Latest news with #Channel4News
Channel 4
2 days ago
- General
- Channel 4
Has sewage been illegally dumped into Lake District protected site?
By Rob Windscheffel Campaigners are calling for regulators to urgently investigate whether water company United Utilities has been illegally spilling sewage into one of the UK's most protected sites. In the heart of the Lake District , Esthwaite Water was eulogised by poet William Wordsworth and was described by author Beatrix Potter as her 'favourite lake'. Today it's a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and a RAMSAR wetland site of international importance. Following a lengthy battle, which involved the intervention of the Information Commissioner, campaign groups Save Windermere and Windrush Against Sewage Pollution (WASP) obtained data from United Utilities about the Esthwaite Lodge Pumping Station. The pumping station has an emergency overflow which feeds into the lake and in emergencies is allowed to release sewage. That, however, doesn't include periods of heavy rain. Professor Peter Hammond analysed the data and produced a report, shared with Channel 4 News, and believes the overflow might have spilled sewage at least 20 times since 2020. If those spills weren't as a result of major failures at the pumping station and caused by heavy rain, they could be in breach of their permit. Campaigner Matt Staniek says: 'It's just been slowly putting sewage into the environment and the result of that is we're seeing this water quality decline. And then we're seeing this flow down to Windermere which obviously now goes green every summer.' United Utilities categorically deny there have been any spills from the site since 2017. They say they carried out an investigation in July 2024 and that their pear float used to detect spills 'was proven to be highly inaccurate and unreliable'. They also say their ultrasonic level monitor was set incorrectly and that 'data prior to June 2024 has been confirmed to be inaccurate and, therefore, cannot be used to confirm the occurrence of any spills'. In response to United Utilities denying the accuracy of the data and the analysis done on it, Matt Staniek has told Channel 4 News: 'We had to go through hoops to try and get the data and it was only following the intervention of the Information Commissioner that they finally released the data to us. And then the first thing they say to us is you can't trust the data. 'If the data's unreliable, why haven't they acted in the last 10 years when the alarm's been going off saying it's spilling? Have they deliberately ignored that? Or have they just not been competent enough to do their job? It's blatantly incompetence or deliberate neglect.' Professor Peter Hammond says: 'When you ask for the detailed data the water companies know you're going to find the evidence, so they say no or they take time to give you the evidence and it's been an uphill battle.' While water companies say they are increasingly more transparent, and more data is being published, campaign groups believe there is still some way to go. The Information Commissioner's Office has had to intervene 13 times in data disputes with water companies in the last year – 11 of those with United Utilities. Information Commissioner John Edwards says: 'The water industry has not been as transparent as we would like. People do not expect to swim in polluted water. People expect to have clean and transparent water. We expect to have transparent water companies. 'We've seen movement in the right direction, a greater willingness to put more information out there. What that's exposing is some data quality issues.' A United Utilities spokesperson said: 'Reports of any spills from Esthwaite pumping station are wrong and we have already provided the evidence and data that shows this. 'Transparency and customer confidence is extremely important to us and over the last year we have invested to improve our performance in this area. Last year, we issued over 16 million rows of data in response to environmental information requests and are on track to provide more than 17 million rows of data this year. 'To ensure this information is accessible to the public, we publish our responses on our website. This provides a central repository for the public to review data that has already been disclosed, and are currently meeting our target of responding to 100% of environmental information requests within the required service levels. There is always more to do and we have a plan for further improvements that will be delivered over the next 12 months.' An Ofwat spokesperson said: 'In November 2021 we announced an investigation into all wastewater companies in England and Wales, looking into how companies are operating their wastewater treatment works and networks, including spills from overflows. 'This resulted in us opening an enforcement case into United Utilities in July 2024 which is on-going. In the last three months alone, we have concluded similar cases against other water companies resulting in Ofwat confirming over £160m in a combination of penalties and enforcement settlement packages. Given this is an active investigation, we cannot comment further but welcome the information that has been shared with us.' An Environment Agency spokesperson said: 'We are currently investigating a number of United Utilities' sites including those on the Esthwaite catchment. If any of these sites are found to be in breach of environmental permits or causing pollution we will take appropriate enforcement action, up to and including criminal prosecutions. 'We've modernised our approach to regulating the water sector, with more regulation and enforcement officers, better data and are on track to carry out 10,000 inspections this year, all of which is holding water companies to account more than ever before.' Watch more here: The secret sewage 'illegally' dumped into rivers and seas Record amounts of sewage dumped into English waters Water companies in England and Wales ordered to pay £158m back to customers Lake Windermere – why swimmer health could be at risk in World Heritage waters
RTÉ News
7 days ago
- Politics
- RTÉ News
Missile strike on central part of Tel Aviv this morning
Paul McNamara, Channel 4 News, reports from Tel Aviv on the Iranian attacks on the city.
