During a visit to a Sussex farm Sir Ed Davey feeds chickens with local children as he campaigns to highlight environmental issues in the UK. The Lib Dems leader says he is "not happy with the way the regulators have been monitoring and enforcing the law on the water companies" before adding that they've been "allowed to get away with filthy sewage dumping" and vowing to "give the extra protection that our precious chalk streams need". Report by Czubalam. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00Well, we've been feeding the chickens and it's been fun with the children
00:03but our main message today is about the environment more broadly and particularly about
00:09pollution in our chalk streams
00:11Of the chalk streams in the world England has 80% of them
00:15They sometimes be called England's rainforest and we're not protecting them well enough last year the
00:2249,000 hours of sewage dumping into our chalk streams
00:27That's outrageous it's doubled getting worse and so what Liberal Democrats are saying today, we've got to tackle that
00:33We've come up with a plan where we would say you need blue flag status for all chalk streams
00:39We consult on on that and I think we would give the extra protection that our precious chalk streams need
00:45Well, actually, it's really really quite cheap
00:48And we do a public consultation to start off so the public can be involved in it
00:53And the blue flag status the applications are really quite cheap, I think it's about 425 from from memory
01:00Pounds so we're not talking a lot of money
01:03What where we have put investment because you need to get behind it is in a new regulator
01:07We've called it the Clean Water Authority
01:09We're not happy with the way the regulators have been monitoring and enforcing the law on the water companies
01:15They've been allowing them to get away with this filthy sewage dumping and we put more resources
01:20Into the Clean Water Authority for what we've called sewage busters a hundred new enforcers