FHDC’s Green Image Meets the East Stour Rubbish Problem

If the East Stour rubbish sits on or beside land tied to Otterpool Park, then Folkestone & Hythe District Council has a problem no amount of eco-language can mulch away. A council that talks green should not leave a river looking like the contents of a split wheelie bin. And in Canterbury, the shopping trolleys in the Stour suggest the city may be trialling a bold new cultural concept: submerged retail realism.

The photographs taken yesterday on a walk beside the East Stour are not subtle. It rises in Postling heads through Stanford, Otterpool Park and Sellindge moving onto Ashford. In the East Stour there is visible rubbish, plastic and debris caught in the water and along the margins.

The rubbish is within the bounds of Westehanger Castle owned by FHDC

In Canterbury, there are shopping trolleys sitting in the Stour with all the grace of a supermarket car park after a flood. This is not wild nature. It is neglect with a current. And it poses a simple question: why do so many public bodies talk about rivers as treasured assets, then seem perfectly relaxed when those same rivers start resembling linear skips?

Under the A2 as it crosses Hambrook Marshes

The legal answer is messy because Britain adores complicated responsibility almost as much as it loves a new consultation. The usual starting point is the riparian owner. Environment Agency guidance says owners of land next to a watercourse are generally responsible for maintaining the bed and banks and for clearing debris, including man-made litter, even if they did not put it there. Kent County Council guidance says that where a river, stream or ditch is not a main river, the landowner is responsible for maintenance. In other words, the old defence of “not my bottle” does not get you very far when the bottle is floating along your boundary.

But councils are not excused from the stage either. District councils are litter authorities, and government guidance says they must keep land under their direct control that is open to the air and publicly accessible clear of litter and refuse, so far as practicable. Separate guidance on fly-tipping in water says councils must remove waste in water on council land and should investigate incidents there. So where the land is theirs — as Otterpool Park is, and through which the East Stour flows — or otherwise under their control, this is not some philosophical question about the circle of life. It is a very practical question: why is the rubbish still there?

That is where Folkestone & Hythe District Council starts to look not just awkward, but absurd. FHDC’s own Otterpool Park FAQ says the council has “two distinct roles” in the project: first, “as a major land owner promoting the project”, and second, as the planning authority. The wider Otterpool material also makes clear that Homes England owns land within the development area. So if, as appears abundantly clear, these East Stour stretches sit on land owned or controlled through the Otterpool project, this is not the council peering mournfully at somebody else’s mess through a pair of binoculars. It is its mess, on its patch, tied to its flagship scheme. And that matters, because this is a council that loves the language of climate action and green ambition. Yet when it comes to the gloriously unglamorous business of keeping a river corridor free of rubbish, the performance appears rather less emerald and rather more absent-minded beige. Green Cllr Stephen Scoffham’s cabinet brief includes water. Green Cllr Polly Blakemore’s includes environmental enforcement. So this cannot honestly be filed away under “nothing to do with us”. It plainly has quite a lot to do with them. The real question is how a green-led council, with cabinet members whose portfolios reach directly into this territory, has allowed a river on land tied to its showcase development to look like this at all.

   

And that is the political rub. FHDC is led by the Green Group. Its public material talks about climate action, biodiversity, green grants and cutting emissions. Splendid. Lovely. Frame it. But there is a vast difference between being environmentally branded and being environmentally tidy. The East Stour does not care how many times a council says “sustainability” in a cabinet report. A river judges you more harshly. A river asks whether the plastic is still there. A river asks whether the rubbish has been cleared. A river, unlike a press office, is very difficult to spin.

To be fair, the photographs do not prove why the mess has been left there, though they plainly show a jumble of discarded rubbish including a bicycle helmet, a football and, naturally enough, the obligatory tyre on the stretch where the Otterpool wastewater treatment works is due to go. They do not tell us whether this is weak monitoring (which it is), poor estate management (which it is), absent enforcement (which it is), or the standard British administrative doctrine of “surely someone else is dealing with it”. But they do support a very fair criticism. A green-led council should not need a seminar to work out that a rubbish-strewn river on or beside land linked to its flagship development looks bad. Not “optically challenging”. Bad.

On the stretch of the East Stour where the Otterpool Waste Treatment Works will go

The Environment Agency does have responsibilities, but again not always in the way people think. The River Stour (Kent) Internal Drainage Board says designated Main Rivers in the catchment are maintained and administered by the Environment Agency, while the IDB itself is responsible for flood protection and land drainage across its district, which stretches from Sellinge to Canterbury and beyond. The East Stour is monitored by the Environment Agency and appears in its river-level service. So yes, national and drainage bodies are part of the picture. But they are not a universal get-out-of-clean-up-free card for landowners or councils where rubbish and debris are sitting in water on land they control.

Then there is Canterbury. The city council’s own Riverside Strategy 2023/28 says litter pollution is an ongoing problem in the river and says the vision is for a “clean, safe, accessible and coherent place” with a “well-managed, clean and safe environment”. Admirable words. Less admirable trolleys. One is tempted to ask whether the submerged supermarket hardware is part of an avant-garde cultural bid. The current national competition is for UK City of Culture 2029, and while Canterbury has many historic charms, “abandoned trolley chic” is unlikely to impress the judges.

The wider problem is that too many institutions have become fluent in green speech and rusty at green action. Councils launch plans. Agencies publish frameworks. Partnerships produce strategies. Everyone agrees rivers are precious. Then the bottles stay in the East Stour and the trolleys stay in Canterbury. It is government by laminated aspiration. And the public is expected to admire the wording while stepping around the results.

The blunt conclusion is this. As the East Stour stretch shown in these photographs is on or beside land owned or controlled through Otterpool Park, FHDC’s Green led administration looks less like guardian’s of the environment and more like a council that enjoys talking green while leaving someone else to do the green bit. And if Canterbury’s riverside strategy is serious, the Stour should not be auditioning shopping trolleys for a starring role in its urban waterscape. Rivers are not wheelie bins. They are not skips. They are not public sculpture parks for discarded retail infrastructure. And the authorities who claim to care about them should start acting like it.

The Shepway Vox Team

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