Corporate report

Whistleblowing about environmental malpractice: annual report 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025

Updated 30 September 2025

Applies to England

1. Introduction

The Environment Agency is designated as a prescribed person for whistleblowing. Workers can contact the Environment Agency about:

• acts or omissions which have an actual or potential impact on the environment
• the management or regulation of the environment

This includes those relating to:  

• flooding
• pollution
• abstraction of water
• the flow of rivers
• inland fisheries and migratory salmon or trout

Under the Prescribed Persons (Reports on Disclosures of Information) Regulations 2017, commonly known as ‘whistleblowing’, we must act on any third-party disclosures made to us about environmental malpractice. These regulations also require us to produce an annual report on whistleblowing disclosures received by us.

This report covers the reporting period of 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025.

2. How we receive reports

The Environment Agency can receive reports in a variety of ways, such as by:

• the dedicated confidential portal for whistleblowers
• phone to our customer contact centre
• the dedicated incident communication centre hotline
• email
• post
• social media
• direct contact with officers

Reports are often about matters that are already subject to investigation or inspection at regulated facilities. All reports are treated confidentially.

We may not always be able to act on reports (or log them as a qualifying disclosure), for example:

• where they are not within our geographic or regulatory remit, in which case we may pass them to the appropriate authority
• anonymous reports that contain insufficient information for us to be able to determine that they are from a whistleblower
• anonymous reports with insufficient data for us to action and where we are unable to check or corroborate the details
• in rare cases we may be limited in the action we can take if we believe that it may breach the confidentiality of an anonymous reporter

3. Number of disclosures

Following the introduction of our confidential reporting portal, the Environment Agency received 340 reports in this annual period. This is a 9-fold increase on the previous year.

228 of the reports were determined as likely to be ‘qualifying disclosures’ in that they were from a worker reporting matters that we considered were (at least partly) within our remit. Not all reports turned out to be within our remit, and those that were not typically fell to local authorities or the Health and Safety Executive. 

All the reports were logged, assessed and, where verified, passed to the relevant Area or National operational teams to consider and follow up as necessary. This was in accordance with our policies on incident categorisation and attendance.

Many reports resulted in trained contact officers being assigned and information gathered. Where an operational response was appropriate, the event was passed to relevant teams to assess. Several ongoing major investigations also benefitted from the intelligence received and some matters we would otherwise be unaware of are now being addressed.

Most reports related to waste activities across a variety of industry sectors, including concerns about the disposal of waste, its treatment, storage, international export and producer responsibility requirements. Around 10% of qualifying disclosures related to the water industry and 5% into agriculture.

Classifying reports into industry sectors is not always possible or informative. For example, a report of chemicals leaking from a lorry trailer may be identified as an illegal waste activity, haulage sector issue, water pollution, local highways or chemical industry concern.

115 of the reports were anonymous, limiting how we could respond to them. In some cases, contact details were incorrect and we believe some reports were deliberately false.

Reports where there was a significant likelihood of an environmental impact were notified to the relevant teams. In most cases this was done in a carefully redacted form to maintain confidentiality.

Any reports that related to actual environmental impact were attended unless they were assessed as of ‘no or minor potential impact’ and no further corroborating reports were received. They are still logged in the relevant systems which automatically flag should further related reports be received. There are several ongoing investigations.

4. The impact on the Environment Agency

Whistleblowing disclosures enable us to meet our key objectives of:

• protecting and improving water, land and biodiversity
• improving the way we work as a regulator to protect people and the environment

They also provide a unique insight into industries, sectors that we regulate and issues we may otherwise be unaware of.

The disclosures have expanded our networking and partnership work with other bodies, particularly where concerns raised primarily about environmental matters also uncovered other matters such as health and safety and modern slavery.

This year’s report followed the introduction of the whistleblowing portal in March 2024. Following the recent upsurge in reports, we have modified the portal and our webform to try to target disclosures relevant to the Environment Agency and reduce the number of anonymous reports. This year we also intend to introduce additional ways for our field staff to discretely provide a portal link to workers who approach them in confidence during their regulatory work.

These improvements should allow us to better inform people who make disclosures to us, to ensure they are directed quickly into secure and confidential systems linked to trained officers.

5. When to report environmental malpractice

We are listed as a ‘prescribed person’ in the Public Interest Disclosure (Prescribed Persons) Order 2014. This means that you can contact us directly about environmental malpractice.

You should report environmental malpractice to us if it affects the natural environment or the management or regulation of the environment.

Find out more about what the Environment Agency is responsible for.

Find out about other ways you can report whistleblowing.

6. Contact the Environment Agency

6.1 General enquiries

General enquiries

National Customer Contact Centre
PO Box 544
Rotherham
S60 1BY

Email enquiries@environment-agency.gov.uk

Telephone 03708 506 506

Telephone from outside the UK (Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm GMT) +44 (0) 114 282 5312

Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.

6.2 Environment incident hotline

Environment incident hotline

Contact form https://www.gov.uk/rep...

Telephone (24 hour service) 0800 80 70 60

7. Whistleblowing by workers

This can be done in confidence through the online portal at Whistleblowing: reporting serious wrongdoing to the Environment Agency.