DIANNE ANNA BAY

In England, you're allowed to clear about 20 metres of silt and rubbish out of a river on your own. Anything past that needs a permit from the Environment Agency. Paul Powlesland's volunteers cleared a 250-metre stretch of the River Roding with a hired digger, which is why a barrister who hauled out 200 bags of trash is now under criminal investigation. The Roding runs through east London. Powlesland lives on a boat moored on it, and for years he and a group of volunteers have pulled out shopping trolleys, needles, old appliances, even weapons. Kingfishers, herons and dragonflies came back to water that used to be buried under junk. This one job took 10 days and a digger that cost £1,000 to hire. The rule that caught him is oddly specific. Under England's water rules, scooping silt off the bottom of a river the agency officially manages counts as a "flood risk activity", and the law treats that the same as building a structure in the water. Do it without a permit and the offence carries up to two years in prison. The agency says it is also looking at waste the volunteers left on the floodplain. Powlesland is an environmental lawyer who has used these exact laws to protect rivers and trees, and a conviction could cost him his licence to practise. The agency's reasoning isn't unreasonable. Dredging done badly can push flooding onto people downstream and wreck the habitat that protected animals need, which is what the permit is meant to prevent. The 20-metre allowance is there for small jobs. And no decision to prosecute has actually been made. While investigators were knocking on a volunteer's door within a week of his cleanup, water companies discharged raw sewage into England's rivers and seas for a combined 3.6 million hours in 2024, more than 400 years of spilling packed into a single year. Only 14% of English rivers are in good health. Between 2015 and 2025, the Environment Agency investigated water companies for pollution 11,474 times. Fifty-eight of those ended in a prosecution. For serious pollution over the last five years, the number of water companies actually taken to court and convicted is zero. So the message comes out backwards. Spend ten days and a thousand pounds making a river cleaner and an officer turns up within the week. Pump sewage into that same river for years and the chance of seeing a courtroom is close to zero.