Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent assessment his Department has made of levels of public awareness of where to find bathing water quality test results; and whether it plans to improve the (a) visibility and (b) accessibility of this information at bathing sites and online.

The Environment Agency (EA) recently commissioned research on behaviours and attitudes of people involved in water activities and included a question on where people accessed information. This revealed that the most popular sources were signs at beaches, the EA’s Swimfo website and Gov.UK online.

The EA is committed to improving the provision of bathing water information to the public and has used the research findings to inform re-development of its Swimfo website which will be delivered over the next few years. The project is currently at its scoping stage and aims to modernise Swimfo and to provide bathers with targeted information on bathing water quality. There are no plans to change beach signage at this stage.