***From The Telegraph’s Environment Editor, Emma Gatten:***
England’s worst-rated water company on pollution failed to explain the reason for its sewage spills last year, it has emerged, after it was shamed by the Environment Secretary.
Southern Water told the Environment Agency (EA) last month that it was still investigating why around 50 of its sewage overflow points had spilled more than 60 times in 2022.
Therese Coffey, the Environment Secretary, said she was “horrified” by the case in a speech on Tuesday, without naming the water company.
“I was particularly horrified last week that one of the water companies seemingly did not know the reason for a single one of their overflows being triggered,” Ms Coffey said during a speech in west London to announce the Government’s new plan to tackle water pollution.
“That is absolutely shocking and reinforced the need for the detailed action plans,” she added.
Overall, sewage was spilled into England’s rivers and seas by water companies on 301,091 occasions last year, for 1.7 million hours. When a single overflow point spills more than 60 times, this is categorised as a “frequent spill”.
The data is taken from event duration monitors at 13,323 storm overflow points on the sewage network.
Water companies are required to tell the EA the reason their monitors pick up more than 60 spills a year from their outflow systems, which are intended to release sewage into rivers only at exceptional times.
Southern Water told the EA that “ongoing investigation” was the primary reason for 100 per cent of its frequent spills, which accounted for 5.2 per cent of its total spills in 2022.
The water company was given the lowest rating of one star by the EA in its rankings last year, alongside South West Water.
It had the most serious water pollution incidents in 2021, with 12 in the year, including sewage discharge after a storm in June that left 11 beaches around Margate closed for days.
Last year, the company threatened to use debt collectors to pursue customers in its coastal communities that were refusing to pay in protest against sewage pollution.
Reasons that can be given for monitors that spill frequently include exceptional rainfall throughout the year or the failure of some assets.
But by far the most common reason given by water companies, accounting for 60 per cent of frequent sewage spills, is insufficient capacity in their sewer network to cope with both wastewater and “typical” rainfall.
Water companies are permitted to release sewage into waterways to stop it backing up into people’s homes, but this should only occur at exceptional times, such as heavy rainfall.
They are expected to inform the EA if they believe any of their sewage spills breach the terms of their permit.
Northumbrian Water and United Utilities said insufficient capacity was the reason for 78 per cent of their frequent sewage spills. United Utilities had the highest number of incidents last year, accounting for nearly a fifth of all sewage spills.
A spokesman for Southern Water said: “We do know the reason for all our spills. We have a continuous programme of root-cause analysis.
“The timing of the annual submission for EDM data is such that the root cause analysis for some spills has not been completed in time for the reporting submission.
“As a result The ‘NA – under investigation’ category was used on the return because we had not finalised all the root cause analysis for each spill event.”
I have heard that if you stop paying your water bills. They can’t actually cut you off. Unlike gas and electrics.
Fining water companies will not help as they will take the fines as more economical than cleaning up the mess.
The only way forward is that water needs to be a public owned.
It is essential for all of us and does not need to make a profit.
There needs to be a mass protests of not paying the water bills .
Remember you pay your bills and they on Thier part clean up the sewage, so they are not upholding Thier part of the bargain.
Thier shareholders will rebel and want to pull out,. Thus reducing the cost of buying back the utilities.
This is why I only ever drink bottled water. There’s nothing quite like the taste of fresh mineral water on your lips after a long morning swimming in our beautiful seas.
None of these stories ever have pictures of polluted water.
* Dirty water, sure, but news flash — rivers in England are very silty because of the geology/ecology. They will never run clear.
* Scummy, but that scum is often a by-product of decaying plant matter in slow moving water. Decaying plant matter also is a source of a lot of the silt.
* Street water outflow pipes. Yes, we redirect rain water from drains in rivers. It saves it happening naturally in the form of rivers in the wrong place.
I know there are recorded incidents of overflows from sewage systems into rain water drains, but are these actually happening more, or are we recording them better? In the last century there was a huge increase in the quality of our river and costal waters. I don’t see the physical evidence that that has gone backwards.
It’s basically that the Victorian infrastructure can’t handle the volume of pee, poo, puke and pluvial runoff modern populations throw at it. The solution is for many tens of billions to be spent on capacity upgrades. But private capital simply won’t do that without being allowed to jack up water rates in return.
So does the government upset water company shareholders by compelling them to spend money? Does it upset every voter by putting rates up? Or does it kick it into the long grass and let Labour deal with it?
There’s a real danger for the neolibs that sewerage is what turns the population against it. For all the faults of the old water boards the apparatchiks running them wouldn’t have stood for this.
