A few of us met for coffee. We’d recently read news about children who fell ill after trips to our local beaches, supposedly due to the quality of the bathing water.

First, our thoughts are with those families. Nothing in this post is meant to play down what they might have been through. But we discussed two worries pulling in opposite directions. Will visitors stay away from a town that depends on them? And will locals, who have swum here all their lives, quietly stop going in the water?

The more we talked, the more we realised the real problem isn’t the headline. It’s that when you’re standing on Avon Beach with a towel and possibly a toddler, there’s no simple way to know whether today is a good day to swim.

What the official system does well

We don’t want to be unfair. Our beaches are formally monitored. The Environment Agency’s 2025 classifications rated Friar’s Cliff, Avon Beach and Mudeford Sandbank East as Excellent. Samples are taken through the season, which runs from 15 May to the end of September, and results are displayed on notice boards at beaches in our area. That’s real, valuable work.

The gap: a rating isn’t a forecast

Here’s the catch. A classification is a long-term average. It’s based on up to 20 samples a season, calculated from the previous four years. It tells you what a beach has typically been like. It can’t tell you what the water is like on Saturday after three days of heavy rain.

We think that’s the heart of the confusion. “Excellent” sounds like a promise about today, and it was never designed to be one. Campaigners have made the same point nationally: nearly 85% of this summer’s sewage alerts on the Surfers Against Sewage app were logged at bathing waters rated good or excellent.

There’s a second wrinkle that matters locally. One family concerned was paddle-boarding at Mudeford Quay when the tide went out. That’s the harbour, and the harbour isn’t a designated bathing water site. It’s busy with paddle-boarders, kayakers, crabbing children and dog walkers, but it doesn’t get the same routine monitoring and signage. To a family, “Mudeford” is just the beach. Nobody thinks about where one regulated line ends and another begins.

Who is filling the gap?

Volunteers, mostly. The Christchurch Harbour and Marine Society has been running daily water tests along the River Stour, and local volunteer groups regularly publish results for the area. The Environment Agency also runs a service, Swimfo, where you can check classifications and Pollution Risk Forecasts. These are good tools, but you have to know they exist and go looking for them.

There’s also a disagreement over the causes. Wessex Water has said the high E. coli readings in the Stour didn’t relate to its assets, and pointed to a largely rural catchment where wildlife, agricultural run-off and private sewage sources can all play a part. We aren’t scientists and we’re not going to settle that here. But whoever is responsible, a family on the sand can’t tell which sources are at work today.

What we think could change

None of this is a demand for the impossible. These are things other places already do in some form, or that look achievable:

• Same-day information at the water’s edge. A simple, dated status at Avon Beach, Mudeford Quay and Highcliffe, it could be with a QR code to the detail on a website
• Bring the harbour into the system. BCP Council has supported efforts to secure bathing water designation for Christchurch Harbour. We’d like to see that pursued with some urgency, because designation brings regular monitoring.
• Test beyond the summer. One councillor raised the concern that testing is only routine in summer, while cold-water swimmers and surfers use the sea all year.
• Take citizen science seriously. Give volunteer testers clear methods and a route into official data, so their work builds trust instead of competing with the official numbers.
• Clarity on what is being tested for and what it means. Different samples at different times mean different things. Clarity is needed and the public needs to be able to understand in simple, non-scientific terms.
• A clear way to manage and view data. There is so much data around, in many different places. AI and a data ingestion tool would aggregate and make sense of the data and then report on it in intelligible ways.

So what next?

Not sure. It’s a big job, we’re a small group of neighbours with lost of other things going on.

Who knows, watch this space…