There has been a law about nitrate since 1991. A national farm advice service since 2006. Statutory farming rules since 2018. A storm overflow plan since 2022. In August 2026 the Environment Agency reported that 14.3 per cent of England’s surface waters are in good ecological condition, and that not one of them passed the test for chemical pollution.
Nobody can say the problem was not identified. It has been identified again and again, in law, in strategy and in plan, for thirty-five years. What has not happened is the fixing.
The point of this page is not that officials do not care. It is that the entire apparatus built to solve this, the directives, the designations, the advice services, the rules and the plans, has now been running long enough to be judged on results. Below is that record, taken from published government and regulator sources.
Catchment Sensitive Farming is the government’s main instrument for reducing agricultural pollution. It is advice led, voluntary, and it has been running since 2006. Natural England evaluated its water quality results across phases one to four, covering 2006 to 2018.
After twelve years, in the catchments where it operated, it recorded nitrogen down 4 per cent, phosphorus down 8 per cent and sediment down 12.3 per cent.3
Twelve years of the national advisory programme, across roughly a third of England’s farmland, produced a four per cent reduction in nitrogen. Meanwhile agriculture still accounts for around 60 per cent of the nitrogen reaching rivers in England and Wales.13
This is not an argument against advice. It is an argument that advice alone, layered on top of a system that has not changed, moves the needle by single digits while the problem is measured in multiples.
The Farming Rules for Water came into force in 2018. They are statutory. They cover the application of manures and fertilisers, soil management and the prevention of run-off.
No farmer has been prosecuted under them.5
Between April 2021 and March 2026 the Environment Agency carried out 19,018 inspections of non-permitted farms, covering 15,006 individual holdings. It found 48 per cent of them non-compliant. It issued more than 27,000 improvement actions. Over the same five years it secured 36 prosecutions, none of them under the Farming Rules for Water.13
For a period, non-enforcement was official policy. Statutory guidance issued in March 2022 directed the Environment Agency not to enforce where land managers were working within the terms of that guidance. It was replaced in June 2025 by guidance that dropped the instruction.14
The Storm Overflows Discharge Reduction Plan is the largest environmental programme in the industry’s history and it is paid for by bill payers. It commits around £56 billion of capital investment.8
Its target is to eliminate 80 per cent of discharges by 2050, bringing the average number of spills per overflow down from 29 a year to 10 a year.
So the plan, in full, is that a child born this year will be twenty-four before England’s sewer overflows stop spilling more than ten times a year each. Wildlife and Countryside Link called it a missed opportunity, arguing the ambition falls well short of the growing harm.15
The legal target for England’s waters to reach good status sits at 2027, having already slipped from 2015. It is not expected to be met. There is currently no statutory provision or plan setting out how the objectives will be achieved after that date.4
The Office for Environmental Protection has criticised successive governments for failing to create and invest in adequate measures in the river basin management plans to meet those objectives.4
Across thirty-five years, almost everything in that timeline regulates the moment of application or the moment of discharge. Almost nothing changes the ground itself.
Nitrate leaves a field because the soil could not hold it. Phosphate leaves attached to soil particles, because the soil moved. Rain arrives at a river in hours rather than days because the ground shed it instead of soaking it up. Every one of those is a property of soil structure and soil biology, and every one of them is downstream of how much living organic matter the soil has left.
England and Wales lose 2.9 million tonnes of topsoil to erosion every year. Arable soils have already lost between 40 and 60 per cent of their organic carbon. Both figures are the Environment Agency’s own.16
A treatment works can only clean what reaches the pipe. A rule can only govern what a farmer applies. Neither reaches the sixty per cent of river nitrogen that comes off the land, because by the time it is moving it is already too late.
The Soil First Initiative works on the soil itself, using natural soil biology to build structure and organic matter so that farmland holds rain and nutrients instead of shedding them. It is done field by field and catchment by catchment, the land stays in full production, and the change is measured in the soil and in the water. We are not claiming to have solved what thirty-five years of policy has not. We are claiming that the cause has never been treated, and that it can be. See how it works.
Thirty-five years of nitrate regulation, and sixty per cent of it still comes off farmland.
The Environment Agency’s own words, and a 2030 target with nothing measuring it.
Thirty-eight per cent of surveyed sites in south west England shed water they should be holding.