedic moment as the regulator responsible for letting water companies off the hook talks about how its asset managers might influence the companies

But perhaps the strangest of all - They have identified the problem that they are responsible for yet continue to benefit from their own failure as a regulator.

A surreal moment as the pension fund had concerns about the environmental performance of water companies it regulates AND invests in.

Can we believe that no one saw the water company shareholdings as a conflict of interest? So what happens next? The standards in public life and organisations are now so degraded that we have no expectation that anything will be done about it but let's end on this question -

Is the Environment Agency's Pension Fund benefitting from the proceeds of crime and wrongly paid dividends from companies benefitting from its policies and procedures keeping pollution profitable?