A decade inside England’s sewage scandal

Rachel Salvidge

Around a decade ago, when I learned water companies were using rivers as open sewers, I couldn’t believe it. It seemed like something from Pepys’ London, not 21st century England. 

“The largest source of phosphorus entering rivers is sewage effluent”, I wrote in 2015 for the ENDS Report, at the time unaware of the scale of the problem. Then in 2016 I wrote about how “water companies were refusing to disclose sewage discharge data” and a shocking picture began to emerge. I have since lost count of the number of stories I’ve written about sewage pollution and the Environment Agency’s failure to tackle it. 

Around this time, WWF wrote a brilliant sewage report in 2017 called Flushed Away. Campaigners such as Surfers Against Sewage (who had been sounding the alarm since the ’90s!) and WASP brought game-changing data to light. Ballsy Environment Agency whistleblowers told me that the agency was unable to tackle polluters, deepening and contextualising the scandal. Journalists like Sandra Laville at the Guardian and high profile figures such as Feargal Sharkey were pivotal and kept the story alive. 

Soon every media outlet was covering the scandal, and overwhelmed with evidence, the public collectively lost its shit. 

At first the government tried to play it cool, counting on the outrage to be short-lived. “Water quality is better than at any time since the industrial revolution,” cooed the press offices of the government and its regulators in response to almost every enquiry I made. 

Could the bar be set any lower? During the industrial revolution the River Thames was described in the House of Commons as “a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors”. The press office claim failed the straight-face test but you couldn’t accuse them of lying. 

Back then, the intolerable ‘Great Stink’ that emanated across London from the river drove emergency legislation and funding for Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer system, which was built with much more capacity than the needs of the day demanded, because you build critical infrastructure with an eye on the future, don’t you?  

Some water companies responded to criticism over sewage dumping by blaming the creaking Victorian infrastructure they had inherited, itself an almost admission that insufficient upgrades had taken place. They were less keen to talk about the massive debts they’d wilfully accrued or the billions in dividends they’d showered on shareholders since the sector was privatised in 1991.

Ofwat oversaw these whopping pay-outs and the steady decline of much of the sector’s assets. Critics lay the blame with it for not allowing water companies to spend more on their assets, arguing it was done to keep customers’ bills low and not rile the electorate. Ofwat maintains there has been a “huge investment in the sector of over £200bn” since privatisation but how much was spent on keeping the kit in good nick is not clear. 

England boasts the only fully privatised water sector on the planet. Some argue that private interests and the profit motive will never work in the service of the public or the environment and that the sector needs to be renationalised – but the government has whisked this option off the table. 

Meanwhile torrents of shit flow throughout the land. Communities, waist-high in their own faecal matter, pose forlornly for cameras, invariably pointing at outfalls spewing unspeakable horrors or scooping sanitaryware out of fishing nets. People and pets fall ill. Wildlife chokes. 

Zoom out and the national story can be illustrated by numbers. Water companies were told to put monitors on their outfall pipes to count and record the sewage ‘spills’. (Spill sounds as innocuous as someone dropping their coffee, so it’s worth bearing in mind that one ‘spill’ can last for hours or even days.) In England in 2024, there were around 450,000 poo spills running for an eye-watering 3.6 million hours, but we don’t know how much sewage that equates to because that information either isn’t recorded or isn’t made public. I doubt water companies are keen for us to know. 

Given sewage discharges are only legal if they take place during ‘exceptional’ weather, someone might want to work out whether we’re all working to a common definition. Besides, the numbers don’t account for outfalls that don’t have monitors fitted or where monitors are not functioning, so it’s fairly safe to assume the actual figures are higher. Plus the water sector has been allowed to self-regulate (some prefer to use the phrase ‘mark their own homework’) so the whole system depends upon water companies putting their hands up when they have committed a crime. Can anyone spot a flaw?

Monitoring is not comprehensive. The crazy spill figures come only from monitors on combined sewer overflows (CSOs) where they are functioning, and it’s not clear how many are fitted on others such as emergency outfalls and those at treatment works. Whistleblowers described to me some of the outrageous goings-on at some of these works, where sewage is deliberately diverted into waterways to meet compliance figures.

Public outrage has been doused with more fuel this week in the form of Channel 4’s factual drama Dirty Business, which showcases the work of Ash Smith and Dr Peter Hammond from campaign group WASP. It’s a must-watch for bringing all the elements of the scandal together and is just slightly slicker than my ENDS Report documentary featuring Ash Smith from 2022, called SEVERN: the poisoning of Britain’s Amazon.

Unsurprisingly, the government has realised that, like a floater encountered by an angry wild swimmer, the problem will not be flushed away easily. Some companies are under investigation for their spills and more recently the government announced it would bin Ofwat, chop up the Environment Agency and smush parts of it together with bits of other quangos to create a new Frankenregulator that will look after all things water. 

This could be a good move, but as critics point out, this enormously expensive and time-consuming project could have been avoided if the watchdogs were unfettered and given the direction and resources to enforce existing pollution laws in the first place.

A Water White Paper has been laid before Parliament and there’s some decent stuff in it such as plans to overhaul rules governing sewage sludge spread on farmland (don’t get me started!). But the history of water regulation in this country is littered with plans, reviews, consultations and pledges. Is this another one that will end up down the pan? If so, you might eventually spot it in your local bathing water.

rachel.salvidge@watershedinvestigations.com