Privatisation, extreme weather and politics: How Britain’s waterways became an ‘open sewer’
Anger is rising over the dumping of untreated sewage into the UK’s rivers and seas.
The situation attracted international attention at the end of
March during the famous OxfordCambridge Boat Race.
Rowers were warned about potentially dangerous E. coli bacteria in the River Thames ahead of the event.
A combination of agricultural runoff and sewage spills now mean the UK is ranked among some of the worst countries in Europe for bathing water quality.
Why have its rivers and seas ended up in this state?
Why has sewage pollution got so bad in the UK?
Many campaigners track the problem back to the privatisation of England’s water utilities in 1989. Companies were created as regional monopolies, split up by river catchment areas.
“The water industry as a whole was privatised in 1989 with zero borrowings,” says founder and chair of campaign group River Action, Charles Watson. Following the 2007-9 financial crisis cheap borrowing saw their debts grow to extraordinary levels.
“Today the water industry is carrying £60 billion [€70 billion] of borrowings.”
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Campaigners say sizable profits were instead distributed to shareholders. Customer bills were also kept low leading to very little reinvestment in infrastructure or improvements to services.
Populations have grown since the 1980s and homes are more tightly packed in urban areas. More demand is now being placed on the existing infrastructure.
Add on top of this an increasing number of extreme weather events over the last decade - Storm Kathleen was the UK’s 11th named storm of this season.
This is a problem because, in much of the UK, sewage and rainwater are carried in the same pipes with both usually taken to sewage treatment plants. During heavy rainfall, however, the system is designed to overflow occasionally with excess wastewater discharged into seas and rivers.
“Basically when you have extreme weather or even just moderate rain, the system is faced with a dilemma, because the sewage handling capacity… it cannot cope with the demand,” Watson explains.
“You either allow sewage to back up into people's homes and businesses, back up the pipes - which is obviously completely and utterly unacceptable - or you open the other end of the pipe and release it into nature.”
Campaign groups say this underinvested and inadequate system is now being overloaded leading to more and more sewage spilling into rivers and seas.
“We’re seeing this on a daily basis,” says Louis Reddy, policy officer from environmental charity Surfers Against Sewage (SAS).
“Last year, there were 1,271 discharges of sewage into waterways a day across England alone. So we know that this is a huge systemic issue, that water companies are relying on waterways to deal with the sewage that they can't face treating.”
How much sewage is being spilt each year?
In 2023, sewage spills into
England’s waterways more than doubled.
Recently released figures from the Environment Agency show that there were 3.6 million hours of spills compared to 1.75 million hours in 2022. The number of individual spills soared by 54 per cent - up from 301,000 in 2022 to 464,000 last year.
The industry body for sewerage companies, Water UK, blamed the “unacceptable” increase on heavy rain with 2023 being one of the wettest in England’s recorded history. It also said that, with 100 per cent of storm overflows now fitted with monitoring devices, more spills were documented.
The Environment Agency, however, has pointed out that water companies still have the responsibility to use storm flows legally regardless of heavy rain.
“We have a plan to sort this out by tripling investment which will cut spills by 40 per cent by 2030 - more than double the Government’s target,” Water UK said.