Episode 2: What Does Clean Really Mean?

0:04I think it's probably true to say I've spent more time afloat or on water than I have on land. I love every piece of it because it all has a distinct character and it all has its own appeal.

0:18Lucy Tobin: To understand what the Thames really means to London, I'm hearing from Chris Livett, a seventh generation waterman. For him, the Thames isn't just scenery. It's a workplace, family history, his livelihood and his home. A waterman is somebody that is licensed to navigate passenger boats for fare, for money. And a waterman has been in existence since the days of Henry VIII, 1515. It's been in my family for 150 years now. On his houseboat in London, 65-year-old Chris says he's done almost every job the river can offer. He's worked tugboats, moved cargo, carried passengers, helped film James Bond boat chases on the Thames, and even had a cameo role in Daniel Craig's Spectre.

1:09Lucy Tobin: And as one of the King's barge masters, if King Charles needs to travel by river, Chris might well be at the tiller. My earliest memories of the river was it was very, very dirty. You could smell the dirt, all the ropes that we used to handle. If they were left in the Thames overnight, they'd have a blacky brown filth on them. And if you fell in, God forbid, you'd have to have your stomach pumped out because it was that toxic. That's one version of a dirty river. Today, Chris says the Thames has come a long way. It's changed hugely. The factories have gone. I mean, people say it's still dirty, but it's not.

1:48There are over 100 different varieties of fish out there. Have a look at the wildlife. Open your eyes and see the corn that's coming and going. Have a look at the wake and the wash from boats now. It's white. Smell when you're out there. It's not toxic anymore. It's changed hugely. That recovery matters, but better is not the same as good. The factories are gone and some fish have returned. but for the people who work these waters and the wildlife trying to survive in it, better is a low bar to clear. The reality check is that a clean river is not a sterile one. If you're looking for a sparkling blue Mediterranean stream, you're in the wrong city.

2:28The Thames is meant to be brown, but there is a massive, often legal difference between a river that is naturally brown and one that is dirty. A healthy Thames isn't a river with nothing in it. it's a river that isn't being used as an industrial scale overflow.

2:47Lucy Tobin: This is Thames Unfiltered by The Standard in association with Thames Water. Across the series we're asking how healthy the Thames really is, who shapes it, who's responsible for it and what needs to happen to safeguard its future. In this episode we're asking a question that sounds simple but is surprisingly hard to answer. What does clean really mean? Should the Thames be clean enough to swim in? Is it okay if it's clean enough for seals but toxic enough to make rowers sick? Because depending on who you ask, the water companies, the regulators or the people in the Thames, you're going to get a very different answer.

3:36Lucy Tobin: For most of us, the first test of a clean river is personal. Would I touch it? Would I swim in it? Would I let my child paddle in it? The government warns people can't just swim in any part of the River Thames, but there are designated bathing spots, including one that's opened this year in Ham and Kingston. Would you take a dip? These questions have become harder to answer because we can now see, almost in real time, when sewage may be entering the water. OK, I've got my laptop open and I'm typing in Thames Water Storm Overflow Map. It's a site that anyone can see and it shows where diluted sewage may be entering the rivers across the region.

4:23Lucy Tobin: It's almost live. okay i'm seeing a red circle with an exclamation mark um i assume it's a warning rather than something exciting happening it feeds into winterborne stream saying discharge has been recorded in the last 48 hours um discharge i assume is a polite way of saying potential poo Our monitor indicates this storm overflow discharged in the last 48 hours. This means there could be sewage in this section of the watercourse. The discharge, as they say, started at 3am and finished at 5.15pm. That's 14 hours and 15 minutes of sewage potentially overflowing into the river. In 2017, the Environment Agency asked water companies to install event duration monitors Poo CCTV, if you will, on storm overflows These monitors don't show how much sewage is entering the water But they do show when an overflow, a metaphorical giant flush of the loo, may be operating

5:41We have a sewage system that was designed with an overflow mechanism, a failsafe, a bit like your bathtub at home. Paul Hampton is Thames Water's River Health Community Manager. If you fill it too much to prevent your home flooding, it has an overflow and the sewage system is designed in a similar way. In the last few years, we've moved to a more real-time situation. So in fact, Thames also were the first company to have a storm overflow map that was publishing and sharing all of our storm overflow information. I certainly think we've obviously got a long way to go to build trust back with customers, with stakeholders, but I certainly don't think not being transparent is the right way to do it.

6:21The water companies claim this flashing map is progress. They call it radical transparency. transparency. In one way they're right, the river isn't any cleaner, the sewage is still flowing, but we now have a high definition picture of exactly when the river is unsafe to use. But does knowing you're swimming in waste actually make the water any better? Or does it just make the failure easier to track? I think our event, you know, the storm overflow information that we provide is a piece of the puzzle in terms of water quality. It's useful information for people to understand and potentially start to build up a picture that, you know, OK, after some heavy rainfall, then there's a chance that some of our storm overflows might be operating.

