Thousands of volunteers across England now regularly take out their own testing kits to study the levels of pollution in rivers and the sea.

With sewage spills rarely out of the news, citizen water testing has become one of the most visible responses to England’s pollution scandals.

A crisis of trust in the water companies appears to be driving the public to take water quality testing into their own hands. Thousands of people take part in the twice yearly water testing events, organised by charity Earthwatch. Spring 2025 saw the highest number of participants at more than 7,000. Other organisations also report rising numbers of people getting involved in water testing.

These people, often referred to as citizen scientists, are doing tasks as varied as surveying aquatic insects to sampling water for chemicals.

Much public attention has centred on sewage pollution in UK rivers in the past few years. Waste is regularly and legally discharged into lakes, rivers and along beaches by water companies during periods of heavy rainfall. But incidents of sewage discharges on days with no to low rainfall have also been identified, and in some cases legal action has followed. In some cases water companies have been fined millions of pounds.

The Environment Agency (EA), the main environmental regulator for the water industry, reported nearly 300,000 sewage spills across England in 2025 alone.

The consequences have affected both wildlife and people. Campaign group Surfers Against Sewage documented more than 7,000 cases of illness linked to swimming at official bathing sites over just five years. In 2025, 12 of England’s 14 inland bathing sites were rated “poor”, meaning swimmers were recommended to avoid the water because of potentially harmful bacteria. In April, the UK’s largest pollution claim began to be heard in the High Court, over allegations of chicken waste pouring into rivers along the Welsh-English border.

Public campaigning is believed to have helped trigger recent government action, with reforms expected in a planned Water Reform Bill.

Citizen sceptics

Some water companies now fund freshwater citizen science initiatives. These run across locations including the Thames Valley, south-east England and Wales. The programmes claim to enhance community awareness, empowerment and improve transparency of water companies’ management efforts.

During my PhD, I researched how one group of volunteers in Oxfordshire collected and interpreted river data. Some told me that they felt that water companies encouraged participation in citizen science, while ignoring the data.

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Read more: Five warning signs that rivers are polluted – even when they look clean

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As one citizen scientist explained in my own ongoing preliminary research, “people keep beavering away, and eager beavers are just what the water industry wants”. In his view, citizen science risks becoming a tool for keeping volunteers busy and distracted, rather than driving accountability.

However, recent research shows water companies have historically underreported the number of sewage spills. The Consumer Council for Water, which represents customers, has reported widespread dissatisfaction with water companies. An independent water commission has also highlighted a deterioration of public confidence in the environmental regulators.

A recent Channel 4 docudrama, Dirty Business, echoes these frustrations. It follows two citizens trying to hold water companies and regulators to account.

In line with some recent academic research, the programme explores suggestions that the water industry attempts to deflect blame and distract attention from sewage pollution. In a statement addressing the allegations, the EA said: “Prosecutions are just one tool against water pollution, and we have also levied a record £8.5 million in enforcement undertakings against water companies in the last year alone.”

Public confidence

The Environment Agency also faces questions about public confidence. Research suggests that volunteers believe current regulations allow water companies to act without sufficient oversight. In this study, people felt that the EA was not fulfilling its responsibility to hold the water industry to account.

In 2024, the head of the EA, Philip Duffy, said that the organisation had buried freedom of information requests, with staff worried about revealing the embarrassing truth of water pollution. In a statement reported in the Guardian at the time, the EA said: “Philip is completely committed to the highest standards of transparency.” It added that he wanted to make more EA data readily available.

In January 2026, the Office for Environmental Protection, a public watchdog on environmental protection, also found possible failures by the EA to comply with water quality laws.

My participants felt that the agency shouldn’t ignore their data in monitoring water quality.

Concerns about data bias and reliability are often cited as reasons to limit the use of volunteer data to support regulatory responses to pollution incidents.

These concerns are not unreasonable. Citizen science data can indeed vary in quality, depending on training and sampling practices. Ensuring consistency across the sheer number of volunteer groups is also a challenge.

Using citizen science

Nevertheless, research now suggests volunteers can produce reliable data suitable for official monitoring. The debate is gradually shifting to how regulators can include it in decision-making. For example, a national programme has already developed a shared framework on how to use data collected by citizens.

In the meantime, groups such as environmental charity Earthwatch and Surfers Against Sewage design and publish their own online maps and dashboards. These make thousands of historic data points publicly available.

As summer arrives and 13 new bathing sites open, pressure is again mounting on water companies and regulators to clean up England’s rivers and beaches. The citizen water sample collectors will be on standby.

Hope Steadman receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council's Grand Union Doctoral Training Partnership; grant number ES/P000649/1.

The effective collapse of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) fighter jet programme is a major setback for European defence cooperation.

France, Germany and Spain have spent nearly a decade trying to develop what was intended to become Europe’s premier next-generation combat aircraft, only for the programme to succumb to disputes over leadership, the distribution of work and intellectual property.

