A BOTTLE of river Wye water has been sent to the Prime Minister after he said it "tasted like nectar" when he once swan there at 5am.

During Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday, Boris Johnson was asked by Hereford and South Herefordshire MP Jesse Norman to press agencies to properly tackle pollution in the river.

In response, he said that he had himself been for a swim in the river Wye, and the Government was urging the Welsh Government to take pollution in the river seriously.

"I had a memorable swim in the Wye myself I think at 5 o'clock in the morning once and it tasted like nectar," he told the House of Commons.

"I understand the problem that he raises and it is very important that our beautiful rivers should be clean as well.

"The Environment Minister will be visiting the Wye area shortly with or without his swimming trunks.

"I know that we're urging the Welsh Government to take this matter as seriously as this Government is."

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After the claim, community group Friends of the Upper Wye, which is trying to protect the Wye, said it had filled a bottle with river water and sent it to the Prime Minister.

"Sadly nobody tests E. coli levels on the river, so he’ll have to take his chances," the group said after posting a video of a five-year-old boy collecting the water in Powys.

"A heady cocktail of farm manure, sewage and other chemicals doubtless swilling around. Bottoms up!"

The group said it would send the bottle to the Prime Minister with a "consume at your own risk" warning.

The group cited Natural Resources Wales as saying 60 per cent of the Wye and its catchments fail against targets for phosphate level.

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And those problems have been highlighted several times.

The Environmental Audit Committee recently published its Water Quality in Rivers report, which addressed at length the problem of phosphate pollution from farming entering the Wye.

“We didn’t want this to be all about sewage,” the committee's chair, Ludlow MP Phillip Dunne said.

“Diffuse agricultural pollution is as big a problem for rivers, if not bigger.”

The report cited an estimate by campaigners that there are now 20 million farmed birds in the Wye catchment and “millions more” in neighbouring catchments, with the river flowing from mid-Wales to the Severn estuary.

One academic told the committee that cattle and sheep were also significant sources of pollution in the river.

Spreading manure from poultry units on surrounding fields was causing “a net annual gain of phosphorus accumulating in soils and river sediments in the Wye catchment”, the report said.

Environment Agency modelling had also shown that farming accounted for nearly two-thirds of the total pollution in the Wye and Lugg rivers.

Leader of Herefordshire Council David Hitchiner told the committee that neither Natural England nor the Environment Agency “have been forthcoming with a solution”, while Natural Resources Wales “has been even less effective in Wales, if this is possible”.

Meanwhile, Powys County Council “continues to consent intensive poultry units, without appropriate mitigation and despite what we now know”, he said.

An algal bloom in 2020 left a stretch of the Wye “like pea soup”, killing off plants and wildlife, the council's submission said.

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