Pumping and dumping in Lake Windermere
Mr Carroll made this Freedom of Information request to Environment Agency This request has been closed to new correspondence. Contact us if you think it should be reopened.
Dear Environment Agency,
I am writing to make an open government request for all the
information to which I am entitled under the freedom of information act and the environmental information regulations.
In order to assist you with this request, I am outlining my query as specifically as possible.
If however this request is too wide or too unclear, I would be grateful if you could contact me as I understand that under the act, you are required to advise and assist requesters.
(i) Could you please confirm what discharge consents are allowed into Lake Windermere from local land owners/companies, the types and quantities of substances allowed to be discharged under permit into the water.
(ii) Prosecution details of any offences undertaken by the Environment Agency in the last ten years in respect of breaches to controlled waters into the lake and the substances involved and those against whom action may have been taken.
(iii) Can you confirm if levels of phosphate in the water/shoreline or sediment at Windermere are monitored by The Environment agency and provide the latest levels detected in analysis. From direct evidence are the EA able to prove an increase in detected levels of phosphate or total phosphorus in the water/shoreline or sediment over the last ten years and prove a correlation between any particular source for such an increase providing it exists?
Could you please provide by electronic means the answers to these
questions at the Whatdotheyknow.com website.
Yours faithfully,
Mr Carroll
Thank you for contacting the Environment Agency.
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But my e-mail refers to an Environmental Incident, won’t it get answered
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Dear Mr Carroll,
Thank you for your enquiry regarding Freedom of information regarding Lake Windermere
For your information, I have passed your query to our local External Relations Team (Planning and Corporate Services) for advice. They will check whether we hold this information and they will be in touch with you shortly.
The External Relations team have 20 working days from the date we receive your enquiry to provide a response, and they will get this to you as soon as possible.
Should you wish to contact them in the meantime, their details are below. Please quote your Enquiry Ref 120312/AR20 in your correspondence with us.
External Relations
Planning and Corporate Services
Environment Agency
North West Region, Northern Area
Ghyll Mount
Gillan Way
Penrith 40 Business Park
PENRITH
CA11 9BP
Tel: 03708 506506
Warm regards
Aimee Reed
Environment Agency
Customer Service Advisor
National Customer Contact Centre
Part of National Operations
03708 506506
Ext 7113063
Dear Mr. Carroll,
Thank you for contacting the Environment Agency, North West.
Please see below regarding our response times and environmental incident
reporting.
In accordance with our customer charter we will endeavour to respond
within 10 working days, and if this is not possible a full response will
be sent within 20 working days.
The Customer Charter (response days) for all enquiries start from the next
working day of you receiving this auto reply from us. For example an
e-mail’s customer charter sent to us on a Friday will start on the
following Monday providing this isn’t a bank holiday.
For further information on our Customer Charter please see
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If you wish to report an incident i.e. pollution, fish in distress,
dumping of hazardous waste, etc please do not use this e-mail service
instead please call our free-phone 24 hour Incident Hotline on 0800 80 70
60. For more details about incident reporting please see:
[2]http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/con...
I have forwarded your request to the relevant team and will be in touch
shortly. If you have any queries in the meantime please contact the
[3][email address] quoting your reference number
PEN3455.
Many thanks,
Anne
Anne Ball - Customer Services Officer
Customer Services
Environment Agency
Penrith Area Office
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Hi
Thank you for your information request.
Your request has been forwarded to several teams however, our Legal
Department has been in touch with me today to inform me they have done a
search using Lake Windermere and just Windermere in the offence location
but have not had any results back. Unless a more specific location is
requested, then they cannot provide any further details at this stage.
Would it be possible you could provide a more specific location please?
Thanks,
Kim
Kim Everson
Customer Service Officer
Richard Fairclough House,
Knutsford Road,
Warrington
WA4 1HT
Phone: 01925 542915
[1][email address]
You can contact me on my direct dial or if you have a general query please
ring our customer
contact team on 03708 506 506 or visit the website at
[2]www.environment-agency.gov.uk
Information in this message may be confidential and may be legally
privileged. If you have received this message by mistake, please notify
the sender immediately, delete it and do not copy it to anyone else.
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still check any attachment before opening it.
We may have to make this message and any reply to it public if asked to
under the Freedom of Information Act, Data Protection Act or for
litigation. Email messages and attachments sent to or from any
Environment Agency address may also be accessed by someone other than the
sender or recipient, for business purposes.
If we have sent you information and you wish to use it please read our
terms and conditions which you can get by calling us on 08708 506 506.
