The waterways
What it does once it reaches the river.
In August 2026 the Environment Agency published its first full assessment of England’s waters in six years. It named phosphate, which comes from sewage and from farm run off, as the single biggest problem of all. Nutrients washed off farmland do not simply pass through: they change the water, and everything living in it, all the way down to the sea.
1 in 7
of England’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters is in good ecological condition
Not one
waterway in England passed the separate test for chemical pollution
Half
of rivers still exceed safe levels of phosphate, the single biggest problem of all
Nutrients feed algae
Nitrate and phosphate arriving in slow, warm water feed algal blooms. The bloom spreads across the surface, and as it dies and decomposes it strips the oxygen out of the water beneath.
The oxygen goes, the life follows
Fish, invertebrates and the insects they depend on cannot live in deoxygenated water. A river can look full and still be close to empty.
Sediment smothers the gravels
Soil washed off a bare field settles on the riverbed and clogs the clean gravel that trout and salmon spawn in, and that river insects live among.
Then somebody has to drink it
Water abstracted downstream must be treated before it reaches a tap. Removing nitrate is expensive, it has to be built, and it has to be paid for again every year the load keeps arriving.
Source: Environment Agency assessment of England’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters, published August 2026, the first comprehensive assessment in six years, together with recorded reasons for not achieving good status across all 94 English management catchments. Agriculture is estimated to account for between fifty and sixty per cent of the nitrates, and around twenty per cent of the phosphates, reaching England’s water bodies.
