Environment Agency

But wouldn't regional regulators have a bit more insight into what's going on in their local areas than a national one would?

Perhaps, but I guess if you're in a situation where you've got, on the one hand, Ofwat already, large but weak, the Environment Agency, which does lots of different things, but one of which is water regulation.

You've got the Drinking Water Inspectorate, which does actually a pretty decent job, but there they are as a separate agency.

regulator as well and Andy Burnham's now saying let's have eight regional regulators.

I think we need a change in the ownership model.

We need stronger regulation, but we need proper, big, ugly regulators that the water companies recognise and fear.

Well, shouldn't all of this just be rolled into the Environment Agency? They have regional offices, so they could have regional regulation as well as national regulation.

Wouldn't that be the most sensible thing to do?

I'm just going to pop them on the screen there so you can actually see what we're talking about here.

He had jobs at DEFRA, so the Environment Agency, the Department of Health and Social Care, the Business Department, Food Standards Agency, the Home Office, you name it.

He had salaries of up to £350,000 in total and he was contracted to work 183 hours per week.

The mathematical genii among you, the geniuses out there, will know that there's not actually that many hours even in a week.

So then the other thing that was suggested was bulrushes, the proper name for them is typhae.

So we started to investigate that and working with the Lancashire Wildlife Trust, we did a water survey of the farm and looked at the hydrology of it all and then decided that that field would be quite suitable to put in for a water discovery pilot project, which was funded by the Environment Agency.

So at this point, Cameron had become involved and was really, really keen on taking it on.

So at that point, Cameron took over because then we were getting into the actual logistics of the field and everything.

But if you live in the countryside and you happen to live next to one of these farms that gets built, that smell is kind of a million times worse than the smell of pigs, you know, the single pig or whatever on a 19th century street.

So one of the things I'm trying to say here is that you know, the idea that we live in a less smelly world saying that probably says more about you as an individual and your own kind of subject position within society and your access to economic and political power than it does about the world more generally, right? Because there are lots of people who unfortunately live next to these farms or live next to waste sites of kind of A recent example being the Wally's Quarry debacle near Stoke, I think it was, which was a giant waste site and the Environment Agency took ages to do anything about it.

And of course, one of the issues was that the people who lived nearby couldn't afford to move.

They were trapped in their homes because the value of their homes had gone down because of the smell.

One, ask for a waste carrier licence.

Two, check the licence number on the Environment Agency's public register.

And three, request a receipt.

Our message is don't fall for a rubbish deal.

The water company says its Hawes Water and Thirlmere Reservoir Group was 42.5% full in the week ending October 4th, compared with an average of 64.1% for this time of year.

Across the whole United Utilities network, reservoir storage was 52.3% full, significantly below the average of 73.2% for this point in the year.

The figures come as the Environment Agency's latest drought update reported that reservoir storage across England has continued to fall, reaching 54% nationally, which is 21 percentage points below average for the time of year.

The agency said further significant rainfall is needed in many areas to return water resources to normal conditions.