The Environment Agency won't tell us the truth.
Details of which of the Agency's Area and Regional Directors currently hold, and have held, financial interests in regulated companies like water companies - shares, directorships, interests in linked companies etc, is being kept secret.
This blog is about INTEGRITY and it's about TRANSPARENCY.
Honesty - not too much to ask from the Environmental Regulator, policing the water industry - is it?
The Nolan Principles are the ethical guide that should apply to all public service staff including the Environment Agency's - but right now, they clearly don't.
Here is the link to the Nolan Principles for conduct in public life.
Selflessness, Integrity, Objectivity, Accountability, Openness, Honesty and Leadership are the pillars of conduct that concern us.
You may have been following WASP's lengthy battle to drag the truth out of the Agency and extract the financial conflicts of interest, especially those in water companies - see the blog series starting with https://www.windrushwasp.org/single-post/corruption-control-or-turning-a-blind-eye .
We already found plenty of 'inappropriate' interests so we know this is an uncomfortable area for some people in the Agency.
Our latest battle is to get access to the interests held by its Area and Regional Directors - roles of great influence and importance - and we are still being denied them. Here is the story.
Back in May 2024, at the Rivers Summit at Morden, institutionalised secrecy and a disregard for freedom of information law and the Nolan Principles was admitted by the Agency's Chief Executive, Philip Duffy.
As part of a panel including Feargal Sharkey and Guardian Journalist, Helena Horton, Mr Duffy said, in response to questions about his staff evading information requests;
.".. I completely recognise what you say, because I see these letters and these FOI requests, and I've got great volumes of them and I see local officers going through quite contorted processes just not to answer, they know often the answer, but it's embarrassing. Why are they doing that? Are they doing that because they're bad people? Probably not. They work in the environment agency, they don't do it for money, they do it because they care about the environment. They do it because they're frightened. They're worried about revealing the true state of what's going on. They're worried about reaction from NGOs and others and possibly from government about the facts of the situation."
That is both a very honest and also a damning admission. Critically, it is also a red flag indicator of an organisation out of control;
The Environment Agency is long overdue a serious adjustment to its professional standards. An effective approach would have been to identify and remove the Directors and Managers who have allowed (and still allow) a culture of arrogance, deceit and disregard for the law and integrity (does this sound like the Post Office?) to grow and become embedded. It didn't happen.
Stepping back from his troubling revelation; Mr Duffy has been breath of fresh air compared to his 'evasive' predecessor who left the Agency in this state. There are signs of important progress in calling out illegally operating sewage works to planning authorities, at least and at last. Big changes are happening in that respect.
But his response to transparency shocked us when he went on to say, not that he would fix this scandalous and unhealthy state, but instead he asked NGOs to write less challenging requests.
Hard to believe but here are his words;
"So I think the first step there is to understand how hard that is for many of my staff when they face with, you know, often very expert NGOs who are asking very good questions,
the right questions ultimately, about how they just lower that tone a little bit and they manage it."
Now, the reason we and other experienced applicants ask very precise and challenging questions is that we have discovered that if we don't, the Agency will simply hold back information - we have evidence they have done just that.
Back to the story - On 11 January 2024 (yes, now it's August - this is how some Agency staff spin it out) we asked for Area and Regional Directors' interests and were refused because;
" The disclosure of the declarations of interest of Directors has no lawful basis as it isn’t necessary to satisfy a legitimate interest. In addition, it would be unfair to individuals to disclose such information to the world at large in response to a freedom of information request."
We challenged that because we knew the damning nature of the discoveries we made about the Non-Executive Directors that we reported on in previous blogs, and because we know it flies in the face of the principles of open government.
And we know that in theory at any public meeting where such interests would be relevant, the Director would have to declare those interests anyway. So why the secrecy?
This was the start of our blog series :
However, our appeal to the Agency was refused and it doubled down on the excuse so we have now made a complaint to the Information Commissioner.
But we also thought; hang on, who is in charge of the ethics of this regulatory body that is supposed to serve the public?
So, on 27 June we wrote to Mr Duffy to ask him to intervene as Chief Executive and to order that the Nolan Principles be applied.
Our letter is below - appealing to his own high standards and adherence to the Nolan Principles, to lead the organisation and not abdicate responsibility to one of the information commissioner's investigators.
Here is a link to the first letter we sent to Mr Duffy on this subject.
His reply is below. Basically, he said no, let's just see what happens, which is disappointing and deeply concerning, so we have also involved the Chair of the Agency, Alan Lovell, and the Office For Environmental protection, which is supposed to oversee the regulators but so far remains silent on this.
No one gets to say at any future inquiry that they didn't know this was going on, so we also have included, Steve Reed the new Secretary of State for the Environment.
Mr Duffy's reply
And now our second appeal to Mr Duffy is being made on the grounds that we think he may have missed the information he asked for about how Agency failure and capitulation to water companies' benefit raise serious questions about the people making those decisions, the role and culpability of the leadership (it was already included in the correspondence but we understand these things can be missed).
We emphasise the need for the public to know which of its Directors are compromised by connections to companies regulated by the Environment Agency, who they are and what Directors' jobs they have held.
Here is that letter which includes a reminder of some of the concerns of compromise that we already raised:
The PDF
If you were working for a regulator that could affect the profitability of a company and had shares in that company, would you expect to be able to keep them and then be able to hide that fact from the public?
This is not a grey area, it is a matter of right and wrong.
The EA bosses, OEP boss and the new Environment Secretary have known the facts for long enough now - let's see what they do about it.
We won't get healthy water without a healthy regulator.
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