'Flow-trimming': another deception

George Monbiot writes about UK rivers:

I’d been wondering how, when more sewage has been entering our rivers than ever before, some of the water companies have managed to improve the ratio of the sewage they treat v the sewage that pours untreated from their storm overflows into our rivers and the sea. Now we know. It’s called “flow trimming”. Sounds innocuous, doesn’t it? What it means is that sewage is diverted into rivers and ditches upstream of the water treatment works. By reducing the amount of sewage entering the works, the companies can claim to be dealing responsibly with a higher proportion of it. The one reliable pipeline, George Monbiot, 10 May 2024

When goals are narrowly defined, it's easy to get away with stipulating outcomes that do nothing to achieve what society wants to achieve or, worse, that conflict with society's wishes. That's because narrowly defined goals are of little interest to most of us, so are not subject to widespread monitoring. As with much of the regulatory environment, they can be easily manipulated to mislead the public or to stifle competition. 'Flow trimming' is just another example.

My suggestion is that we become more familiar with defining society's environmental and social goals as broadly as possible. So that, instead of meaningless goals such as 'increasing the proportion of sewage entering the plant that's treated', we target indicators that actually are, or are inextricably correlated, with what we want to achieve. So, we should be targeting 'the health all of our rivers', as exhibited by an array of indicators of ecological well being. The benefits of doing so are not limited to making manipulation more difficult: goals that are too narrowly defined can be achieved by shifting problems from one realm to another. So, for example, the goal of reducing the level of several particular polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs - better known as 'forever chemicals') in our rivers could be readily achieved by replacing them with an untargeted set of such chemicals. The goal of improving the health of one river could be achieved simply by relocating a source of pollution to a different river a few miles away. 

Expressing our goals in broad, meaningful, terms has advantages other than making our goals less susceptible to manipulation. It makes them more amenable to public participation in their construction and, for many goals, more public engagement in monitoring progress toward their achievement. It means we can more readily formulate long-term goals, so making it easier to optimise resource allocation over time, and providing policy certainty which, again, encourages long-term thinking. 

The Social Policy Bond concept would have these, and additional advantages: it would inject market incentives into the achievement of our social or environmental goals, maximising efficiency as measured, in our example, by improvements in the health of the UK's rivers per pound spent. My work on applying the concept to environmental goals is linked to here.