This article is a must-read:
**I worked on the privatisation of England’s water in 1989. It was an organised rip-off**
>Long before anyone talked about “magic money trees”, the Thatcher government offered one: this was free money to anyone who filled in the application form.
>The average gain to investors on the first day of trading was 40%, and over the next two decades the privatised water companies paid more than £57 billion in dividends, at the same time as running up large amounts of debt, the interest on which is effectively paid for by customers.
>So how did we get it so wrong?
>I mean me, not you.
>I was a very junior Treasury official working on the water privatisation project, responsible for securing value for money for taxpayers and water consumers.
>In retrospect, we utterly failed on both counts: the shares were sold well below their value so taxpayers lost out, and consumers have paid through the nose ever since.
>But this is not just hindsight. We knew what was going on, because water privatisation was never really about efficiency. In the short term, the overriding political priority was a “successful” sale
>The Treasury was steamrollered by the combined forces of the water companies’ management, the Department of the Environment, No 10 and a huge army of investment bankers, accountants and PR consultants.
>Paradoxically, while the underpricing of the water and sewage companies helped fulfil Thatcher’s short-term goal of a successful sale that was lucrative for those who bought shares, it fatally undermined her long-term goal, which was to create a “shareholding democracy” that would parallel the way right-to-buy created a “property-owning democracy”. The problem was that few small shareholders could resist the temptation to cash out their large profits.
>So, as they sold their shares, the companies were bought up, mostly by private equity, institutional investors and large infrastructure firms from abroad. These investors spotted the combination of large investment programmes, effectively guaranteed returns, and a supine and underpowered regulator that lacked access to high-powered economic consultants and lawyers.
>The result is that companies have been loaded with debt that has permitted huge returns for shareholders. Meanwhile, regulators have allowed returns that have been high or higher than an average risky private company, yet investors have been exposed to no more risk than government bonds.
>*Jonathan Portes is professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London and a former senior civil servant*
12 comments
***From The Telegraph’s Environment Editor, Emma Gatten:***
England’s worst-rated water company on pollution failed to explain the reason for its sewage spills last year, it has emerged, after it was shamed by the Environment Secretary.
Southern Water told the Environment Agency (EA) last month that it was still investigating why around 50 of its sewage overflow points had spilled more than 60 times in 2022.
Therese Coffey, the Environment Secretary, said she was “horrified” by the case in a speech on Tuesday, without naming the water company.
“I was particularly horrified last week that one of the water companies seemingly did not know the reason for a single one of their overflows being triggered,” Ms Coffey said during a speech in west London to announce the Government’s new plan to tackle water pollution.
“That is absolutely shocking and reinforced the need for the detailed action plans,” she added.
Overall, sewage was spilled into England’s rivers and seas by water companies on 301,091 occasions last year, for 1.7 million hours. When a single overflow point spills more than 60 times, this is categorised as a “frequent spill”.
The data is taken from event duration monitors at 13,323 storm overflow points on the sewage network.
Water companies are required to tell the EA the reason their monitors pick up more than 60 spills a year from their outflow systems, which are intended to release sewage into rivers only at exceptional times.
Southern Water told the EA that “ongoing investigation” was the primary reason for 100 per cent of its frequent spills, which accounted for 5.2 per cent of its total spills in 2022.
The water company was given the lowest rating of one star by the EA in its rankings last year, alongside South West Water.
It had the most serious water pollution incidents in 2021, with 12 in the year, including sewage discharge after a storm in June that left 11 beaches around Margate closed for days.
Last year, the company threatened to use debt collectors to pursue customers in its coastal communities that were refusing to pay in protest against sewage pollution.
Reasons that can be given for monitors that spill frequently include exceptional rainfall throughout the year or the failure of some assets.
But by far the most common reason given by water companies, accounting for 60 per cent of frequent sewage spills, is insufficient capacity in their sewer network to cope with both wastewater and “typical” rainfall.
Water companies are permitted to release sewage into waterways to stop it backing up into people’s homes, but this should only occur at exceptional times, such as heavy rainfall.
They are expected to inform the EA if they believe any of their sewage spills breach the terms of their permit.
Northumbrian Water and United Utilities said insufficient capacity was the reason for 78 per cent of their frequent sewage spills. United Utilities had the highest number of incidents last year, accounting for nearly a fifth of all sewage spills.
A spokesman for Southern Water said: “We do know the reason for all our spills. We have a continuous programme of root-cause analysis.
“The timing of the annual submission for EDM data is such that the root cause analysis for some spills has not been completed in time for the reporting submission.
“As a result The ‘NA – under investigation’ category was used on the return because we had not finalised all the root cause analysis for each spill event.”
