Staffing problems are nothing new at the EA. In 2023 its chairman Alan Lovell told parliament that it had “struggled with recruitment and retention of staff”.<\/p>\n
Internal emails obtained by campaign groups Greenpeace and Desmog through freedom of information requests were shared with the BBC. They show EA officials discussing the impact of staff departures on testing and saying that others planned to leave.<\/p>\n
One senior official, writing an email to her colleagues, said it was “not good news I’m afraid” adding “this isn’t where we want to be (again)”.<\/p>\n
Helen Nightingale, who worked at the Environment Agency as a catchment planner, analysing data from its water quality programme until 2022, says that while she was there she saw a shift of focus away from serious investigation to trying to find “successes”. <\/p>\n
She also said that morale was low: “The pay is not great \u2013 we didn’t have pay rises for years due to austerity, <\/p>\n
“But a lot people are in it [the EA] because they want to make a difference \u2013 and when you’re not even getting that – well, what’s the point?”<\/p>\n
Documents seen by the BBC show that the work affected by the cuts to testing this year included investigations into the water industry in various parts of the country, and monitoring of protected areas including the River Wye, which is currently facing a pollution crisis linked to intensive chicken farming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Staffing problems are nothing new at the EA. In 2023 its chairman Alan Lovell told parliament that it…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":88258,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[746,159,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-88257","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}