The water companies have taken us back centuries to when the main English water-courses were open sewers. England is the filthiest country in Europe.

Why should the company owners, living in China or Australia, give a toss about the pollution of the River Wye or the Avon? All they care about is regularly receiving their fat dividend cheques

They do not care that they have made Britain is the smelliest and filthiest country in Europe, its rivers, canals and coastal waters made putrid by the companies that have made billions by charging us for services they do not fully provide.

Sewage overflows contain the product of toilets, baths, showers, kitchen sinks, washing machines and dishwashers, as well as industrial and agricultural effluents; not a tasty mixture. After discharge into a waterway, much of the solids quickly sediment, so that the bottom of the river, lake or coastal littoral water now contains a reservoir of putrifying sludge releasing offensive matter and toxins indefinitely. Eventually saltwater disinfects the toxic matter. This is no consolation to those who unknowingly find themselves swimming near a beach discharge pipe.

Privatisation, Thatcher’s ideological fixation has proved to be a disaster, but we could not expect the erstwhile Tory government to admit that and neither, it transpires, can we expect the new Labour government to take any radical step, having  eschewed renationalisation in its transformation into Tory-lite.

The nearest Labour got to a real solution was Jeremy Corbyn’s fully costed re-nationalisation proposal.  Starmer, in seeking the labour leadership, endorsed that proposal, but reneged on it as soon as he was elected. Our water supply and sewage infrastructure has remained largely untouched since the Victorians built it. It is amazing that it has held up so long, despite more than a century of neglect.

With population increase, new housing developments have simply been attached to the existing system, with never a thought for enlargement or renewal, and consequently it has become grossly overloaded.

In an earlier blog, I explained that the pipes for sewage and surface rainwater should be separate. Mixing sewage, which requires full treatment, with rainwater, which does not, overloads the sewage treatment plants and wastes the relatively clean rainwater, a precious resource we cannot afford to waste, as domestic demand is ever increasing.

When  the water and sewage utilities were privatised, a regulating body was established, but it has never functioned adequately. The Environment Agency (EA)has suffered innumerable cuts and now its laboratory facilities and field staff are far too diminished to keep a close eye on the cowboys who run the water companies, although those crooks have amply proved that they need daily scrutiny.

 

Sewage discharges are most frequent during heavy rainfall, but the latest scandal is the frequency of discharges during dry weather, when there should be no discharges at all.

A pitiful excuse is that the system becomes overloaded by ground water seeping into the pipes.  It is probable that any excess groundwater comes from the companies’ own leaking water mains.

It was once thought that sewage lines needed the addition of surface drainage water in order wash the sewage along.  That is no longer the case, because domestic sewage now includes plenty of water.

The water utilities have found it convenient and profitable to dump excess sewage into our waterways and coastal waters, passing the occasional token fines on to their customers.

The new Labour government has expressed a wish to curb the sewage dumping without giving the EA the wherewithal to establish a regime of close monitoring. The stated intention to hold individual executives legally responsible will not happen; it is just so much hot air.

And the government is doing nothing whatever towards the only effective solution: the separation of sewage and surface drainage. That would cost billions and would require government investment as well as compulsion on the utilities to cough up at the expense of dividends, fat salaries and bonuses.

 

Renationalisation is the answer, but labour has eschewed that.