Yet Europeans shouldn’t be surprised. The history of European combat aviation is littered with programmes that struggled under the weight of competing national ambitions. In this respect, FCAS looks less like an extraordinary failure than the latest chapter in a recurring story.

The more important question is not why FCAS has run into trouble, but rather what its collapse reveals about Europe’s ability to generate and sustain the military capabilities it will need in a more dangerous world.

Adversaries are now investing heavily in integrated and layered air defences encompassing long-range missiles, electronic warfare capabilities and increasingly sophisticated sensors. Maintaining the ability to penetrate defended airspace in future conflicts will require a step change in capability.

FCAS was conceived as a “sixth-generation” combat system – the latest leap in fighter jet technology – to overcome this contested air environment. At its centre would sit a new combat aircraft, supported by autonomous drones, advanced sensors, electronic warfare systems and a digital network linking everything together from the 2040s.

The challenge is that such programmes are becoming extraordinarily expensive to develop. By sharing costs, expertise and industrial capacity, European governments hope to achieve capabilities that would otherwise be beyond their reach.

Reality check

Despite the perceived commonalities, the FCAS nations – France and Germany in particular – had very different objectives.

For France, the project was never simply about replacing its Rafale fighter jet. Any successor aircraft would eventually have to support the airborne component of France’s nuclear deterrent, operate from its aircraft carrier, and preserve sovereign industrial capabilities – specifically the ability to independently design and build advanced combat aircraft. The insistence by France on design leadership for FCAS therefore reflected concerns about national autonomy, even if portrayed as industrial obstinacy.

Meanwhile Germany, represented by the aerospace giant Airbus, had little interest in financing a programme that was likely to concentrate Europe’s most valuable expertise, intellectual property and design authority in Dassault, the French aerospace company, for decades to come.

These tensions are hardly new. In the 1960s, Britain and France attempted to build the Anglo-French Variable Geometry aircraft. But France’s withdrawal in 1967, for similar reasons to FCAS, led to the project’s collapse.

Other joint European projects have succeeded. For instance, the Panavia Tornado. And in the 1980s, the Eurofighter consortium was developed. This time, despite France withdrawing (to produce the Rafale), the UK, Germany and Italy proceeded (with Spain later joining) with what would become the Eurofighter Typhoon.

Reliance on America

For decades, therefore, European collaborative programmes have been expected to do several things at once: deliver military capability and sustain national industries while strengthening diplomatic relationships or at least not upsetting them.

That may have been a manageable compromise when Europe’s security was underwritten by the United States and the threat from Russian appeared contained. It is far harder to justify when European governments are warning that the continent must rearm.

The challenge is compounded by the changing relationship between governments and industry. Unlike Airbus, which remains partly state-owned, Dassault is controlled by the family that bears its name.

This reflects a broader trend of European governments often exercising less influence over major defence firms than they did during the cold war, when state ownership and greater industrial competition gave them more leverage. This is to say nothing of the tech firms increasingly fundamental to military capability.

That matters because armed forces are built over decades, not electoral cycles. If European governments struggle to mobilise industry to meet their defence requirements, they may find themselves confronting capability gaps at precisely the moment they are trying to deter aggression.

Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorious, has already outlined three alternatives to FCAS. The first and simplest is to buy more F-35s from the US. But this would fall short of Germany’s requirements while also deepening dependence on the US – something European nations are keen to avoid.

The second option is to join another collaboration, most likely the UK-Italian-Japanese effort to build a sixth-generation fighter, called the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP). Germany’s growing defence budget could provide the project with additional funding and a larger order book. But it would also raise questions about influence.

If Berlin rejected a subordinate role within FCAS, it is unlikely to accept one within GCAP. Existing partners may therefore conclude that the benefits of expansion are outweighed by the risks of delay to a programme targeting entry into service by 2035.

The third option is a German-led effort, being discussed through the proposed Team Gen 6 industrial grouping – an Airbus-led alliance of eight defence firms. This would solve industry concerns, preserve German design ambitions and might allow Berlin to build a coalition with other partners, such as Spain and Sweden.

But it could be prohibitively expensive, risky, and by further fragmenting Europe’s already crowded combat aircraft landscape, reduce the viability of all the existing programmes. France faces similarly difficult choices. It can pursue a national successor to Rafale, preserving control over industrial, nuclear and carrier requirements but accepting substantial costs. Or it could seek a revised collaborative framework.

In the meantime, both French president Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz have made clear that other opportunities for collaboration exist, such as the drones intended to support the FCAS fighter jet, or the main aircraft’s engine.

The experience of FCAS is not that Europe cannot cooperate. History shows otherwise, and GCAP may yet again demonstrate that a pragmatic coalition can succeed where a more politically ambitious partnership failed.

What FCAS does reveal, however, is a growing mismatch between Europe’s security environment, the way it continues to procure defence equipment and the costs involved. The recent resignation of Britain’s defence secretary, John Healey, amid disputes over defence funding, points to the same problem.

European governments increasingly agree on the threats they face, but remain “unwilling” to make the financial and political compromises required to address them. That should concern us all.

Arun Dawson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.