Sir, Brian Clarke (Sport, Oct 1) describes the awful events on the River Wandle caused by a discharge from Thames Water’s Beddington sewage treatment works. While dramatic events such as these make the headlines, anglers know that more routine pollution from sewage works and from overflows into rivers across England and Wales are causing a pervasive degradation of the ecological health of our rivers.

Eighteen years after water privatisation, the Anglers’ Conservation Association (ACA) is still called upon all too often to pursue water plcs through the civil courts for compensation for the damage they cause to our members’ waters. Increasingly, the ACA’s attention is drawn to routine discharges of untreated sewage from the thousands of combined sewer overflows that pepper the banks of rivers in both urban and rural areas. As Brian Clarke points out, thousands of these overflows operate quite legally as “deemed consents” - a quick fix granted as a temporary measure in 1989 only weeks before the old water authorities were floated.

There is only so much a voluntary organisation can do to address this problem, and often it is after the damage has been done. So it is with increasing alarm that this year we see the Environment Agency finalising plans for operator self-monitoring. Under these plans, the water plcs - already topping the league of water polluters – will be asked to monitor their own polluting discharges and presumably report themselves for prosecution if they slip up.

The threat posed by a visit from Environment Agency inspectors, already far less significant than it once was, will be all but removed, returning the responsibility for keeping tabs on sewage pollution to where it rested pre1989, with the dischargers themselves, now in private hands. Of course, those hands are tied by undervaluation of this vital resource.

DR STEPHEN MARSH-SMITH, Chairman, Anglers’ Conservation Association

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