Sewage spills into England’s lakes, rivers and seas by water companies increased slightly in 2024 to 3.614 million hours up from 3.606 million hours in 2023. However, the Environment Agency said that the total number of spills were down – meaning that on average spills in 2024 were longer in duration.<\/p>\n
Water UK, the industry body for sewerage companies, has previously said spills are “unacceptable”, but that it had a plan “to end water sewage flowing into all waterways” which involved significant infrastructure upgrades.<\/p>\n
In July data from the Environment Agency also showed that pollution incidents by water companies, which can result from spilled sewage and other contaminants, hit record levels. <\/p>\n
Of these there were 75 serious incidents – where there is threat to aquatic and human health – and Thames Water was responsible for 33 of those.<\/p>\n
Spill data for the devolved nations is released separately. Northern Ireland does not currently monitor real-time spills and although Scotland has made efforts to increase monitoring, it only collects data from 27% of spill sites. <\/p>\n
In Wales, hours of spills was down in 2024 by 11%, but pollution incidents hit a ten-year high.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sewage spills into England’s lakes, rivers and seas by water companies increased slightly in 2024 to 3.614 million…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278344,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3843],"tags":[728,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-278343","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114887735859050161","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}