There are certain things we British just don’t like to talk about.
Poo is one of them.
Few of us bother to think what happens when we flush and walk away. As long as the air freshner is at hand and the toilet is left clean we think it is someone else’s problem now.
So the recent Panorama documentary that revealed that water companies released raw sewage into our rivers more than 400,000 times last year, was quite a disgusting shock. And it’s not just poo -- residents in one part of London now call the stretch of the Thames riverbank in their area the ‘Great Wet Wipe Reef’.
This matters! In fact it stinks: both physically and metaphorically. That’s why last week I was grilling witnesses to the Environmental Audit Select Committee to get to the bottom of the problem – if you will excuse the pun!
The Water companies say they are operating within the law, and any spills are rare, minor and unintentional. But that’s not the data which we were given. It is clear that these are not spills – spills are what happens with a cup of tea – these are deliberate discharges of hundreds of tonnes of raw sewage into our rivers and brooks. Despite being legally required to seek a permit to use storm overflows and dump sewage, and then only allowed to do it during periods of exceptionally high rainfall, our local sewage treatment works down at Mogden appears (along with others) to be doing it on a daily basis.
We heard that there is a lack of transparency about how often water companies illegally dump sewage and the volume of untreated sewage that they dispose of at a time. This is hindering enforcement by the Environment Agency and only 4 water companies were actually prosecuted for illegal dumping in the last year. That is 400,000 illegal dumpings of raw sewage but only 4 prosecutions!
The Victorians took this shit seriously. The famous engineer Joseph Bazalgette built an amazing sewar network for London 150 years ago that was able to cope with 10 times the volume of sewage the city was producing then. He knew that the city’s population would expand. But now that Victorian network is literally bursting at the seams. Government must act to get the water companies to invest properly into this creaking infrastructure. These are the companies that have paid out £60billion to their shareholders whilst polluting our rivers and coastlines.
Our rivers are not supposed to be open sewers. They should be places where people can fish and swim and picnic and play. At the moment they are a health hazard, and our committee heard reports from swimming groups and canoeists and anglers about people who had experienced all too close encounters with sewage and contracted serious diseases from their contact with polluted rivers.
It may seem incredible that there is only one river in the whole of England that has secured certified Bathing Water status. That should be a cause not just for national shame, but for action. Prosecutions must follow. Infrastructure must be modernized and our rivers restored to the beautiful places for nature and recreation that they once were.