Channel 4
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Channel 4
Is India quietly tightening its grip on Kashmir?
India's prime minister has just inaugurated the Chenab rail bridge, connecting Kashmir to India's vast rail network. But critics are warning it's the latest project designed to control the disputed territory. India has been approving an enormous amount of building projects in the disputed territory of Kashmir in recent years. Since revoking laws that granted Kashmir autonomy, Narendra Modi's government has had new powers to build on and populate the land. Channel 4 News explores the impact of these projects and the extent of a growing military presence using data gathered by Forensic Architecture and Forensis, to investigate claims by some Kashmiris that Modi's government is trying to tighten its grip on the region by bringing more Hindus into India's only Muslim-majority region. India says this is all part of a plan to improve the lives of Kashmiri people. Produced by Matthew Lucas, Milena Dambelli, Mahnoor Akhlaq and Girish Juneja Graphics by Ian Watkins Reported by Harry Fawcett
Channel 4
09-06-2025
- Channel 4
TAGGING JACKIE
As the government gets ready to roll out a massive expansion of the offender tagging programme in England and Wales, a whistleblower from inside Serco, the private company charged with running it, has told Channel 4 News the system is in 'chaos' and could be putting the public at risk. The Serco insider works at the company's monitoring centre. We've called him Aaron to protect his identity. He told us at one point the computer system was throwing out so much data, finding genuine breaches was 'like finding a needle in a haystack'. 'It was throwing out all these alerts that sometimes didn't mean anything but there'd be thousands and thousands. We didn't know how to identify the genuine breaches from all this traffic of data that was coming into the system.' He also claimed some offenders are going unmonitored and the company only realises it after being asked for information from police or probation looking for them. 'We've had somebody who they want to arrest for rape or potential assault, a serious assault of a victim, and you'd look up the records to identify the person that they're asking about. There's been instances where we haven't been able to give them that information because something has gone wrong when it's been installed, or something's happened in the system where the person has got a tag on, but we're not actively monitoring them. There's been instances where it's been weeks and weeks of where we think we're monitoring someone but they're not actively being monitored.' Aaron described staff at the centre being asked by police for GPS location details of a tagged domestic abuse offender after his ex partner was found dead and he became a potential suspect. Aaron claims staff found he hadn't been monitored effectively 'due to an error.' Serco won the 200 million pound government contract back in 2023 and it came into operation in May the following year, but it's had a troubled history . The company has been fined for poor performance on the contract every month since it started. In April, failures in the tagging system were exposed by Channel 4's Dispatches programme, including offenders going untagged for weeks. In response, Serco said it was tagging a record number of people and its performance would continue to improve 'at pace.' But Channel 4 News has uncovered potential flaws across the entire system – not just with Serco. 'If I was a victim of domestic abuse, I would be extremely scared having been told that tagging is the solution to my safety and then to find it's not.' Twenty one year old Samuel Mattocks was found by police with a knife in his bag. He was initially told to expect prison but, for his first offence, magistrates decided instead to give him a three month community sentence, a critical part of it being a tag to make sure he observed his curfew. He was told the tag would be fitted in two or three days. For weeks, Samuel says he waited for the tagging company to arrive, initially being told they went to the wrong address. He told us he tried to contact the company to make sure they had his new details but was left on hold for hours. Eventually, he says – a fortnight to go before his three month curfew ended – the tag was fitted. When we tried to find out why it had taken so long, there were problems identified throughout the process. Samuel was put on probation on March 14, but no specific instructions for the tag were sent from Probation to Serco for another two weeks. Serco told us after that it did attempt to fit the tag three times, going 'above the requirements' of its contract, but he wasn't at the address Serco had been given. Serco said he was in breach of his conditions and this was reported to Probation. Probation says from Serco's first visit on 11 April until 6 May, Samuel was deemed to have withdrawn his consent to be tagged, because he had been at the wrong address. They say he was told at a meeting on 15 April to return to his original address which he confirmed he had done at a meeting the following week. Samuel says he had already notified the authorities about his change of address and had tried to contact both Serco and the Probation Service to ensure they had the correct one. What is accepted is that Samuel remained untagged until May 23 – the vast majority of the time he was supposed to be being monitored. We put his story and the whistleblower's claims to the National Chair of the Magistrates Association, Mark Beattie. He said: 'We tell an offender that the tag will be fitted in the next two days and the expectation is it's fitted in the next two days. We're very concerned about what we're hearing if we're now being told it's not being fitted for weeks, then you question whether tagging is an effective solution.' Mr Beattie said tagging should be a useful tool to both punish the offender but also to protect the victims of crime. He said if they can't trust the process 'that's a disaster'. 