7:03Lucy Tobin: On Thames Water's website, it says the monitors are sensitive and can sometimes play up, meaning the data isn't always accurate. That might be the reason the storm outflow was discharging on a sunny day like today, but it might not. Campaigners say Thames Water could simply be dumping sewage without a weather reason for it. This uncertainty matters. The map tells you something is happening, but not exactly how much pollution is entering the water. Thameswater argues that recording the volume of sewage is not a requirement. And I think some of our most vocal critics, I think, recognise that that was a brave move and the right thing to do and the right thing for the industry to do.

7:48One of Thameswater's most vocal critics is Ash Smith a retired police detective and the campaigner whose work inspired Channel 4's dirty business He gives the company a modicum of credit for its map

8:05They were the first company to put out the sewage map They're going to like me saying this, I know that They put out the sewage map and they did it very honestly with honest colours all right green amber and red whereas with some of the other water companies you're getting like a color chart of vague shades of purple meaning different things you have to have to guess that by by kind of spending half a day with grid references whereas Thames Water at least did do that and we really do appreciate the efforts that the Thames Water staff go to and you see that in dirty business you see that portrayal of a Thames Water person working in difficult situation and that has been our experience.

8:45We like the way that Thames water staff try to do their best with the horrible hand that they've been dealt. But sewage is only one way of judging a river. If you want to know whether the Thames is genuinely healthy, you have to look beyond what can be seen and into the chemistry of the water itself. Professor Mike Bowes is a hydrochemist at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, based on the banks of the Thames at Wallingford in Oxfordshire.

9:19We're very evidence-based. If I say anything that's not based on evidence that we can point to, I'm going to get strung up. For nearly 30 years, Mike and his team have been collecting samples at various locations along the non-tidal Thames. Consequently, he has a forensic knowledge of what's in the river. We sample every week and it's a very high-tech system we've got. We have a bucket on a rope and we go into a bridge and we throw the bucket into the river, in the main central part of the river, and we pull up the full bucket and that's our sample. Week after week, bucket after bucket, Mike and his team have compiled one of the most comprehensive data sets on the microscopic make-up of the Thames.

10:05The biggest misunderstanding that I come across on almost a daily basis is that people believe that the River Thames has never been so polluted and it's simply not the case. One of the loudest narratives about the Thames is that everything is just getting worse. But Mike argues it's more nuanced than that. It's not that the river is clean enough, it's that the data tells a more complicated story. In 2000, the Environment Agency adopted an EU-wide monitoring scheme. The Water Framework Directive has been retained despite Brexit. Its intention is to give governments a way of assessing declining or improving river health.

10:45But it's got problems. It's a really blunt tool because what you find is that because they measure so many different parameters and there's lots and lots of chemicals that they measure, such as metals, for instance, organic pollutants, pesticides, herbicides, pharmaceuticals, things like that. If any of these tests come back as above a limit, the whole river site fails. It's called the one-out, all-out principle. What that means is that for the UK as a whole, only 14 % of our rivers meet good ecological status, which is what we're aiming for. And that sounds terrible. And it hasn't budged for, I don't know, 10 years.

11:33It just is always about 14%. That 14 % figure appears again and again in news reports, campaign videos and official documents. It sounds like a simple measure of failure, but Mike says it can hide progress as well as reveal problems. When you delve into the data, things aren't quite as gloomy as they seem because a lot of these rivers are failing for one particular parameter. If you look at, for instance, the thing I research, which is one of the main parameters, phosphate concentration, they might still be failing on phosphate. Their phosphate levels might still be too high, but they've improved dramatically in virtually every large river.

12:15Phosphates come from agricultural runoff fertilisers that are washed into nearby streams and end up in big rivers like the Thames. Like nitrates, which come from sewage, they can starve the water of oxygen by stimulating the growth of algae, a process known as eutrophication. The Water Framework Directive sets an acceptable limit of 100 micrograms of nitrates per litre. The phosphorus concentrations in the Thames in the late 1990s used to be about 2 ,000 micrograms per litre. Now they're down to about 250 micrograms per litre. So that's an 85 % reduction in phosphate concentration, which is a huge improvement and will have big beneficial impacts on the river ecology.

13:02But they're still not low enough. That's the key. Among those who investigate river health the Water Framework Directive seems to have few fans Joe Bradley worked for the Environment Agency for more than 24 years before joining Stormwater Shepherds a campaigning charity which focuses on the effects of stormwater pollution

13:29We miss the picture of the whole catchment So the water framework directive classification point is often towards the bottom of the catchment and that's where the Environment Agency measure river health and they'll say, well, this whole river is polluted or this whole river is in poor ecological status from one sample towards the bottom of the catchment. And that's nonsense. Budget cuts mean the Environment Agency has now slashed the number of locations where it monitors water quality. In the section of the Thames where Mike Bowes worked, the number of classification points has roughly halved.

