“Sir, any salt, vinegar and norfluoxetine on your fish and chips? A dollop of ketchup, diltiazem or carbamazepine?”
Seven pharmaceuticals, including the three prescription drugs mentioned above, were found by scientists in fish caught downstream from sewage treatment plants in five US states in 2009. Another study that year found that 80 per cent of male smallmouth bass in the Potomac River near Washington were growing eggs. The US Fish and Wildlife Service suspected that pharmaceuticals were partly to blame for the gender-bending.
Water companies in Britain insist that there is no risk from pharmaceutical pollution. “It’s a silly-season story,” a Thames Water spokesperson said. Should we trust the water companies to keep our rivers clean and drinking water safe? Or might it be worth having an independent review of the risks by a group of expert scientists?
Professor Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, decided last year that there was enough evidence to warrant an investigation into the impact of pharmaceuticals excreted by humans or flushed down lavatories. But this has been cancelled because the commission has been abolished, a victim of the Government’s bonfire of the quangos.
Set up 40 years ago to provide independent advice to the Government, the commission had also been considering a report on the environmental impact of discarded plastics. Sir John said that the commission could have recommended tighter controls on the treatment of sewage sludge and strict limits on packaging.
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The coalition bridles at any suggestion that industry needs more regulation. It prefers what it calls “responsibility deals”, cooked up behind closed doors by ministers and lobbyists.
It has rid itself of a body with a long track record of embarrassing ministers. The farming industry’s friends at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs hated Sir John’s report condemning the practice of crop-spraying beside residential areas. When the commission highlighted the environmental impact of the growth of aviation, a transport minister accused Sir John of attacking people’s right to fly. “I told him that only birds had a right to fly,” said Sir John.
The Government says it will order studies from specialists if it considers a particular issue worth investigating. Ministers have failed to understand that the commission’s ability to pick its own topics and engage a range of experts from across academia and industry was precisely what gave it such authority.
Of course there were too many quangos gobbling up public money, but the commission was one of the cheapest. Closing it will save only £300,000 a year.
The commission’s role might have been partly filled by another green watchdog, the Sustainable Development Commission, had it not also been abolished in March. The SDC made itself unpopular in Whitehall by opposing new nuclear power stations on the grounds of safety and clean-up costs. It also attacked the Government’s claim that voluntary measures were sufficient to persuade people to adopt sustainable lifestyles. “Nudge is not enough,” it said. Most controversially, the SDC suggested that economic growth could be incompatible with a sustainable society.
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Scrapping the SDC will save £3 million a year, a fraction of the £60 million it claimed to have saved Whitehall by recommending energy efficiencies.
The coalition may come to regret killing off these two influential critics. A government that is truly committed to being the greenest ever, as it has promised to be, would surely have valued the help of such authoritative bodies in persuading us to accept some uncomfortable truths.