'If I was a victim of domestic abuse, I would be extremely scared having been told that tagging is the solution to my safety and then to find it's not.' This is all a problem for the government itself. In an effort to relieve the prisons crisis , there will be more community sentences and a massive expansion of the tagging programme. It's expected tens of thousands more offenders will be tagged in the coming months. Mark Beattie says if magistrates can't trust the system they will just send offenders to prison instead, defeating the government's plans to send fewer offenders to jail. He says before they expand the tagging programme there should be a complete review of how it's working. 'I think we need to understand the scale of the problem. If they can't deliver now what we have been ordering through the courts, then we have to understand what the recovery plan is. So at the point that it ramps up, we have to have confidence that they're going to be ready to deliver it.' In a statement , Antony King, the Managing Director of Citizen Services at Serco, said: 'We are proud of the challenging work our people do, working with multiple partners across the criminal justice system in delivering an essential and critical public safety service, often with complex and ever increasing requirements. Our performance continues to improve, which the MoJ recognise, and we continue to monitor record numbers of people in the community supporting our colleagues in probation and the Home Office.' The Ministry of Justice told us: 'While we cannot comment on individual cases, we dispute many of the claims being made. Tagging is an important and effective way to monitor and punish offenders and any delays are totally unacceptable.' But it did add that while the backlog of tagging visits had been significantly reduced, Serco's overall performance 'remains below acceptable levels'. Serco to repay £68m for wrongly billed electronic tagging G4S and Serco face SFO 'criminal investigation' over tagging Is electronic tagging too costly and out of date?
The Herald Scotland
05-06-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Shame on you, Labour. How can you still sell arms to Israel?
Sandy Slater, Stirling. • What appalling, deeply distressing scenes were screened on Channel 4 News on Tuesday night with people in Gaza desperate for food being mown down by Israeli Defence Force bullets. Former UK Supreme Court senior judge Lord Sumption was interviewed on the programme and said he believed Israel was committing gross breaches of international humanitarian law in Gaza by killing on an indiscriminate scale. He also opined that genocide was the most plausible explanation for what was taking place. Gaza is now in ruins with most of its infrastructure, hospitals, schools and other public buildings shattered beyond repair. People are starving, hundreds are being slaughtered every week and children are suffering unimaginable horrors. Why oh why are our Labour MPs not up in arms; how can they watch this deteriorating catastrophe every night on TV news and do nothing? Why is Scottish Secretary Ian Murray not leading a delegation to Westminster to demand we stop supplying Israel with arms as of now? I truly despair. Alan Woodcock, Dundee. Read more letters Scotland could be Ground Zero With great fanfare, Keir Starmer and John Healey this week revealed that the mysterious magic money tree, never available for things that people need but always in full blossom for incendiary hardware, is once again being shaken down for "defence". Meanwhile, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA tells the journal Foreign Policy that "the Russians recently revised their nuclear-use doctrine, and one of the things that they specifically said in there was that if there are attacks by an adversary on important state or military infrastructure that would disrupt responses, potentially by Russia's nuclear forces, that is potentially a trigger for Russian nuclear use". The fact that Ukraine is a non-nuclear nation becomes irrelevant, because it is perceived to be enabled by the US and Nato, which ARE nuclear powers, ergo justifying a potential nuclear response. Long ago, a Westminster political correspondent said that if there were to be a nuclear war, he was certain that in the aftermath I would be saying "I told you so" [as a former chair of CND]. It gives me no pleasure at all to say we are very possibly nearing that stage, and none of the things Messrs Healey and Starmer have announced would make any difference, even if we already had them. I don't need to remind anybody where Ground Zero in Europe is. Oh yes, aside from the US submarines currently