Call for urgent improvements to Scarborough bathing water quality

​Residents, politicians, and businesses have called on Yorkshire Water and the Environment Agency to speed up their work to improve water quality in Scarborough and to introduce a year-round testing regime of bathing water in the resort.

​Yorkshire Water has admitted that “for many it feels like too little too late” but promised further significant investment in its storm overflows and infrastructure in Scarborough and across the coast.

​“Irate” residents said “Scarborough is celebrating its 400th anniversary as Britain’s first resort, but it’s now the last resort” at a special meeting convened to discuss bathing water quality in the town.

​​Issues with Scarborough’s bathing water quality have continued to persist and last year’s ratings saw the South Bay still classed as ‘poor’ and the North Bay’s bathing water quality classed as ‘sufficient’.

​Steve Crawford of Surfers Against Sewage told the meeting on Monday, March 23: “Based on the ratings, if it was a restaurant, you wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole.

​“I think it’s fantastic that Yorkshire Water is investing in infrastructure, but it needs to clarify why its previous work failed, if I’m to trust it now.

“I’ve lost my shop, lost my business, lost my livelihood as a surfing instructor because of the water quality. I want to feel that I can leave this meeting and feel that something will get done.”

​Miles Cameron, manager of strategic partnerships at Yorkshire Water, said: “I’m really proud of the bathing water team who will be out working in communities, and Scarborough is a key priority for us.

​“I know for many in the room it feels like too little too late, but it is coming, and we are working on these projects. We hold the operational team to account.

​“We’ve seen improvements, including at Wheatcroft, which we are pleased to see, and were driving that improvement across our assets.

“The Scarborough investment programme will benefit Yorkshire by reducing spills from Scarborough’s five CSOs to no more than 10 per year and no more than two per bathing season, helping to improve and protect the bathing water.

​“The programme is a major AMP8 programme impacting a major urban area with a value of £150 million.”

​The Environment Agency currently tests bathing water quality from May to September, but councillors said Defra should extend the agency’s remit and funding.

​Cllr Roberta Swiers told the meeting: “The extension of the testing regime has to happen because we’re a year-round destination, because holiday parks are used consistently.

​“For everyone in this room its very frustrating that the issues remain and the change has to come faster, we need results, and we want to see Scarough going up in these water quality tables because it’s one of the best resorts in the country.”

​Professor Darren Gröcke has been investigating seaweed as an indicator of water quality in Scarborough for the past two years in a study supported by North Yorkshire Council.

​The Durham University expert said his findings pointed to Scalby Beck as the dominant source of pollution which is understood to be travelling through North Bay and into South Bay.

​He said the pollution itself was “either human sewage or manure from farms, but based on what the Environment Agency (EA) has shown us, human DNA seems to be the dominant one that’s coming through”.

​Professor Gröcke told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) that the issue could be addressed by going to the source of the pollution.

​He said: “Go to the source, which is Yorkshire Water, and make sure that a lot of that water that’s being released into the Scalby Beck is clean, it’s sterilised, that there’s no DNA, no pathogens in it, and hopefully with monitoring that Scalby Beck through the two to three years, then we’ll hopefully start to see an improvement.”

​Alison Hume, the MP for Scarborough and Whitby, said she was concerned “by the issue that the people of Scarborough cannot be assured that the water they are bathing in is safe”.

​The MP said the system for rating bathing water quality should be more “dynamic” in order to reflect recent improvements “instead of this four-year cycle”.

​Ms Hume added that she would be pushing the Government to adopt “a more dynamic resolution to this, because people don’t want to wait for years, as the water is improving due to recent investment by McCains and Yorkshire Water, and we need to be able to say that”.

​Mr Cameron, of Yorkshire Water, described innovation in water quality monitoring as “the holy grail to inform all water users whether it’s safe to bathe” and noted that the company had installed 20 new monitoring units as part of a trial to assess “how we can provide near or ‘real-time’ water quality data for water users”.