The Government has said it welcomes the Office for Environmental Protection’s (OEP) review of the implementation of the current Bathing Water Regulations in England.
The OEP published their report in November 2024, which looked at the effectiveness of the Bathing Water Regulations as a legal instrument, their application in practice and their coherence with wider law and policy. In so doing, the OEP assessed whether the Regulations are positioned to achieve their aim of improving bathing water quality to protect human health and to facilitate recreational water use.
The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that the prominent conclusion made by the OEP is that both Defra and the Environment Agency are implementing the Regulations effectively in terms of compliance with bathing water monitoring, classification and reporting, but acknowledged there is scope to update and improve the Regulations to reflect changes to the public’s recreational use of water beyond bathing and the public’s expectations of bathing water quality.
The Government said it welcomes the 12 recommendations made by the OEP in its review, which included expanding the meaning of ‘bathers’, removing dates of fixed bathing water season (currently May to September) and taking a more flexible approach to determining the most representative sampling locations as well as introducing multiple testing points on long stretches of bathing water sites.
