Sewage Dumping in England’s Inland Waters and the Surrounding Seas: The Background to an Ongoing Problem 

Three French MEPs (Pierre Karleskind, Nathalie Loiseau, and Stephanie Yon-Courtin), all members of President Emmanuel Macron’s La République En Marche! party, wrote to the EU’s Commissioner for the Environment, Virginijus Sinkevicius, on 24 August 2022, protesting the dumping of raw sewage in the English Channel and North Sea by English water companies.  They demanded action to protect marine life and biodiversity, the livelihoods of coastal fishermen and shellfish farmers, and the health of sea bathers along the north French coast. The French protest was preceded by pollution warnings for nearly 50 beaches in England and Wales, affecting many popular seaside resorts at the height of summer. This is by no means a new phenomenon. Only last year, for example, Southern Water was fined £90 million in July 2021 for dumping billions of litres of raw sewage from 17 wastewater treatment works into the seas off the coasts of north Kent and Hampshire between January 2010 and December 2015. 

The diversion of sewage overflow into rivers and seas is a feature of Victorian combined sewage systems, in which rainwater accumulating on roads, pavements, and paved areas joins domestic wastewater from sinks, baths, showers, toilets, and washing machines and is then conveyed along a network of underground sewers to be processed in thousands of public sewage treatment works. An estimated three million households in the UK are served by private sewage treatment works, also referred to as cesspits or septic tanks, bypassing public sewers. Large volumes of surface water may occasionally overwhelm the holding capacity of sewers, as can happen when thunderstorms cause torrential rainfall after a protracted period of hot dry weather, following which a hard and dry sun-baked soil can no longer soak up all the excess water, leading to flooding. Under these circumstances, the overflow, a mixture of rainwater and raw sewage, is on occasion deliberately released by water companies into inland waters (rivers, streams, lakes), estuaries, and the sea. This form of waste disposal is apparently legal during overwhelmingly wet conditions, when the sewage system cannot accommodate the extra workload, while the dumping of untreated sewage remains illegal during drier times.  The lack of capacity to process sewage during unusually wet and inclement weather has been partly linked to underinvestment in critical infrastructure, especially in both sewers and sewage treatment works. Infrastructure investment is, however, a massive and costly undertaking, with Thames Water alone managing over 68,000 miles of sewers, 5, 235 pumping stations, and 1.48 million manholes, meaning that not enough resources cannot be made available for remedial or developmental projects.  

Wastewater undergoes a succession of primary, secondary, and tertiary treatments before it can be safely returned to rivers, streams, or the sea. The removal of large, and often unflushable, floating objects and the filtration of finer grit is followed by a sojourn in settlement tanks, where a semisolid deposit, referred to as sludge, accumulates in the bottom, while the cleaner water at the top is sent to aeration lanes for removal of bacteria in a second settlement tank, followed by further chemical treatment in a final settlement tank. Any failure to treat sewage in the approved manner only means that human faeces, among other noxious waste, is to be found in the effluent that makes its way back into the water cycle via river systems or the sea. 

England and Wales are unique in their completely privatised water and sewage companies, where a short-term agenda of boosting profit-linked shareholder dividends and perks (benefits, bonuses, and share options) for CEOs, over and above inflated salary packages, may divert much needed funds better invested in infrastructure updates. The Water Act 1989 enabled privatisation of water and wastewater services in England and Wales.  Ten regional water authorities, first set up in 1974, were sold at discounted prices to limited water and sewage companies, primed with public seed money and newly floated on the London Stock Exchange, which are currently represented by Water UK. Three new regulators were created to keep an eye on these newly created monopolies: the Drinking Water Inspectorate, to monitor safety of drinking water; the National Rivers Authority (now the Environment Agency), to monitor pollution; and Ofwat (Water Services Regulation Authority), which sets water prices. 

Privatisation was intended to introduce competition, but instead we have a monopoly of private companies, each the sole provider for a given geographical region. The much- touted improvements in efficiency can be considered work in progress, as much water continues to be wasted from leaking pipes, even in times of severe drought, while household bills need to become more affordable, guided by water meters to allow home owners to rein in their consumption of the life-sustaining liquid.  Self-monitoring of pollution by water companies and light-touch regulation by the Environment Agency and Defra (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs) may have encouraged further deterioration in the situation.  As we await corrective action, it seems clear that the water industry will have to pull out all the stops, through new collaborative Drainage and Wastewater Management Plans, to convince an increasingly sceptical general public both about the benefits of privatisation and their stated sincere intention to improve matters in the near future. 

Ashis Banerjee