To be fair to DEFRA the bathing water details were announced 10 days ago. It's just taken me a little while to get round to going through them in detail.

The one newly designated river location that was given a rating was the River Stour at Friars Meadow - rated as good.
It did, however, have one Ecoli reading of over 10,000 which was discarded due to an "abnormal situation"

This, however, is interesting when you look at the example of the River Wharfe at Ilkley. Which was designated as a bathing site 4 years ago. It’s been rated as poor every year.

Defra says the poor ratings are understandable;
“up until that point they hadn’t been monitored or managed for bathing. For us to create a plan and work to improve a bathing water site, we first need to understand what’s going on and that’s what starts in the first year of designation “

At the time I had to fight to get those figures - and it was still a fraction of what was actually being released.
Turns out in 2024 we’re still not getting the full picture - new FOI/EIR coming soon.

I do like a good starter pack. It’s the equivalent of follow Fridays in the early days of that other social media thing.