The Treasury and the taxpayer would save millions of pounds if the Environment Agency were to be disbanded and broken up into its component parts. There would also be considerable benefits for the environment, for democracy and for local communities. Those of us who have worked for the Environment Agency and know it well have watched in despair over the past few years as it has descended into a bureaucratic morass. It has consistently failed to deliver in so many important areas – river quality being just the latest of many. Breaking up the Agency would be a relatively straightforward and cost effective task. Environment Protection could be taken over by district councils. At a district level councils already have environment officers who already carry out some tasks such as bathing water and river quality monitoring. The waste protection, packaging and strategy function should go to County/Unitary Councils who already duplicate much of what the EA does. Riperian owners and fishery clubs should take over the EA’s fisheries responsibilities. At the moment the EA spends far too high a proportion of its fishery funding on collecting and administering fishing licences. The Flood warning function should go to the Met Office. It is ridiculous to have one organisation issuing weather forecast and another flood warnings as if the two were not inter connected. The Thames & Medway Navigations along with Rye Harbour should either be sold and privatised or passed to British Waterways who have a much better record in terms of the cost effectiveness of the management of the nation’s rivers and canals. The responsibility for regulating major industries should be merged with the Nuclear Directorate --- in many cases the two organisations already overlap. Finally flood defence. For far too long funds from this area have been siphoned off by the EA to finance some of its more fanciful projects. This is despite their supposed ring fencing. Major structures such as the Thames, Dartford and Barking barriers should be sold off and privatised. Responsibilities for more local structures and defences should go to County Councils who already have an enormous amount of engineering expertise in this area. This would ensure the proper management of drainage systems that would have prevented so much of the river flooding that we have seen in the past few years. The EA’s clarion call that climate change and not its mismanagement of the river systems is responsible for flooding does not stand up to a closer and historic scrutiny of the facts. Local communities and not bureaucrats based in Bristol will in future be able to decide whether or not flood defences should be built and if they are both necessary and affordable. The EA simply cannot be allowed to continue paying relatively large salaries to so many managers ….there are an enormous number in relation to what is a relatively small organisation. The numbers of managers are out of all proportion when compared with an average sized county council or other similar public sector organisation. The Environment Agency must also be stopped wasting millions of pounds of taxpayers money on frivolous activities – the £30,000 it gave to the Birmingham Gay Pride festival is just one of hundreds of examples where it has frittered away taxpayers money that should have gone towards helping the environment. The EA has become so bogged down in its own bureaucracy the only way forward is to dissolve the structure and start all over again.

Now would be a good time for the Minister to act. There should not be a review or any other delaying tactics.

The Environment Agency should be history by the end of this year as part of the overall spending review.

When front line services are being cut the government cannot afford the luxury of this wasteful and clumsy organisation.

It has failed to live up to the expectations and the vision of those such John Gummer who created it.