You’ve gained bathing water status. What’s next?

Once your local lake or river is designated as a bathing water, you unlock a host of protections and responsibilities that help safeguard water quality for everyone – wild swimmers, paddlers, wildlife, and the whole community. Here’s what to expect, what needs to be done, and how you can use your newly designated status to keep campaigning for cleaner waters.

The legal framework: Bathing Water Regulations 2013

The Bathing Water Regulations 2013 lay out clear roles for Regulator, polluters, and local authorities to maintain and improve the water quality at designated sites. Here’s a summary of their respective roles:

How you can support improvements to your bathing water

The practical steps you can take – exploring available information, engaging with key stakeholders, influencing decision-makers, and joining community efforts – to help ensure designation delivers change.

• Explore the bathing water profile: You will find information where the Regulator has identified pollution sources, previous development, and investment in improvements.
• Check Action Plans for ‘poor’ or priority waters: If further investigation or improvements are needed, an Action Plan is issued. These outline planned costs, timelines, and measures to enhance water quality. Surfers Against Sewage requested all of the UK’s action plans, but only Scotland and England have shared them with us so far. You can view them in our interactive map.
• Understand planned developments: Use Action Plans to see what investigations and investments are committed for your local bathing water.
• Engage with regulators and water companies: Reach out locally to understand whether the work committed in the Action Plan has taken place or is scheduled, and provide community feedback.
• Review water company investment plans: Water companies publish five-year business plans (PR24) detailing infrastructure projects and investments affecting bathing waters. These plans are often available on their websites. You can find the business plan for your water company on their website by searching for PR24 (Price Review 2024).
• Influence your local representatives: Contact your MP and councillor for their support, sharing Action Plans and business plan commitments. The Regulator and polluter have a legislative obligation to improve a bathing water to ‘sufficient’ classification.
• Participate in or initiate working groups: Ask your local Regulator or authority to be part of any water quality working groups exist where communities, authorities, and businesses collaborate. If none exist, you could take the first steps in forming one.

A note on the Action Plans:

Bathing Water Action Plans were obtained by a request for information under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIR). The EA responded with an Information Warning:

These action plans are created as an internal tool and are summary information for internal use rather than an exhaustive list of all actions and understanding at a given site. They are used to help identify potential issues affecting poor and priority bathing waters, possible remedies and contain elements of speculation if unlimited resources were available. They are ‘live’ documents updated as new information is received or modelling conducted. Currently they are under review for the upcoming bathing water season, and so represent a snapshot in time and are subject to change. As these documents are used as a discussion tool between colleagues, local knowledge and context is vital in properly understanding how these documents should be used.

Advice on how the data in the actions can be used can be found here Open Government Licence

Changes to regulation for sites with repeated poor water quality

While many bathing waters are improving, some have seen only gradual progress over several seasons, sometimes not quite meeting the hoped-for improvements.

Under the old rules, any site classified as ‘poor’ for five years in a row would lose its bathing water status automatically.

But new regulations coming by the end of 2025 will scrap this automatic removal. Instead, sites can keep their status if making improvements is feasible, allowing more time for communities and organisations to work together for cleaner waters.

For example, Blackpool is already collaborating across groups with a clear action plan.

Hear from communities: Bathing Water Forum 2024

Gain insights straight from those who have applied for bathing water status and are involved in ongoing efforts to improve water quality: Watch our 2024 Bathing Water Forum

Agriculture

Of course, sewage pollution isn’t the only impact on poor water quality at bathing waters especially at river and lake locations. Agriculture, road run off and private sewage systems also play their part. The Regulator will identify sources of pollution linked through E. coli and intestinal enterococci monitoring which could be human or animal waste. The Regulator may then undertake Microbial Source Tracking (MST) to understand the source of the .

As the Bathing Water Regulations only require the Regulator to monitor for E. coli and intestinal enterococci at SAS we are calling for additional pollutants to be monitored that are harmful to human health. These include phosphates, nitrates, micro-plastics, PFAS and antimicrobial resistance (AMR).