Celebrating 20 years of The Rivers Trust: a reflection from Mark Lloyd, CEO

This year marks the 30-year anniversary of the first Rivers Trusts being formed – in a process of parallel invention – by dedicated volunteers in the Westcountry and on the Tweed, Thames and Wye, all of whom had a common purpose: to restore and revive their beloved local river. Gradually they discovered each other and started sharing ideas and intelligence. This collaborative way of working was formalised 20 years ago with the formation by Ian Gregg of the Association of Rivers Trusts (ART), renamed The Rivers Trust in 2011.

Arlin Rickard and Alan Hawken travelled all over the country supporting the formation of new Trusts with applications to the Charity Commission and other governance requirements, and organising conferences to facilitate knowledge-sharing. I remember the energy, creativity and passion of these early events, and the way that strangers from opposite ends of the country greeted each other as friends. That spirit of comradeship lives on at all our events to this day, even though we now have more than 65 Trusts in the movement, covering the whole of Britain, and a rapidly increasing proportion of Northern Ireland and Ireland.

The meteoric growth of this network of independent charities reflects the universal need for catchment-based organisations to deliver environmental improvements on rivers throughout these isles. It’s also a reflection of the fact that people everywhere care so much about the health of their local river that they are prepared to give their time and energy to serve as Trustees, to fill in endless grant funding applications, navigate complex local politics and all the other things involved in setting up a charity.

These efforts have led to a growing list of annual outputs: last year alone, our member Trusts planted nearly half a million trees, created or restored 900 ha of wetlands, worked with nearly 4,000 farmers and opened up 544km of river to fish passage by easing or removing 126 fish barriers. They employ about 600 expert, dedicated staff and have a total income of £65m. It must be one of the fastest-growing environmental networks ever.

River health is a hugely complex and wicked problem, that I have heard likened to knife crime and hospital waiting lists. There are simply too many ways in which we have modified and poisoned our rivers for any single organisation to fix them alone. Sewage effluent and overflows have hit the headlines in recent years, but are only part of the story. Nearly all our rivers are plagued to varying degrees by a litany of threats: dams and weirs, channel straightening, concrete river banks, tyre particles and brake pad fragments in road run-off, pesticides, fertilisers, slurry, soil erosion, antibiotics, pharmaceuticals, narcotics, pet flea treatments, rising water temperatures, depleted aquifers, damaging high flows, sewage sludge, household chemicals, oil spills, leaking milk tankers and invasive non-native species. All these things and more conspire to degrade the water environment.

And all of these things interact with each other: a dammed and straightened river is less resilient to pollution; low flows concentrate pollutants and higher temperatures drive biological and chemical oxygen demand, depleting oxygen levels for fish and invertebrates. And most of them are going to be exacerbated by climate change and population growth. So, Rivers Trusts have their work cut out, but we know we can’t do it alone.

It's a plain fact that we’re all part of the problem and we can all be part of the solution. Individuals, businesses, organisations, government departments, highways agencies, local authorities all need to join in a collaborative effort across every sector if we are to make our rivers healthier.

This year also marks 10 years of the creation of the Catchment Based Approach and its 105 Catchment Partnerships. These were set up by the then Environment Minister Richard Benyon as an attempt to build local ‘coalitions of the willing’ to identify the pressures in each river catchment area, and to join forces in delivering projects at a local scale. The concept is excellent – and globally unique – but they have never been funded adequately to do this complex job, and their local knowledge and social capital has rarely been factored into delivery and investment plans by the decision-makers in charge of spending public money on the environment.

In this multi-anniversary year in the history of civil society’s action to fix rivers, we are facing a golden opportunity to build on the achievements and learnings of the past three decades and to create a water management system that is capable of rising to meet the huge challenge of restoring rivers to good health. For one, the government recently announced the formation of a Water Commission to have a detailed look at how we manage and mismanage water in England and Wales.

There are huge opportunities to rationalise and optimise the current ways of working to generate far better outcomes for people and nature. Our current system is disjointed and chaotic. The River Tamar, for example, has 65 different government-funded plans affecting its fortunes. These plans are written and published, but they aren’t funded and so don’t get delivered. Many contain generic measures which fill up boxes in tables, but aren’t relevant for the local environment. Some are in direct conflict with each other. Some polluters are heavily regulated with complex permitting regimes, while others face almost no risk of sanctions whatsoever for causing chronic pollution. We have a dearth of data about rivers, and they are mainly held in separate databases that aren’t linked, and are too often hidden in Excel spreadsheets deep in government web sites with no attempt to make them useable by citizens. This lack of reliable data drives very poor decision-making about how tens of billions of taxpayers and billpayers pounds should be spent, every year.

Catchment partnerships, Rivers Trusts and other NGOs in the environment sector face huge bureaucratic hurdles to delivering environmental improvements: at least half of our work comprises applying for permits, licences, planning permission and a host of other Kafkaesque processes. Funders take months to agree contracts and then pay in arrears and usually late, but set punishing deadlines for spending the money. And all this has to be done in ecological windows around bird-nesting and fish spawning seasons.

So, there are huge challenges with this endeavour, but also great opportunities. The Rivers Trust movement is incredibly well placed to play a key role in rising to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities because it has accrued a deep well of collective experience, knowledge, intelligence, passion and collaborative spirit over the past three decades. If we all keep working together, it really is possible for us to achieve our mission of wild, healthy, natural rivers for all.