The next government must give Windermere greater protection from sewage pollution, campaigners including the naturalist Chris Packham and the comedian Paul Whitehouse have urged in an open letter to all party leaders.
The campaign group Save Windermere, which organised the letter, says the lake has huge ecological significance, is home to rare and protected species and brings in about £750m to the economy. But the signatories, who include the Wildlife Trust, the countryside charity the CPRE and WildFish, say it is being degraded by pollution.
As party leaders prepare to publish their manifestos this week, Matt Staniek, the founder of Save Windermere, said greater protection for the lake was urgently needed to make sure it was looked after for future generations forever. “This is not ideological, it’s non-contentious, and it is absolutely necessary to save Windermere whilst also setting an example for the treatment of our freshwater and our natural world on a national level,” he said in the letter.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The next government must give Windermere greater protection from sewage pollution, campaigners including the naturalist Chris Packham and the comedian Paul Whitehouse have urged in an open letter to all party leaders.
The campaign group Save Windermere, which organised the letter, says the lake has huge ecological significance, is home to rare and protected species and brings in about £750m to the economy.
As party leaders prepare to publish their manifestos this week, Matt Staniek, the founder of Save Windermere, said greater protection for the lake was urgently needed to make sure it was looked after for future generations forever.
Last month it emerged that millions of litres of raw sewage had been illegally pumped into Windermere in February, and that United Utilities had failed to stop the pollution of it for 10 hours.
The letter says Windermere has been victim to decades of pollution and exploitation resulting from inadequate investment and substandard regulation, leaving the lake unadaptable to our changing climate.
As soon as we discovered this fault was affecting the Glebe Road pumping station, our engineers took urgent steps to resolve the situation and we informed the Environment Agency within an hour of the pollution being confirmed.”
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