‘Dirty secret’: insiders say UK water firms knowingly break sewage laws | Water

20 comments

1. They might even get reimbursed for it from the taxpayer too!

2. Fines don’t work.

   Prison sentences can be effectively nullified by a good enough lawyer.

   There needs to be actual consequences for doing this. As long as there is no real punishment for breaking these law, why would they ever stop?

   What do the ultra rich fear?

3. This isn’t a surprise, is it?

   After the Conservative government deliberately neutered the Environment Agency, what exactly did people think would happen?

   They are private enterprises, they will do the bare minimum they can get away with for maximum profit.

4. “By law, every wastewater treatment works must treat a minimum amount of sewage as stipulated in their environmental permits. Four whistleblowers have told Watershed that a large proportion regularly fail to do so and are not reporting it to the environmental regulator.

   The insiders say the amount of sewage reaching a works is being “manipulated at the front end” by “flow trimming”, which can be done a number of ways including by “manually setting penstocks to limit the flow”, by “dropping weir levels” and by “tuning down pumps at pumping stations”. The diverted raw sewage makes its way into ditches, rivers and seas.”

   One industry insider says they “have personally surveyed works and found valves operated and diversion pipes installed so that part of the flow arriving is deliberately diverted to an environmentally sensitive stream, rather than into the works, so that the works passes compliance of sanitary parameters.”

   Never forget that these people are allowed to pay themselves billions for doing this. You don’t get to do this without the government allowing it.

5. In other news, forestry insiders say bears defecate in woodland, while Vatican insiders say Pope might be Roman Catholic.

6. time to prosecute. Let Thames water and other indebted companies go bankrupt then we take the assets not the debt. This travesty has gone on for long enough.

7. All lies! These companies work in our best interests, that’s what we pay them for, they wouldn’t purposefully pollute our glorious waterways and countryside /s obviously but I mean seriously we’ve all known this for a very long time now and I wonder if we have some sort of right to not pay the buggers for their blatant wrongdoings but I suppose not

8. I don’t know why there hasn’t been a mass exodus of people just not paying water bills. If there was a huge organised protest from millions just not paying the water bills they would be forced to change their practices. People are scared of having their water turned off when you can literally buy the long keys they use to turn it back on at BnQ

9. >insiders say UK water firms knowingly break sewage laws

   Everyone had come to this conclusion by now anyways. Nice to see it backed up though.

10. Probably more brown envelopes going around as much as there is brown water.

11. Sweet. It’s gonna be really easy to prosecute them then.

12. If we were french we’d go and spray raw sewage over the front of their head office and chief executives house

13. As long as the profit >> fine, they’ll carry on doing it too.

14. Water companies shit in rivers, bears shit in the woods. More at 10.

15. We’ve known this for fucking ages especially when they’ve been so open about dumping raw sewage

16. We Know they do. Of course they do. They know we know they do.

    So. Can someone please stop it.

17. We Know they do. Of course they do. They know we know they do.

    So. Can someone please stop it.

18. Because of these water companies (along with other industries like farming) have literally made the rivers and also the seas around the UK dangerous, keep seeing articles outside of reddit of how wild swimmers or people paddling in the sea ending up ill due to waterborne viruses etc.

    I cant believe we are sitting here while these companies are literally destroying the environment and putting peoples lives at risk.

19. If the fines don’t actually cause hardship (and a few tens of thousands to companies with billions in turnover doesn’t), and if doing it properly is more expensive than the fines, then it’s just a cost of doing business.

20. I thought this was a given.

    That the water authorities have been absolutely gutted to the point of being completely toothless has absolutely nothing to do with the current government is something I’m quite sure of.