BY BEN O’ROURKE
In the summer of 2023, United Utilities was named one of the country’s top polluters. Newspapers published charts ranking it alongside other water companies. Pubgoers sipped at frothy pints while spewing about scummy spills and angry activists and celebrities took to social media to fume. In days, there were few people in the country who hadn’t heard about the scandal.
Not long after, I was asked to find out what the company was doing in the Lake District following reports it had been threatening tenant farmers on its land around Haweswater. Even worse, the RSPB was somehow involved.
The bird charity, which I have done several stories about over the years, regularly fails to live up to its promises to manage wildlife, rejuvenate land or even protect birds – the reason for its existence. Despite its dismal record, the organisation remains unscathed and has a remarkable talent for finding money, nearly all of it from the public, either through gullible donors or lucrative government grants.
The RSPB has never really been put under the same scrutiny as UU, perhaps for the Royal in its name. In fact, most people think the RSPB does a good job, unaware of its shady side or the millions it pours down the drain. With the two teaming up, the potential for disaster was high.
My full report can be found here or downloaded from below:
According to the farmers, they’re being pushed into expensive ‘green’ schemes managed by the RSPB. The justification for the schemes is UU’s unproven claim that sheep urine is polluting Haweswater. These schemes demand farmers cut livestock to levels where their business is no longer profitable. Instead, they’re told to plant trees, often on healthy fields where crops grew. People who have left the schemes have been threatened with losing their farms, I was told, and once they’ve gone the land will never be farmed again.
The farmers hired an expert to test Haweswater. He took the samples to UU’s very own lab, the same one that would have warned of dangerously-high concentrations of sheep urine in the reservoir. The results came back cleanish. While the raw reservoir samples wouldn’t be classed as drinking water, they weren’t polluted with pee.
One scheme involved planting about 100,000 trees across a large area of land. Only about 1% remain, along with the tons of plastic and metal tree guards, wooden stakes and cable ties that were wrapped round every one. Some have just been left where they were put, leaking micro plastics in becks and streams that run into the nearby reservoir. There doesn’t appear to have been any attempt by UU or RSPB to retrieve them. Land they were planted on included Wet Sleddale moor, a SSSI.
Besides planting trees and removing sheep – which causes all sorts of problems for hefting commoners – there was a lot of rewilding. Once farmland is turned into a worthless rewilded wasteland, the vermin move in. Since RSPB doesn’t (officially) carry out pest control, the vermin effectively have protected status, allowing them to multiply unabated. They start spilling over into nearby farms, where they are about as welcome as drunk gate-crashers from next door’s party.
Meanwhile, UU and RSPB are getting subsidised by Natural England for maintaining the rack and ruin, just one of the many crackpot green initiatives that won’t affect the climate in the slightest.
As the landowner, UU appears to be teaming up with the RSPB to add the credibility needed to pass the carnage off as ‘conservation’. Or recognising its talent for failure, it might have unwittingly been hired to deliberately destroy the farmland in a slow-motion attack on the country’s food security? That would just be ridiculous though, right?
Ben O’Rourke worked as Assistant International Editor of the South China Morning Post and as a journalist for Fieldsports Britain. Ben now works as a freelance journalist and investigator. His Substack can be found here.