Environment Secretary Steve Reed made the contested claim during an interview on Channel 4 News on Monday evening.
Interviewer Krishnan Guru-Murthy (below) failed to call out the claim, which has been contested by Scottish Water.
The publicly-owned corporation hit back on Tuesday, with a statement pointing to independent reviews of Scottish water which found it to be of a higher quality than that found in England.
Now the row has been escalated to Ofcom, which is tasked with upholding British broadcasting standards.
READ MORE: SNP minister calls on UK counterpart to retract ‘misleading’ Scottish water comments
Chris McEleny, a former aide to the late Alba leader Alex Salmond, told Ofcom the report was “not accurate” and set out the four sections of the broadcasting code he believed had been breached.
He pointed out that the interviewer failed to “interrogate the interviewee to substantiate his claim” and argued that the “views of the UK Government have been given undue prominence which has allowed them to promote misinformation to the public”.
Speaking to The National, McEleny (above) added: “The Environment Secretary is a member of a UK Labour Government and talking down Scotland is what they do.
“So it’s not a surprise that he is attempting to promote misinformation about Scotland but broadcasters have a responsibility to ensure that if a UK minister is appearing on their programme that such a blatant misrepresentation of the facts is challenged, that the contrary view – in this case the facts – is given due prominence and that the true situation is actually communicated to viewers.
“This UK Labour Government must be held to account in its attempts to promote falsehoods to the public.”
Reed has also faced calls from the Scottish Government to retract the claim and apologise.
The Scottish Environmental Protection Agency has found that 87% of the Scottish water environment is of “high” or “good” quality – up from 82% in 2014.
And a recent expert report from the Independent Water Commission found that 66% of Scotland’s water bodies were of good ecological status compared to just 16.1% in England and 29.9% in Wales.
Channel 4 and the UK Government were approached for comment.