14:02Fewer samples means a less detailed perspective on the cleanliness of all parts of the river. And then there's what the Water Framework Directive is actually looking for. It's a long list, including legacy pesticides like DDT, which was banned in the 1980s, and perfluoroctane sulfonate, or PFOS, one of the highly persistent forever chemicals. But it doesn't even monitor the amount of microplastics in the water. Microplastic pollution is the thing that keeps me awake at night. And one of the largest sources and the least measured source of microplastics in our water environment are microplastic tyre wear particles.

14:42Joe believes that microplastics from tyres are a key blind spot in our understanding of the river's overall health.

14:49Lucy Tobin: The River Thames is crisscrossed by motorways like the M4 and the M25 with the daily movement of hundreds of thousands of road vehicles. Unlike sewage, which goes through a treatment plant when overseen by a fit and proper utility, nothing stops tyre particles from being washed into the river network. They look like food. So if you're a mayfly larva or a small fish or an oyster, perhaps, these little tiny particles look like food. So you think, oh, good, and you eat them or you ingest them or you filter feed them or however you eat. and then psychologically that creature thinks it's eaten food.

15:30So its tummy's full and it thinks, well, I'm all right now, but actually there's no nutritional value to that that it's taken in. So not only are they microplastic tirewire particles going into their bodies and poisoning them, they're also tricking them into thinking they've ingested food when they haven't and therefore they fail to thrive. It kills the things that live in the river, it poisons them, mutates them, deforms them, affects their eggs before they're even hatched, causes abortions, changes their behaviour. And those pollutants, we're not spending any money or attention on particularly.

16:00And those are the creatures that live in the river. And that is what river health is all about. Joe Bradley recently appeared before MP Chris Hinchliffe, a member of the Environmental Audit Committee. Miss Bradley, I mean, you've talked about no one's measuring this properly. As a layperson, is that perhaps because it's a more diffuse problem harder to track in a way that you can just go to a sewage outflow. Perhaps I'm missing something. It's not diffuse pollution like landfill pollution that sneaks into the river underground. These are big pipes. The Environment Agency have a statutory responsibility embedded in the legislation that says for all known discharges of priority hazardous substances, they have a duty to monitor them, control them and ultimately eliminate them.

16:44They know that these discharges contain priority hazardous substances. I've told them, other people have told them, research has been telling them so for 30 years and yet they do not monitor any highway outfalls in England

17:03Sewage is a loud crisis It smells, it's visual, it produces a visceral public shock But another pollution gets far less airtime simply because it's harder to see But every time it rains, a cocktail of heavy metals, tyre rubber and oil is washed off our streets and straight into the water For the creatures living in the Thames, these urban surges are just as consequential as sewage and far more persistent Up until now, we've been looking at the Thames through a purely human lens It's not about me and it's not about you, it's about the creatures that live in the river It's frustrating for me because I can see this fixation on sewage pollution that we've had over the last five or six years.

17:50We're investing millions of pounds fixing sewage pollution, albeit slowly, but we're doing it. But very little money has been invested in fixing pollution from urban surfaces and highways. And unless we do the two things at roughly the same speed in parallel, we won't achieve a cleaner river when we hope to achieve a cleaner river. We'll have to wait another 30 years while the urban runoff catches up. You don't need a scientific report to know the river is alive. Sometimes evidence appears right outside a pub. It sort of goes around these boats here and then when it dives down, you know, when these big boats come past, it's here every day and it doesn't hang out outside the Mayflower, but it swims up and down.

18:31So locals will see it and whether it's the same seal, I don't know, or it is a number of seals because they all look pretty similar. That's Paul Graham, owner of the Mayflower in Rotherhithe, one of the oldest Thameside pubs, talking about the seals he sees from the riverbank. But anecdotes are not enough. Scientists at the Zoological Society of London have been trying to measure that recovery with their State of the Thames report. The second edition was released earlier this year. It uses 21 indicators to show whether conditions are improving, stable or deteriorating. Catherine Head is one of the authors.

19:10So of our 21 indicators for the state of the Thames report one of them is plastic pollution and we found quite a big increase in takeaway containers and things like that which are being thrown and found in the Thames waterway but we also found a positive story of reduction in cotton buds. Over a decade ago citizen scientists started to collect data on the amount and type of plastic at different points along the Thames foreshore. Thanks to the 2020 ban on plastic cotton buds, one of the most frequently found items in the samples has now been reduced to nearly zero. And that's really testament to legislation.

