England's dirty beaches set to fail EU's new stricter clean water regulations It is not hard to gauge the importance of Blackpool's beaches to the town's fortunes. A view from Blackpool Tower last week revealed a ribbon of sand and sea, glittering in the sunshine, stretching to the north and south of the resort. Children paddled at the water's edge, while an occasional adventurous adult swam in deeper waters. It was a vision of seaside Britain at its finest. All is not well with the beaches beneath the tower, however. New European Union regulations contained in the Bathing Water Directive are scheduled to come into force in two years, introducing rules that are twice as strict as the present ones. Councils whose bathing water is rated poor under the new scheme will have to put up large signs warning visitors to its beaches not to swim there. And that is very bad news for Blackpool. The town's three main beaches, north, central and south, which provide the background to its famous seafront, meet bathing water standards at present. However, all three will fail the EU's new strict regulations unless ways are found to make dramatic last-minute improvements to the quality of the water. If these efforts fail, Blackpool will find its beaches bristling instead with signs warning visitors that the waters here are dangerous: a nightmare for any seaside resort. Nor is Blackpool alone. The Environment Agency currently estimates that 55 of England's 500-odd beaches have bathing waters that pass current regulations but which will fail the new EU rules. The nation has two years to turn the tide and clean up its bathing water blackspots. "Bathing water in Britain is far cleaner than it was 25 years ago," says Christine Tuckett, the agency's head of water resources. Raw sewage was routinely discharged into the sea in the 80s, and levels of bacteria in the water - which indicate levels of human and animal faeces in the sea - were far, far higher than they are today. By stopping that routine discharge we were able to make major improvements in bathing water cleanliness. However, making further improvements is a trickier business, because all sorts of different factors - from levels of runoff water from farms to dog muck on streets - can affect bathing water quality on beaches. It is going to take a major campaign to put this right round the country. In the case of Blackpool, these efforts have included the construction, by United Utilities, of a £120m scheme at Preston, 17 miles from Blackpool, to stop sewage overflows affecting the Ribble estuary, whose waters sweep round the Blackpool coast, as well as campaigns to ensure that donkey excrement - a natural consequence of pleasure rides on Blackpool beaches - is properly removed. "It is very important to Blackpool that it is seen to be a clean, safe place to bring kids," says Neil Jack, chief executive of Blackpool council. Anything that detracts from that - in particular, signs on beaches saying our water is not safe to swim in - is bad for the town and the tourist trade on which it depends. We take this issue very seriously. This point is emphasised by Tuckett. The efforts we are taking here will have to be repeated across the country if we are to ensure our bathing waters meet new EU standards. Nor is the problem confined to England: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which have their own environmental agencies, face similar challenges. It remains to be seen if they can meet them by 2015. Lee Bryce, a senior manager for United Utilities, has an unusual taste in desk ornaments. They include a large plastic bottle that is filled with fibrous mats of a strange white material. "The white stuff is made up of what is claimed to be flushable baby wipes," Bryce explains. By implication, the label suggests that these wipes will simply dissolve in water once you have flushed them down your toilet and into the drains. As you can see in this bottle, they don't do anything of the kind. That is why I have it: to demonstrate the problems we face. Far from dissolving in water, these "flushable" wipes form clumps of material that can have serious consequences for dealing with water cleanliness, adds Bryce, whose company provides north-west England with its fresh water and is responsible for treating its sewage and waste water. In sewage pipes, the mats mix with other materials. Solidified fats dumped in drains by fast food outlets is a common addition. Others include nappies, cotton wool buds and dental floss. These combine to create huge plugs of gloop that frequently block underground pipes and pumps. The result is an overflow of sewage that seeps into the soil and the water table, and then filters into rivers, estuaries and seawater. In this way, the sins of the inland are visited upon the nation's coastal fringes. As to the extent of this pollution, that is measured by teams of Environment Agency staff who collect samples of seawater 20 times a year, between May and September, from each beach in Britain. The water is stored in plastic bottles, refrigerated and shipped to the agency's water testing centre in Devon every night. The water is then filtered to remove its bacteria. Growth factors are added to the filters and the resulting colonies of bacteria that appear give a measure of the water's cleanliness. The greater the number of colonies, the more polluted the water. "We test for two species of bacteria, E coli and intestinal enterococci," adds Tuckett. They are not the real problem, however. High levels of them merely indicate that there was a great deal of faecal material - most probably from humans, dogs or cattle - in the water when the sample was taken. It is the faeces that cause the stomach upsets and eye and ear infections that are typical of polluted bathing waters. An example of the patterns of pollution found in bathing water is provided by data taken over the past two months at Blackpool's north beach. Most samples revealed low levels of bacteria - a few dozen colonies per 100ml of water. Two reached a couple of hundred, however. Crucially, on both occasions, there had been recent heavy rain: dog excrement had been washed into drains from streets and public gardens while cattle excrement had been flushed into streams. Much of it ended up in the sea off Blackpool. By these standards, it would appear that keeping British water clean is largely a battle to control the nation's excrement. The British weather clearly plays a role in this battle. Not every factor is subject to such whims, however, as Elaine Fisher, a local manager for the Environment Agency, makes clear. Households in Britain have two separate drainage systems. One is the foul drain. Excrement from our toilets goes into it and is carried to sewage plants where it is treated. The other drain takes runoff water from our gutters. It is clean and is released into local streams. The trouble, says Fisher, is that about 5% of households have misconnected drains. In other words, there are thousands of homes round Britain in which the pipes carrying excrement are not fitted to the foul drain but are connected instead to clean water runoff drains. Their output gets dumped in local streams. Human excrement is then carried into rivers and estuaries and is eventually swept round to beaches like those at Blackpool. Nor is this a trivial problem, adds Fisher. If a large hotel is misconnected this way - and we have pinpointed several in the area - then this can have a very serious effect. Thousands of cubic metres of foul water gets dumped into streams. In an effort to trace misconnected drains, agency staff now routinely walk the length of local streams in the land behind Blackpool to pinpoint areas into which foul drains are pumping their contents. "It is not hard to spot places where that is happening," says Fisher. The problems affecting Blackpool's bathing water are not unique, nor are they intractable. However, they do give an indication of the widespread nature of the problems involved in keeping our water clean at a time when more and more houses are being built and are straining water and sewage systems. "At the end of the day, the cleanliness of our bathing water is a measure of the cleanliness of water supplies throughout the nation," says Tuckett. We are going to have to work very hard to get it to a satisfactory level by 2015. More than £2bn has been spent on infrastructure improvements that will help achieve that. But we still have a great deal to do to reach the goals set for us by the European Union. In the long run, it should be worth the effort. Check your drains. Make sure you are not allowing dirty water to run into local streams or rivers because your drains are wrongly connected. Clean up after your dog when taking it for a walk. If left on streets or parks, its excrement will be washed into the water table. Do not flush wipes, cotton wool, nappies, dental floss (pictured) and other toiletries down the toilet. Catch rainwater in a water butt and use it for your garden. This reduces the amount of water running into surface drains. Do not drop litter on streets or pavements, especially food waste. This encourages birds, in particular gulls, whose excrement can also foul bathing water and beaches. Farmers should try to keep cattle and sheep away from riverbanks to reduce animal excrement that might get washed off the land.