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The water industry, the Tories and Labour have faced public outcry after new figures showed record amounts of raw sewage were pumped into Britain’s rivers and seas last year.
Campaigners argue that Labour’s plans to beef up oversight of pollution should it win the general election are “feeble” while green Tory MPs argued that the Government needed to do more to tackle the sewage crisis ahead of the local elections.
Campaigners reacted furiously to the news that the amount of time storm overflows were spilling sewage in England was more than double the previous year, with demands for water companies to be forced to take action.
Official figures revealed storm overflows dumped sewage into the country’s waterways for more than 3.6m hours last year.
Labour has pledged to block water company bosses’ bonuses if they fail to meet their obligations to reduce sewage dumping, and have vowed to hit water executives with criminal charges if they oversee repeated sewage spills.
But anti-sewage campaigners have raised doubts over how much impact a ban on bonuses will have on reducing pollution in the country’s waterways.
Nick Measham, chief executive at WildFish, said: “Bonus bans are feeble gestures. We want politicians to enforce the law to force water companies to invest – at their and their shareholder’s expense – and end this off-the-scale law-breaking.”
The organisation also called for senior executives in the regulators, such as the Environment Agency and Ofwat, to face action, who it said had “collectively failed to police the water companies on our behalf”.
Tory environmentalists said the Government needed to do more to tackle the sewage crisis, with the Conservative Environment Network warning the Government needs a “strong environmental offer to impress voters” ahead of the local elections.
The CEN’s senior nature programme manager Kitty Thompson told i: “Increasing our natural environment’s capacity to absorb and retain rainfall, rather than letting it flow into the pipe network, will be critical to reducing our use of storm overflows.”
Lib Dem leader Ed Davey, who has been using the issue of sewage pollution for the party’s local election campaigning, said the issue would hit the Government in the 2 May local authority polls.
“Rishi Sunak and Conservative MPs are facing a sewage backlash after years of blocking tough measures to crack down on water firms,” he said. “The water industry needs to be ripped up from top to bottom, to stop profits and shareholders’ dividends driving everything. It is time to start again.
“From Dorset to Yorkshire, lifelong Conservative voters across the country are switching to the Liberal Democrats because they’re fed up with seeing their rivers and beaches ruined by sewage.”
Clean water campaigner Feargal Sharkey demanded the water companies pay to fix the sewage system.
“Any money needs to be spent right now needs to come out of the shareholders’ pockets and not another penny of the public’s money should go into these failures of companies,” he said.
Sienna Somers, nature campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “Scandalous inaction by water companies has pushed our ecosystems to the brink and is putting our health at risk.
“But the real sewage scandal is our government’s pursuit of deregulation and deep cuts to the Environment Agency, which mean even ministers are in the dark about the true extent of water pollution.”
Labour has insisted its plans to beef up regulators’ powers and the threat of personal criminal liability will lead to improvements in the sector.
Shadow Environment Secretary, Steve Reed MP, said: “The Conservatives’ are too weak to get tough with polluting water companies.”
Data published by the Environment Agency reveal there were 464,056 spills in 2023, up 54 per cent from 301,091 in 2022, which the organisation said was partly due to England experiencing its sixth-wettest year on record.
The duration of the sewage spills had more than doubled from 1,754,921 hours hours in 2022, to 3,606,170 hours in 2023, the figures show.
Both the frequency and duration of spills were also up on 2020 levels, which saw comparable amounts of rainfall.
The figures were described as “disappointing” but “sadly not surprising” by the EA’s director of water Helen Wakeham, while clean water campaigners accused the privatised water industry of having “run amok with billpayers’ money” and called for shareholders to pay for action to stop the spills.
Water Minister Robbie Moore pointed to action the Government had taken on the issue, with a consultation to ban water bosses’ bonuses when criminal breaches have occurred, quadrupled company inspections next year, fast-tracked £180m investment to cut spills, and launching a whistleblowing portal for water company workers to report breaches.
He added: “Today’s data shows water companies must go further and faster to tackle storm overflows and clean up our precious waterways.”
A Lords report in 2023 crticised Ofwat for ‘failing to ensure companies invest sufficiently” in water infrastructure, instead “choosing to keep bills low” at the expense of investment.
Water companies have been “overly focused on maximising financial returns” at the expense of operational performance and protecting the environment, the Cleaning up failures in water and sewage regulation: Industry and Regulators Committee report said
An Ofwat spokesperson said: “Today’s data is very disappointing and further evidence that wastewater companies’ performance on the environment is simply not good enough.
“We have strengthened rules to allow us to take enforcement action against companies that pay dividends to shareholders where their environmental performance does not meet our expectations.
We have also gained new powers which mean bonuses will no longer be funded by customers if companies’ obligations to the environment are not being met. Where companies fall short, we act – over recent years, we have imposed penalties and payments of over £300m and we currently have our biggest ever investigation under way with live investigations into six companies.”
