Ian Liddell-Grainger MP is demanding answers from the Environment Agency and Wessex Water as to how thousands of gallons of raw sewage have been allowed to continue contaminating a river near Dunster.
He said he was horrified to be told that a broken Wessex Water sewer pipe had been allowing effluent to flood across farmland and into the River Avill.
And, he said, it was ‘scandalous’ that the leaks had been reported on several occasions by a local farmer without any action being taken.
Farmer Oliver Hill says he has lost count of the number of times the spills have occurred in recent years on the land at Timberscombe he rents from the Bath and Wells diocese.
But Mr Liddell-Grainger, MP for Bridgwater and West Somerset, said questions now needed to be asked - and he would be expecting answers.
“The Environment Agency told me last year they were puzzled as to why bathing water at Dunster was repeatedly failing quality tests and they were trying to trace the cause,” he said.
“Now it has become all too clear what the problem is yet nothing appears to have been done to correct it. And meanwhile the lives of otters, trout and all the other wildlife along the Avill are in jeopardy.
“If it had been the farmer who was causing the pollution the agency would have been down on him like a ton of bricks. But this is yet another example of its policy of being hard on the soft targets, soft on the hard ones.
“Farmers and landowners right across Somerset are rapidly getting fed up with the Environment Agency. It is targeting their industry and demanding costly anti-pollution controls at the same time as it has been watching the water industry pollute rivers with excessively high amounts of phosphate from its inadequate sewage treatment plants.
“But what has been happening on the Avill appears to me to be nothing more or less than a scandalous dereliction of duty.”
(PHOTO: Oliver Hill)