Find out more about the Environment Agency at
[3]www.environment-agency.gov.uk
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Dear NW North Penrith, Information Requests,
Thankyou for your recent email concerning clarification from myself regarding potential pollution offences into lake Windermere.Can I clarify if your legal team need street addresses or individual properties? or if it is the case that pollution from rivers that feed into the lake and have been directly traced back to source via these routes is needed? Is it possible and within the cost limits to search for offences that have known to have caused pollution into the lake from the rivers?
Yours sincerely,
Mr Carroll
Dear Mr Carroll
Thank you for your email. I've emailed the officer and as soon as she gets back to me I will inform you which information you will need to let us have.
Thanks,
kim
Dear Mr. Carroll,
Our legal team have confirmed that we can search on either a street address or individual property - just by inputting Windermere did not bring any results back.
If further address information is passed to us, we will search the database again.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards,
Anne
Anne Ball - Customer Services Officer
Dear NW North Penrith, Information Requests,
Concerning part of my requset for information, can I clarify that I am requesting WHO any potential polluters may be in the last ten years into the lake, and that if I knew of their addresses I would not be requesting the information in the first instance. Could I therefore ask you to search for all sewage treatment works operated or managed by United Utilities which find their way into Lake Windermere?
The lake is fed by the Rivers Brathay, Rothay, Trout Beck and Cunsey Beck. I believe that the Hawkshead Treatment works by Esthwaite water at it's southern point runs into Windermere via Cunsey Beck.
Other potential sources of polltion on the lake are from hotels, farmland and boats on the lake. If it is not possible for you to search for pollution incidents
from these sources how are you able to compile bathing water quality standards?
Yours sincerely,
Mr Carroll
Our
Ref: PEN3455
Date: 17/4/12
Dear Mr. Carroll,
PUBLIC REGISTER AND ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION REQUEST
Lake Windermere
Thank you for your email regarding the above site. Requests for recorded
information are generally governed by the Freedom of Information Act 2000
(FOIA).The information you have requested is environmental and is
therefore exempt from the provisions of FOIA by FOIA s.39(1). We have
therefore considered your request under the Environmental Information
Regulations 2004 (EIR). Please find our response to your questions below:
(i) Please find attached discharge consent information and recent
phosphorus data from the lake.
(ii) We have no record of any breaches or offences that have taken place
in the last ten years.
(iii) We confirm that we do monitor the lake, and have concerns over the
lake nutrient status over the last 20 years - long term trend, hence the
wide range of work being undertaken to address nutrient sources eg
Windermere WwTW, Catchment Sensitive Farming, and partnership approaches
being lead by Windermere Catchment Restoration Programme. We've focussed
on long term trends, establishing loading from key sources, point source
and diffuse and solutions eg P removal and long term management via
Windermere Catchment Restoration Programme.
Rights of appeal
We hope that our response has addressed all of the questions that you have
asked. However, if you are not satisfied with our response to your request
for information, you can contact us to ask for our decision to be
reviewed. If you are still not satisfied following this, you can make an
appeal to the Information Commissioner, who is the statutory regulator for
Freedom of Information. Their contact details are: Office of the
Information Commissioner, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire
SK9 5AF .
Tel: 01625 545700. Fax: 01625 524 510
email: [email address].
Website: http//www.ico.gov.uk
Yours sincerely,
Anne
Anne Ball
Customer Services Officer
Direct dial: 01925 54 2937
E-mail: [1][email address]
Information in this message may be confidential and may be legally
privileged. If you have received this message by mistake, please notify
the sender immediately, delete it and do not copy it to anyone else.
We have checked this email and its attachments for viruses. But you should
still check any attachment before opening it.
We may have to make this message and any reply to it public if asked to
under the Freedom of Information Act, Data Protection Act or for
litigation. Email messages and attachments sent to or from any
Environment Agency address may also be accessed by someone other than the
sender or recipient, for business purposes.
If we have sent you information and you wish to use it please read our
terms and conditions which you can get by calling us on 08708 506 506.
Find out more about the Environment Agency at
[2]www.environment-agency.gov.uk
References
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Dear NW North Penrith, Information Requests,
Thankyou for providing me with information regarding permitted discharge consents into Lake Windermere, however could you please clarify to whom each permit number has been granted?
Yours sincerely,
Mr Carroll
Dear Mr.Carroll,
Please find attached data as requested. We hope that answers all your queries.
Kind regards,
Anne
Anne Ball - Customer Services Officer
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