Corporate greed for the needs of shareholders is given priority

AFEW weeks ago I wrote to John Penrose MP about a growing environmental scandal exposed by the national press: the criminal unhealthy condition of England’s precious waterways and shorelines.

It seems England’s corporate bodies such as Wessex and Southern Water continue, unabated, to contaminate our valued waterways with raw sewage, untreated floodwater and agricultural pollutants. And, alarmingly, a few weeks ago the government’s Secretary for the Environment, Thérèse Coffey, granted Wessex Water carte blanche to continue to ‘self-police’ it’s polluting behaviour. To add to this, this government is attempting to abolish the EU Clean Water Regulations in there post Brexit bonfire of EU legislature. With nothing to replace it!

To compound this wilful neglect, the government bodies of Environmental Agency (EA) & Water Services Regulation Authority (Ofwat) who are supposed to regulate illicit discharges from water corporations are extremely unfunded and continue to be impotent in there legal duties. Thousands upon thousands of gallons of raw and agricultural sewage are being released into our waterways – above what’s permitted. The River Severn has been found to have the highest levels of pollutant in England. Obviously, this has – and will continue – to have a worrying effect on North Somerset’s waterways and wildlife.

A serious driver behind this scandalous situation is corporate greed. Ongoing research by the Independent newspaper claims that the water bills of up to 50 per cent of water customers in England go towards funding foreign based corporations.

Apparently, three out of nine of our privatised water and sewage businesses are owned by Chinese conglomerates. And according to the same newspaper our very own Wessex Water is ‘fully owned by

YTL Corporation, a Malaysian global infrastructure conglomerate that is publicly traded on the Malaysian and Tokyo stock exchanges.’

And so, as is so often the case nowadays, underfunding and corporate greed for the needs of shareholders has been given priority over the health of England’s precious environment. I am still waiting for answers from Mr Penrose.

John Cadwaller Weston-super-Mare