UK under fire over beach pollution

ENVIRONMENT

The European Commission was today urged to take legal action against the UK for "persistent and planned failure" to free bathing beaches of sewage pollution.

The call came from the Marine Conservation Society which said 49 UK beaches were still sewage-contaminated 21 years after an EC bathing water directive was laid down. "It is a scandal that despite years of protest ... these beaches fail to meet minimum legal limits for sewage pollution," said the society's conservation director Guy Linley-Adams.

The society said the UK had broken commitments given to the European Court of Justice in 1991 to achieve full compliance to the bathing water directive by 1995, and had broken its own revised target of 95 per cent compliance by 1995. "It is high time we were not so soft with our record profit-making water companies. It is up to the new Government to stop the pollution of our beaches once and for all," said Mr Linley-Adams.