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England is lagging behind its European neighbours in each the quantity and high quality of formally designated bathing websites, in accordance with official statistics.

Regardless of having treasured few swimming websites per capita, England ranks because the nation with the fifth-biggest share of bathing waters of “poor” high quality in Europe, an evaluation of UK and EU information by the Liberal Democrats has discovered.

Areas given official bathing water standing obtain further testing from the Surroundings Company in England between Could and September to guard public well being. They embody so-called blue flag seashores, which will need to have a classification of “Glorious”.

Tim Farron MP, Liberal Democrat MP and setting spokesperson, stated: “The UK is formally the sick swimmer of Europe, with water corporations allowed to get away with foul polluting habits.”

He added: “This authorities has failed spectacularly to guard our lakes, rivers and coastlines. The general public are rightly livid about this situation but Conservative ministers simply don’t appear to care about it.”

This summer season various fashionable English seashores, together with Blackpool’s, have been deemed unsafe for swimmers for a number of days this summer season because of sewage outflows.

Lower than three-quarters of England’s 424 bathing websites are deemed to be of wonderful high quality, in accordance with England’s Surroundings Company information.

This contrasts with a few of Europe’s stronger performers by way of the quantity and high quality of bathing websites, resembling Greece, Denmark and Germany. All three international locations have a minimum of 1,000 bathing websites with a minimum of 90 per cent granted “glorious” standing, in accordance with figures from the EU’s European Surroundings Company.

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Kirsty Davies, neighborhood water high quality supervisor at marketing campaign group Surfers In opposition to Sewage, stated: “Sadly, it’s a fantasy that blue flag seashores have pristine water — they endure from the identical insufficient testing regime as [the rest of] our bathing waters.”

She urged swimmers to examine her organisation’s Safer Seas and Rivers Service earlier than coming into the water anyplace in England. SAS displays info from eight of England and Wales’ 10 water and sewage corporations in order that it could possibly alert surfers, paddle boarders and swimmers to sewage outflows at seashores.

A authorities spokesperson stated: “In comparison with many European international locations, England has a smaller land mass in addition to much less intense daylight, increased rainfall and better inhabitants density, which all have an effect on bathing water high quality.”

It added: “The fact is we’ve got the best variety of bathing waters ever . . . Final 12 months 93 per cent of them met the best requirements of ‘good’ or ‘glorious’, up from simply 76 per cent in 2010, regardless of stricter requirements being launched in 2015.”

Environmental activists have been lobbying the Surroundings Company to grant extra rivers, lakes and seashores official bathing water standing as a method of pressuring water corporations to clamp down on sewage air pollution.

“The purpose of bathing water standing is to pressure authorities to tell the general public so that they resolve whether or not their children can or can’t paddle and play across the rivers,” stated Becky Maltby, a member of a neighborhood marketing campaign group in West Yorkshire in search of to scrub up the Ilkley river. “In the beginning of our marketing campaign, individuals had no concept that there was sewage within the river.”

Water UK, which represents the business, stated: “Due to water firm funding we’ve got seen a metamorphosis in our seashores with greater than 70 per cent reaching an ‘glorious’ score in contrast with solely 10 per cent within the Nineteen Nineties.

“We recognise that we now have to do the identical for our rivers and inland bathing areas and are proposing to speculate £10bn — a tripling present ranges — within the greatest transformation of our sewers for the reason that Victorian period. As a part of this, bathing waters can be prioritised and among the many first to obtain funding.”