Clean European beaches: Standards raised
Euro-MPs today approved stricter cleanliness standards for Europe’s beaches.
From 2015, the updated “Bathing Water Directive” will rank coastal water quality in three simple-to-understand categories – “excellent“, “good” and “sufficient“.
And, within two years, the way water quality is tested will also be improved, providing faster, more reliable information for consumers.
For years the European Commission has published an annual bathing water quality league table, listing which of the EU’s thousands of coastal resorts and other bathing spots are meeting EU cleanliness standards.
But some of the information is out of date by the time it is published, because of the delay in collating the figures and compiling the data.
In future the information will reflect the most up-to-date situation, with the bathing water categories available at a glance online.
British Conservative MEPs successfully fought attempts to delete the “sufficient” category, arguing that a number of UK beaches which failed to reach the “good” standard but which are safe for bathers would have lost their “blue flag” status of quality, with a damaging effect on the region’s tourism revenues.
The EU Bathing water Directive is nearly 30 years old, and originally involved a raft of about 70 scientific tests to establish pollution levels.
In future water quality will be assessed using just a handful of more efficient testing methods, and rivers and lakes used mainly for windsurfing and canoeing will not have to comply with the strictest criteria applied to bathing areas.
Tory MEP Caroline Jackson said that avoids the costs of testing such recreational waters being passed on to consumers through higher water bills.
She said: “We need clean beaches in the UK but we can do so at a reasonable cost. Water companies have already spent billions of pounds cleaning our beaches and standards are much better.
“However, we must remember that the majority of people use our beaches only a few times each year and it is not sensible to ask everyone to suffer increases in their water bills to pay for an unnecessary army of recreational water inspectors.”
