Sewage Spills and the Polls of Pollution
Keir Starmer has accused the government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an open sewer”, as data showed raw discharges were sent into English rivers 825 times a day last year. Private water companies have been consistently accused of failing to take action, and the Environment Agency admitted there were more than 300,000 spillages into rivers and coastal areas in 2022, lasting for more than 1.75m hours. The alarming figures led to calls for the environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, to resign, and added to the pressure on Rishi Sunak to do more to tackle the issue. Clean water has become a politically charged topic in the runup to May’s local elections, and Labour and the Liberal Democrats are mounting campaigns against the government’s record on raw sewage. Conservative MPs are reporting voter anger about sewage in England’s rivers and coastline, especially in coastal areas.
Several Conservative MPs said they feared that Sunak’s government needed to get a better grip on the issue of sewage spills before the May polls or risk losing more council seats to Labour and the Lib Dems. […] A Conservative backbencher who joined a recent meeting of Tory MPs with a water company and the Environment Agency said there was a real awareness of the damage the issue could cause. “In general, Defra seems to be on this, but it’s important we show that we understand it’s an issue,” the MP said. “It’s a very emotive subject, and our opponents are making the best of it, not always fairly. That’s politics, but it is something people raise on the doorstep, especially in rural and seaside constituencies.” At the end of last year, the Labour party revealed that sewage discharges had more than doubled from 14.7 per overflow in 2016 to 35.4 in 2019, coinciding with Coffey’s decision to cut funding for environmental protection during her tenure as water minister. Coffey continues to face significant pressure after a troubled start to her new role, having broken the government’s own statutory deadline for publishing water quality targets; announced a 36-year delay to cleaning up waterways; told parliament that meeting polluting water bosses wasn’t her priority; and been heavily criticised for announcing a storm overflow reduction plan containing no reduction measures.
United Utilities said: “We set out to reduce the number of spills from storm overflows by at least one-third by 2025, compared to the 2020 baseline, and our performance in 2022 means we have met that target.”
Also included is a nice little overview of some of the good work the Guardian has done to begin revealing the extent of situation:
Insiders say that for many years the water industry ignored warnings about the growing scale of spills from combined sewer overflows (CSOs) – storm pipes that allow rainwater, untreated sewage and runoff to discharge into waterways. But water campaigners were increasingly raising the alarm as they monitored the situation, and when the Guardian broke the news in 2020 that water firms had discharged raw sewage into England’s rivers 200,000 times in 2019 it was no longer possible for the government and the companies concerned to ignore the situation. At the same time, the Guardian revealed that England’s privatised water firms had paid £57bn in dividends since 1991. Repeated revelations have highlighted the issue that despite growing public fury, the government – in particular Defra – and its regulators appear unwilling to take firm corrective action. Last summer, George Eustice, then environment secretary, finally announced that water companies would have to invest £56bn over 25 years in a long-term programme to tackle storm sewage discharges by 2050.