Emma Howard Boyds’ letter (30 Jan) fails to address the allegations that Environment Agency officers have made about staff being gagged and frontline pollution response service personnel being cut.
After having been with the EA since 1996, I retired in 2014. I was initially responsible for leading a dedicated team of officers in this type of work. Over those 18 years, resources moved from frontline crime prevention and pollution prevention to higher-paid positions in policy and legislative management. The EAs spent the majority of their resources on flood risk management, which is the old saying “follow the money”. I was shocked when I discovered that the system I used to record my information, which I helped develop 20 years earlier, was being used to report a pollution incident.
The EAs statutory mission of promoting sustainable development was quietly altered to promote sustainable economic growth after the coalition government came into power in 2010.
Ms. Howard Boyds’ letter reads like it was lifted from any EA corporate reports in the last ten years. This is a poor response to serious and substantial allegations.
Peter Foulston
Clayton West, West Yorkshire