in the Atlantic, Scotland would be the most significant target. In fact, in US nuclear war planning, it's always been "independent". It's called Unit 11. Marjorie Ellis Thompson, Edinburgh. PM is right over Russia Hugh Kerr's 'the Russians are not our enemies' claim (Letters, June 3 on the basis that 'they lost 20 million people helping us defeat Nazi Germany', is I suggest delusional. Firstly, Stalin, who murdered millions of his own citizens, not least in Ukraine, before the war, was an ally of Hitler, until Hitler betrayed him and invaded the Soviet Union. Then the Soviets became our allies on the basis that our enemy's enemy was our ally, but certainly not in reality our friend. Nor is Putin's dictatorship, murderers of civilians, abductors of children and suppressors of political opposition, the kind of friend I would wish to have. It is only too clear that his invasion of Ukraine is just the start of his dream of expanding westwards. Whatever Keir Starmer's failings, he is right to warn of the threat that Putin's Russia poses to European liberal democracy, of which the citizens of these islands are a fundamental part. By relying on American heft, Europe, UK included, has for too long under-invested in defence. With Donald Trump in the White House, those days are over. We must shoulder that burden ourselves because a government's first responsibility is the defence and safety of its people, and we know the price of appeasement. As the Romans had it: "Si vis pacem, para bellum' – if you want peace, prepare for war. Roy Pedersen, Inverness. Despairing of the SNP Where does one even begin with the SNP? No, to £2.5 million to one of Scotland's and the UK's cutting-edge employers ("SNP in munitions ban hypocrisy row over Ferguson Marine", heraldscotland, June 3); yes to £2.5m to promote a language that virtually no one in Scotland speaks or even comprehends. Then, the leader and his prospective candidate in the Hamilton by-election disagree on how to manage child poverty, an issue that's been an awful by-product of capitalism since that economic system became dominant ("SNP candidate Loudon takes different stance on the Scottish Child Payment from Swinney", The Herald, June 4). You'd think that a party who'd been in power for 18 years would have the perfect opportunity to come up with fresh ideas on how to eradicate child poverty, and many other of society's problems. But wait, if that government is the parochial SNP, whose total stock of ideas, strategies and tactics amounts to how to make Westminster and the UK look bad, then none of our problems is addressed, and you end up with our leading Scottish politician eating rusks with two-year-olds, rather than talking to fellow politicians about the defence of the UK which, last time I looked, included Scotland. Stuart Brennan, Glasgow. Capital woes will get worse Edinburgh's woes continue with the £1.7bn sea of debt that is only going to get bigger ("Edinburgh faced with £1.7 billion 'sea of debt' amid fears for services", The Herald, June 4) This is symptomatic of the general situation in Scotland as a whole under the less than careful guidance of the SNP. Large debts accrue because of reckless spending and suddenly taxes must rise to cover this but it is never quite enough and so the cycle goes on ever upward. There is a limit and it has already been breached. Edinburgh wants to introduce a visitor levy, and is also mooting a congestion zone tax on cars. Elsewhere, taxes on cruise ship passengers are in the pipeline. This will actually lead to the exact opposite effect, a drop in revenue as people go elsewhere. If Scots return an SNP administration in 2026 all this will continue until the penny finally drops with Holyrood, that is once it has sorted out its toilet rules properly. Scotland is going down the pan. Dr Gerald Edwards, Glasgow. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and with Defence Secretary John Healey (Image: PA) Flip side of the equation Once again Guy Stenhouse seems determined to present his jigsaw but with several key pieces missing ("Public sector workers who refuse to come into the office should be sacked", The Herald, May 31). He makes rather sweeping assumptions about Tesco and Aldi and suggests that their performance in one field somehow equips them, or other private sector organisations, to deliver important public services. To take the examples he cites, Tesco and Aldi can certainly be considered successful if profit levels are the only factor taken into account – £3.1 billion and £553 million respectively. At face value, he might be entitled to think he has a case. However he might want to consider other significant figures in this equation such as the fact that 30% of children in the UK are now living in poverty. He might also want to look at the exponential rise in food banks in recent years and the fact that over three million people last year were having to make use of them. While there are many factors giving rise to this situation, I believe it does call into question the "success" of the supermarkets if their pricing policies are putting their products beyond the reach of a significant number of people, particularly the most vulnerable. Mr Stenhouse might consider taking a more measured view the next time he wants to offer up another "private sector good/public sector bad" rant. Andy Crichton, Cupar.
