The pollution pouring in to our rivers is widely recognised as a national disgrace. And last year no water company polluted more than United Utilities.
In 2022 the company pumped raw, untreated sewage into the rivers and lakes of the north west of England for 425,000 hours.
That means that on average 1,164 hours of raw sewage was released every day. This is probably not easy to do. It is so difficult to be this incompetent and careless that no other water utility could get anywhere near them. This is not just sewage spilling, this is United Utilities sewage spilling.
At least, faced with such environmental mayhem, we can rely on the bastions of the conservation industry to lead the charge in naming and shaming a business that routinely pollutes otherwise pristine waters on an industrial scale. Can't we?
Well, no actually you can't. The RSPB, ('Give Nature a Home') far from criticising, has actually been working in the most intimate partnership with United Utilities for years. After all, let's be reasonable, what's half a million hours of raw sewage, when measured against the rewards of working hand in glove with these massive land owning businesses?
Nor is their blind eye only turned solely to United Utilities. RSPB have an equally intimate relationship with the UK's second worst polluter, SevernTrent and its subsidiary, Hafren/Dyfrdwy, but we can come to that another day. This is not an oversight, it is a pattern of behaviour.
Just to give an idea of the scale of this blindness let's consider an alleged water quality issue that RSPB does become incoherent with rage about - grouse moor management.
They will tell anyone that will listen that the rotational cool burning of vegetation on a grouse moor has a dreadful effect on water quality. They also assert that it may alter the detailed nature of the invertebrate communities in some of the streams that flow from the moors. It is thus an anathema and must be stopped forthwith.
It will surprise no one that we find this position more than bizarre.
RSPB, who complain at every opportunity about almost everything apart from their own record, apparently fail to notice that their dearest partners, United Utilities, for whom they solicit vast sums of public money, are pouring half a million hours’ worth of raw sewage into the rivers of England and Wales. Not just slightly altering the invertebrate balance, but happily risking wiping invertebrates out wholesale.
But this brings us to what is probably the most shocking element of this sordid mess - the money.
It is to no one's surprise that, despite the atrocious environmental record of United Utilities, the RSPB have not only failed to once criticise the company but instead actively champion them and their partnership.
This is crapwashing of the highest order and the RSPB should hang their heads in shame.