Every article below is built the same way: what the published record actually says, what was promised and when, and what would have to change in the field for any of it to move. Every figure is sourced to the Environment Agency, Defra, Ofwat, Parliament or the research institutions, and every source is linked.
A nitrate law in 1991. A national advice service in 2006. Statutory farming rules in 2018. A storm overflow plan in 2022. In August 2026 the Environment Agency reported 14.3 per cent of waters in good condition, and none passing the chemical test. The full timeline of what was promised and what happened.
A £90 million fine for offences a judge found were deliberate. An industry privatised with no debt that now carries £72 billion. And ten thousand water quality tests quietly cancelled by the regulator in the summer of 2025. What the courts, the accounts and the Environment Agency’s own reports say.
Sixty per cent of the nitrogen in rivers comes from agriculture, after thirty-five years of nitrate regulation and with 55 per cent of England designated a vulnerable zone. Why rules at the point of application never reached it, and what it costs to take back out.
The Environment Agency’s own words. Fifty-five per cent of river water bodies fail the phosphorus standard. Phosphate travels attached to soil particles, so stopping it means stopping erosion.
Thirty-eight per cent of more than three thousand surveyed sites in south west England had soil degraded enough to shed water. What compaction does, what it costs downstream, and what restores infiltration.
A regulator that called soil carbon loss an act of economic and environmental self-harm, a 2030 target to reverse degradation, a shelved soil plan, and an admission that there is not enough data to know whether it is working.
A national on-farm survey found key earthworm types rare or absent in 42 per cent of fields. The cheapest soil test in the country, what it reveals, and why it agrees with what the rivers are saying.
Eight sections covering the water, the framing, the companies, the regulator, the wildlife, the public health picture, the soil and farming’s own share of it. Every figure is numbered against the forty linked sources at the foot of The water companies, on the record.