Stand by the River Ems today and something feels wrong. This chalk stream, rising in the South Downs and slipping quietly towards Chichester Harbour, once ran cold and clear through its meadows. Now, in places, it is sluggish, shallow, or dry. What was once a living thread through the landscape now looks like a river that’s been allowed to fade away while everyone involved insists they’re doing their best.

And that’s the question at the heart of this: Who failed the Ems? Was it Portsmouth Water, with its pumping and its patchy augmentation schemes? Or was it the regulators and governments who handed out abstraction licences (a legal permit required to extract water from natural sources, ensuring sustainable water management and environmental protection) as if rivers were bottomless, and then walked away?

The honest answer – and the one people don’t like because it can’t be squeezed into a neat headline – is that there’s blame to spare.

A river treated as spare change

Locals have been raising the alarm for years. They’ve watched stretches of the Ems shrink to a trickle, seen fish stranded in dwindling pools, and photographed dead sections where the river simply gave up. Community groups have done more surveying and data-logging than some of the agencies meant to protect these waters.

 

Portsmouth Water doesn’t deny the Ems is struggling. In fact, to their credit, they’ve published technical reports, run flow-augmentation trials and launched a five-year environmental study into the state of their rivers. They say that some abstraction doesn’t pull directly from the visible river, and that they use a borehole removed from supply to top up flows in crisis periods.

 

All correct on paper, but paper isn’t the river

The Ems is a chalk stream. Pump water out of the aquifer and the river feels it, whether the pumps are beside it or miles away. And while augmentation is supposed to be the safety net, it has not always reached the parts of the river most in need. Independent appraisals say as much. Water released upstream has vanished into porous ground, or simply failed to travel far enough to protect the weakest stretches. It’s a system that works in theory but too often lets the river down in practice.

But then there are the licences…

Here’s the part people sometimes forget: Portsmouth Water didn’t create its own licences. Those permissions were issued – and repeatedly renewed – by the Environment Agency (EA), under rules shaped and overseen by successive governments.

Most of those licences date from a time when environmental pressures were different, population growth was lower and climate change wasn’t biting into summer flows. And yet those old permissions, set in a different era, still dictate how much can be taken today.

The EA has said it is reviewing Portsmouth Water’s abstraction licences in the Ems catchment. It has that power, and some would argue it has had cause to use it sooner. But regulators are stretched thin. Licence reviews take years. And rarely does a government allocate the funding or political momentum needed to overhaul a system that’s been outdated for decades.

So when we ask who is to blame, it’s not as simple as pointing at a pump and shouting “there”. Behind every abstraction is a licence. Behind every licence is a policy. And behind every policy is a government that chose not to reform fast enough.

What’s really being lost?

It’s tempting to treat all this as paperwork and pumping data, but the real loss is on the riverbed.

A chalk stream depends on steady, cold, oxygen-rich water. Lower flows mean warmer temperatures, fewer plants, collapsing insect populations, and a food chain that buckles from the bottom up. If you want to understand the seriousness, talk to the people who walk the river at dawn, or the volunteers who’ve watched once-reliable springs cough air instead of water.

The restoration plan drawn up by local river trusts is blunt: without a major rethink of abstraction levels, habitat work alone won’t be enough to bring the Ems back. This is not a river that will fix itself with a few days of rain and a photo-op.

The politics: Plenty of noise, less action

Chichester’s former Conservative MP Gillian Keegan has given the Ems a voice locally, challenged Portsmouth Water directly. That matters. It forces statements, meetings, and uncomfortable conversations between regulators and water companies.

But as we’ve all seen before, politicians can shout loudly, governments can nod gravely, and rivers can still die quietly.

What we need is more than noise – we need the system itself to change. That means modernising abstraction laws, giving regulators the teeth and the budget to enforce them, and demanding transparent data from companies so the public can see what’s being taken from their rivers in real time.

So far, none of that has fully materialised.

So who is responsible?

People prefer villains. It’s easier that way. But the Ems wasn’t lost overnight, and it wasn’t harmed by one bad actor.

Portsmouth Water bears responsibility for how it operates its pumps, for the design and delivery of its augmentation, and for the choices it makes when the river is gasping. The Environment Agency bears responsibility for issuing and maintaining licences that no longer ensure the river’s survival. Government, past and present, bears responsibility for underfunding the regulators and failing to reform a system everyone knows is creaking.

That’s the uncomfortable truth: the river sits at the intersection of corporate decisions, regulatory inertia, and political delay.

The Ems is not gone. It is fragile, diminished, and in places damaged – but not beyond saving. Everyone involved knows what the river needs: realistic abstraction limits, monitoring that isn’t optional, restoration that is long-term, and political will that survives more than a news cycle.

If any good is to come from the state of the Ems, it will be this: that we stop treating rivers as background scenery and start treating them as what they are – living systems that only thrive when the people who manage them take their responsibility seriously.

And this time, we shouldn’t accept soft words. The river deserves better than that.

By Oak Bear 13-12-2025 08:00in Environment, Sussex

Sussex ByLines 8th January