OEP: Northern Ireland bathing water regulations outdated

Northern Ireland’s bathing water regulations need to be updated to improve the protection they provide to the public, according to a report by the UK’s Office for Environmental Protection (OEP).

In the report to the province’s Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA), the OEP said that while the regulatory regime in place is being followed, it is outdated, as regulatory requirements have not kept pace with the changing ways in which society uses rivers, lakes and coastal waters for recreation.

The OEP said any future review of the regulations’ focus on swimming should consider expanding that to include surfing, paddle-boarding, wind-surfing and the like. It also criticised the regulations’ focus on a fixed bathing season which, the OEP said, does not reflect the year-round nature of the activities.

And the OEP emphasised that any review should also consider the approach to sampling water quality, with a view to increasing the number of sample points on long stretches of water and being more open about monitoring decisions.

A separate and recent OEP report on the implementation of the Water Framework Directive Northern Ireland Regulations found that progress was not on track to meet the environmental objectives set for most identified waters. This was, according to the report, due to a range of factors including a lack of clear objectives, or specific and certain measures to achieve those objectives.

The OEP found that despite bathing waters’ “protected areas” status under the Water Framework Directive Northern Ireland Regulations, the same implementation issues apply to them. There is a lack of site-specific information on measures to meet the required standards, and no clear indication for what overall levels of bathing water quality DAERA aims for or expects to achieve.

Chair of the OEP, Dame Glenys Stacey, said: “We have taken an in-depth look at the Bathing Water Northern Ireland Regulations and found that they have fallen out of step with the needs of today. They originate from developments in the 1970s and 1980s and have not kept pace with the evolving ways in which waters are now used for recreational purposes, or with public expectations.”

She went on: “The lack of overall improvement in water quality observed in recent years, combined with a number of bathing water sites failing to achieve sufficient or better standards, is a cause for concern and has been widely reported.”

The report’s other recommendations to DAERA included:    

• A review of the current identification criteria for bathing waters to ensure it covers sites where large numbers of people bathe, based on a properly representative assessment of current use, rather than a fixed number of bathers.

• Further development of short-term pollution risk forecasting systems so that health risks can be better understood and communicated to the public with greater speed, including for inland sites which may be increasingly identified as bathing waters.