Professor John Robertson OBA
The Ferret factchecker today has:
Revealed: The mega farms polluting the environment with excrement – Mega farms in Scotland, including some with more than a million animals, have repeatedly leaked excrement and failed to monitor contamination, putting humans, wildlife and the environment at risk, The Ferret can reveal.
By failing to responsibly contain or dispose of slurry, wastewater and harmful air particles these industrial-sized farms were responsible for 126 breaches of green regulations between May 2022 and November 2024.
The rule breaking is revealed in inspection reports compiled by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa), which The Ferret obtained under freedom of information law.
In the Ferret report, I couldn’t help but notice that of the 5 main offenders, the worst two were based in England, Hook2Sisters and Warrendale Eggs Ltd, and one, Annyalla Chicks, in Wales.
From the Ferret report:
The worst offending mega farm company was Hook2Sisters (H2S). The Oxfordshire-based firm, which is permitted to keep nearly 7.5 million birds at its 19 Scottish sites, was responsible for more than a quarter of all intensive farm environmental breaches.
In 2024, Sepa found that York-based Warrendale Eggs Ltd was releasing dust and particulate matter – air pollution which is harmful to humans – via exhaust fans from its chicken sheds at Swinton Poultry Farm near Greenriggs, Duns.
The Welsh business seems less of an offender:
In 2022, Sepa found that Welsh poultry firm, Annyalla Chicks, allowed dirty wastewater to flow onto land neighbouring its Addinstone complex, near Earlston.
The other two businesses, on further investigation, also all lesser offenders than the two huge Oxfordshire and Yorkshire-based concerns are PD Hook – Oxfordshire and DW Argo (only pigs) – Aberdeenshire. These two, single site concerns had only one reported offence in 2022 and 2023, respectively, and neither were linked to risks to humans.
The Ferret report is keen to lay the blame for this situation at the feet of the Scottish environmental protection agency, Sepa, and by implication the Scottish Government.
Not mentioned in the Ferret report is a fundamental weakness in the devolved environmental legislation, not suffered by the Environment Agency in England.
In England:
The Environment Agency can bring its own prosecutions and claim legal expenses in successful cases, whereas SEPA must submit cases through the Procurator Fiscal and cannot claim expenses
Readers will know from many media-reported cases, that the Procurator Fiscal is strongly predisposed to only approve cases likely to succeed in the courts. This delays, adds excessive costs and, with the inability to claim expenses, serious inhibits Sepa actions. These mostly English companies will be well aware of this and, as we see with the creepily-named Hook2Sister, exploit it serially.