SEVEN Dorset beaches fail guideline standards for bathing water quality, new research from DEFRA shows.

The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs released a report entitled 2014 Compliance Report For Bathing Waters In England.

Although the beaches pass basic mandatory standards, it reveals a number of Dorset beaches have failed guideline standards on bathing water quality.

These are: Castle Cove beach and Sandsfoot Castle beach in Portland Harbour, Seatown beach near Bridport, Church Cliff Beach and Front Beach in Lyme Regis, and Highcliffe Castle beach and Avon Beach in Christchurch.

Cllr Ian Bruce, Weymouth and Portland Borough Council’s briefholder for community facilities, said that he would be interested to know how the beaches were monitored as things like currents and flooding can have a significant bearing on results.

He said he would not like to see stricter standards putting off people from the borough’s beaches if the water was still safe to swim in.

Cllr Bruce said: “It’s a strange situation if people have been perfectly safe and we have not had any problems then somebody comes and says we are going to keep tightening the standard.

“Clearly we do want to make sure everything is safe but we don’t want to scare people off going to a particular beach.”

The results also show that Lyme Regis’s Church Cliff Beach has failed current mandatory standards for bathing water, which comes after a previous ‘pass’ result in 2013.

Bathing waters are defined as beaches, lakes or ponds that are used by a large number of bathers and have been designated under the bathing waters directive.

From 2015 a revised bathing waters directive will be issued, using stricter mandatory standards.

The report says 84.5 per cent of South West beaches pass current guideline standards, putting the seven Dorset beaches in the region’s bottom 15.5 percent.

It also puts them in the bottom fifth (19.3 percent) of beaches across England.

The regional figures show compliance with the guideline standard that is being used during the transitional period from 2012 - 2014 as the revised directive is implemented.

In addition, DEFRA has said on its website that it is surveying the number of users of Church Cliff Beach in Lyme Regis.

The beach is one of 12 across the country that will be surveyed, and if the number of bathers using the beach is considered to be low, DEFRA will consult whether to remove the beach altogether from their list of bathing waters.

The full report can be viewed at: http://bit.ly/1EpdjNC.