In August 2019 we reported that river quality targets were "very unlikely" to be met in England.
We analysed data on river water quality in England and along the Scottish and Welsh borders (the basin districts overseen by the Environment Agency).
It showed that by 2027 it's currently predicted that nearly three quarters of rivers will be "good" in terms of ecological status.
That compares with just 14% as of 2016, the latest current data available.
The WWF charity says it is "very unlikely" that this improvement will happen without new laws that will stop rivers being used, in their words, as "open sewers".
We combined each district’s data and then broke the figures down by overall waterbody for rivers before adding in the predictions for 2027.
The local data was also used to help regional broadcast colleagues find potential sites for filming.
- Environment Agency: Catchment Data Explorer
- XLSX: Raw data for river quality 2013-2016 and analysis
- XLSX: Further rivers analysis
- Shapefiles (for mapping): WFD River Basin Districts Cycle 2
- Dave Tickner, chief freshwater adviser, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)
- Spokesman, The Environment Agency
- Dr Andrew Singer, senior scientist, the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology
- Melissa Compton, taken to hospital after "swallowing sewage" during a 220-mile swimming challenge in the River Severn
- Spokesperson, The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)
- Feargal Sharkey, fly fisherman and chairman of Amwell Magna Fishery
- Spokesman, water companies' trade association, Water UK
- Choropleth map: Percentage of rivers meeting 'good' ecological status in each river basin district
- Multiple bar chart: Percentage of rivers meeting 'good' ecological status in 2016, versus government predictons for 2027
- Bar chart: incidents per 10,000km of sewer in 2018
- R Notebook: Fetch and combine river data CSV files
- R Notebook: Analyse rivers data