19:49So cotton buds were banned a few years ago and now we've seen a real sort of decrease in those. Last year, close by Hammersmith Bridge, London's most unwelcome tourist attraction was removed. Wet Wipe Island, an accumulation of eight years worth of plastic wipes that had been flushed down the toilet. The cultural landmark was so big it featured on Google Maps. It was something like the equivalent of 20 double-decker buses which was forming a foreshore along the River Thames near Hammersmith Bridge and literally changing the flow of the waterway and possibly impacting you know the ecology of the river.

20:28An example of how plastic pollution can really impact our waterways. After years of campaigning, plastic wet wipes are now set to follow cotton buds with a ban. Here's Fleur Johnson MP speaking in Prime Minister's questions. This government promised to bring in this ban and is doing so now. Will the Prime Minister join with me on celebrating a Labour promise delivered and share the message that we should always bin wet wipes and other wipes, not flush them? This ban will put an end to plastic wet wipes that litter our beaches, clog up our sewers and harm wildlife.

21:07The ban should also reduce the cost of clearing wet wipes from the sewer network. This is a job Thames Water says costs£18 million a year. But plastic is only one type of river pollution. To understand whether the Thames is recovering or worsening, ZSL looks at the river as a living system.

21:32the thames is full of life from the smallest thing up to one some of the most iconic species and these animals are living feeding and breathing and fulfilling their whole life cycles in the thames alison debney from zsl another of the editors of the state of the thames report it was first commissioned in 2021 as a way of providing a benchmark for data samples in the future. It's also there to assess the impact of Thames Water's new super sewer, the Tideway Tunnel. We were doing fish surveys a couple of years ago and we were finding seahorses in Greenwich. We have seahorses living in a seagrass, you know, people fall off their chairs if they knew what was swimming past outside the door.

22:15It makes me really proud that we have a capital city with all this life in it. We have river porpoises in the Thames, which some people might not know about because obviously you don't see them, but we have them in numbers up to as high as five individuals per 100 metres squared, which is higher than some of the special areas of conservation in Ireland. Wildlife surveys form a key part of the report's 21 indicators. So do pollutants, including nitrates from sewage, phosphates from agriculture and metals such as copper and zinc. But one of the most important indicators is dissolved oxygen. All aquatic life needs oxygen to breathe and therefore survive.

22:59So it's a really sort of fundamental way of understanding the health of the waterway. And if that dissolved oxygen dips below about 45%, then we start to see problems. What we're seeing in the Thames is that over the last 20 years, things have really, really improved and we now rarely see reductions in dissolved oxygen below 45%. So that's really, really positive for the wildlife in the Thames. That's the good news from the report, but sadly the data also shows the number of fish species and wildfowl are on the long-term decline. The seal that Paul spotted outside the Mayflower in Rotherhithe may have been a rare harbour seal.

23:40Its population has declined by 30 % since 2018. There is a healthy environment, it's really important, but there's an awful lot of work that we still need to do to clean up water because it is quite compromised, really.

23:53Lucy Tobin: In the next episode, I find out whether the Tideway Tunnel is delivering everything its backers promised. Chris Livett, who spent a lifetime on the river, believes he's already noticed a difference. I think we have, actually. I think that, you know, on boats, you've got filters that suck up water to cool the engine water down. And those filters are often blocked with debris from pollution, syringes, plastics and so forth. And I think we've noticed a marked difference on that, which we're very pleased with.

24:35Lucy Tobin: So, it seems the rating of clean depends entirely on who you're trying to satisfy. For swimmers, a clean river means having the confidence that a morning dip won't leave you in A &E. For scientists, it's a spreadsheet of oxygen levels, phosphates and bacteria counts, a search for life in a chemical soup. For campaigners, it's a battle against invisible poisons like microplastics and tyre toxins that make few headlines but never leave the water. For the Thames, clean is a baseline of survival. It's enough dissolved oxygen to breathe. It's a habitat for seals, birds and seahorses. A clean Thames is not a sterile filtered tank of water, but a living, breathing, brown and silt-heavy ecosystem.

25:27Lucy Tobin: It's supposed to be messy, but not toxic.

25:34Lucy Tobin: This is Thames Unfiltered by The Standard in association with Thames Water Next time, we go inside Abbey Mill's pumping station or the so-called Poo Palace One crucial part of our sewer system built more than 150 years ago and still carrying London's waste today I'm going to tell you the story of the Great Stink Sir Joseph Bazalgette and a Victorian engineering miracle that's been overstretched and underfinanced for decades

26:16This podcast was produced by The Standard and Message Heard in association with Thames Water with all content created under The Standard's editorial control I'm your host, Lucy Tobin From The Standard, Tori Frost is our executive producer and Vanessa Cutt is our senior project manager. From Message Heard, Mark Kendrick is our senior producer, Will Aspinall is our producer, Martha Tipper is our assistant producer, Lizzie Andrews and Alan Lear are our audio engineers and James Cox is our production coordinator.