Campaigners are pushing for year-round bathing water sampling in Scarborough to support a proposed tidal sea pool, while the Environment Agency awaits government funding to extend the testing season.
There are growing calls for year-round sampling of bathing water in Scarborough to better reflect how the sea is used by the local community.
At present, water quality testing is only conducted for twenty weeks of the year, leaving a significant gap in data for the remaining thirty-two weeks.
The push for extended monitoring comes as local campaigners work towards establishing a new tidal sea pool in the North Yorkshire town, a project that would attract visitors and residents to the water outside of the traditional summer tourist season.
The Scarborough Sea Pool campaign believes the current testing regime is inadequate for those who use the water during the winter months.
Karen Chiverall from the Scarborough Sea Pool campaign said:
"Our aim, quite ambitious but serious aim, is to have a new tidal sea pool back in Scarborough. Again, and the preferred location for this has been identified as what we call Children's Corner, which is slightly to the south of the main South Bay beach, just round from the Spa.
"Having read the papers for the meeting, we do think that the current monitoring period, 15th of May to 30th of September, and only 20 times during that period, it doesn't meet the year-round nature. As you've heard today, we swim and surf and use the sea all year round. So we really want that acknowledged, and we want year-round testing done across all the bays, all the areas, not limited to a small number of testing locations. And we want to be involved in that as far as possible."
The Environment Agency, which handles the monitoring, has acknowledged the situation and expressed a willingness to expand their testing schedule, provided they receive the necessary backing and resources from the government.
There are also ongoing scientific challenges involved in accurately identifying the sources of water pollution along the coast.
Martin Christmas from the Environment Agency said:
"I think Defra have gone out to consultation on extending that. If we get the green light to do it and they send us some funding to do it, we would love to do it. We recognise that, particularly in South Bay, it goes on when all the other beaches are blown out, and it being a south-facing beach does well in northerly swells.
"We're using a number of techniques and the issue that that gives us is that the DNA markers for some of the animals and sources that we're looking at are slightly different. So we're basically saying these are the sources that we've got and they're either a strong or a weak indicator and we should either consider them or consider them irrelevant. I'm afraid that's the best we can do with the scientific techniques that we've got at the moment."
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