The government and regulators may have broken the law by failing to stem raw sewage dumping into rivers by water companies in England, the new independent environmental watchdog has said. The Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), which was set up after Brexit to replace the enforcement powers of the European Commission, said an investigation suggested the government, the Environment Agency (EA) and Ofwat may be failing to comply with environmental law and allowing raw sewage to be discharged by water companies more frequently than the law allows.

The OEP was called in to investigate by the charity WildFish, which said it believed regulators were failing in their duty to enforce the law. The OEP said the EA failures related to the way it set permit conditions for raw sewage releases and in the way it enforced the conditions on the permits. Ofwat, the financial regulator, had potentially failed to properly use its powers to make enforcement orders where sewerage companies had failed to treat sewage. The watchdog said the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs had possible failures relating to its duty to make enforcement orders where sewerage companies fail to comply with the law to effectively deal with sewage.