**Read this piece in full:** [**https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/06/rivers-sewage-environment-agency-southern-water/**](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/06/rivers-sewage-environment-agency-southern-water/)
I have heard that if you stop paying your water bills. They can’t actually cut you off. Unlike gas and electrics.
Fining water companies will not help as they will take the fines as more economical than cleaning up the mess.
The only way forward is that water needs to be a public owned.
It is essential for all of us and does not need to make a profit.
There needs to be a mass protests of not paying the water bills .
Remember you pay your bills and they on Thier part clean up the sewage, so they are not upholding Thier part of the bargain.
Thier shareholders will rebel and want to pull out,. Thus reducing the cost of buying back the utilities.
This is why I only ever drink bottled water. There’s nothing quite like the taste of fresh mineral water on your lips after a long morning swimming in our beautiful seas.
None of these stories ever have pictures of polluted water.
* Dirty water, sure, but news flash — rivers in England are very silty because of the geology/ecology. They will never run clear.
* Scummy, but that scum is often a by-product of decaying plant matter in slow moving water. Decaying plant matter also is a source of a lot of the silt.
* Street water outflow pipes. Yes, we redirect rain water from drains in rivers. It saves it happening naturally in the form of rivers in the wrong place.
I know there are recorded incidents of overflows from sewage systems into rain water drains, but are these actually happening more, or are we recording them better? In the last century there was a huge increase in the quality of our river and costal waters. I don’t see the physical evidence that that has gone backwards.
It’s basically that the Victorian infrastructure can’t handle the volume of pee, poo, puke and pluvial runoff modern populations throw at it. The solution is for many tens of billions to be spent on capacity upgrades. But private capital simply won’t do that without being allowed to jack up water rates in return.
So does the government upset water company shareholders by compelling them to spend money? Does it upset every voter by putting rates up? Or does it kick it into the long grass and let Labour deal with it?
There’s a real danger for the neolibs that sewerage is what turns the population against it. For all the faults of the old water boards the apparatchiks running them wouldn’t have stood for this.
This article is a must-read:
**I worked on the privatisation of England’s water in 1989. It was an organised rip-off**
>Long before anyone talked about “magic money trees”, the Thatcher government offered one: this was free money to anyone who filled in the application form.
>The average gain to investors on the first day of trading was 40%, and over the next two decades the privatised water companies paid more than £57 billion in dividends, at the same time as running up large amounts of debt, the interest on which is effectively paid for by customers.
>So how did we get it so wrong?
>I mean me, not you.
>I was a very junior Treasury official working on the water privatisation project, responsible for securing value for money for taxpayers and water consumers.
>In retrospect, we utterly failed on both counts: the shares were sold well below their value so taxpayers lost out, and consumers have paid through the nose ever since.
>But this is not just hindsight. We knew what was going on, because water privatisation was never really about efficiency. In the short term, the overriding political priority was a “successful” sale
>The Treasury was steamrollered by the combined forces of the water companies’ management, the Department of the Environment, No 10 and a huge army of investment bankers, accountants and PR consultants.
>Paradoxically, while the underpricing of the water and sewage companies helped fulfil Thatcher’s short-term goal of a successful sale that was lucrative for those who bought shares, it fatally undermined her long-term goal, which was to create a “shareholding democracy” that would parallel the way right-to-buy created a “property-owning democracy”. The problem was that few small shareholders could resist the temptation to cash out their large profits.
>So, as they sold their shares, the companies were bought up, mostly by private equity, institutional investors and large infrastructure firms from abroad. These investors spotted the combination of large investment programmes, effectively guaranteed returns, and a supine and underpowered regulator that lacked access to high-powered economic consultants and lawyers.
>The result is that companies have been loaded with debt that has permitted huge returns for shareholders. Meanwhile, regulators have allowed returns that have been high or higher than an average risky private company, yet investors have been exposed to no more risk than government bonds.
>*Jonathan Portes is professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London and a former senior civil servant*
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/16/i-worked-on-privatisation-england-water-1989-failed-regime
Better give them more taxpayer money – some Tory. /s
It must be bad if even the Torygraph is commenting on it. It seems that privatisation isn’t always the solution.
Saying they’re spills tends to imply they’re accidents, they aren’t accidents, it’s being done on purpose because they know they’ll get away with it.
Charging sky high prices, and paying all their profits to shareholders whilst letting the infrastructure crumble
>“That is absolutely shocking and reinforced the need for the detailed action plans,” she added.
The need for national ownership, I would say.
I knew without even clicking that the water company in question was going to be mine 😭
Let me explain it:
[https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/07/government-ease-sewage-discharge-rules-amid-chemical-shortage](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/07/government-ease-sewage-discharge-rules-amid-chemical-shortage)
because they were wrong about this:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47652280