Bathing Status granted on the Wye

Friends of the River Wye is delighted by the Welsh government’s decision to award bathing status to the Warren outside Hay-on-Wye. The government’s regulator, Natural Resources Wales, will now be obliged to monitor water quality at the Warren between May and September, to publish the results, and to take steps to improve that quality if it is poor.

We are grateful to the Good Law Project, which helped us with legal advice pro bono, and which wrote the letters that persuaded the Welsh government to reverse its earlier refusal.

“It’s a shame that the Welsh government had to be compelled to reconsider its decision by an environmental charity that’s seeking to protect the river. We only went down this path to begin with because of the government’s failure to take water monitoring more seriously,” said Tom Tibbits, chair of FORW’s board of trustees.

The governments in both Cardiff and London have neglected the River Wye for decades, failing to stop pollution from agriculture and sewage with disastrous consequences for the river’s fish, birds, plants, invertebrates and mammals. Despite repeated promises of action, they have taken no substantive action.

We are confident that the legal obligation to monitor water quality at the Warren will lead to improvements upstream, in the entire Welsh catchment of the Wye, with benefits for everyone and everything that relies on the river.

The Warren was labelled as a “bathing place” on the first OS map of the area in 1888.

The Warren has been owned by the Warren Trust since the 1970s, and has been used by locals as a bathing site since at least 1888, when it was labelled as such on the first Ordnance Survey map of the area.