Thames Water is f ined £3m over river sewage spill
BriTAin’S biggest water firm has been fined £3.34million for a discharge of millions of litres of sewage into a river, killing thousands of fish.
Thames Water tried to cover up the incident, prompting a judge to tear into the company for ‘attempting to manipulate the system and the regulator’.
The company pleaded guilty to causing a ‘major pollution event’ in a case brought by the Environment Agency, with attempts to mislead the watchdog aggravating the offences, the judge told Lewes Crown Court.
Financially troubled Thames blamed the spill on the failure of two pumps and a valve in what its barrister, Lisa roberts KC, called ‘an unfortunate series of events’.
Sailesh Mehta, prosecuting, said poor monitoring, inadequate systems and a lack of alarms all played a part in the three-mile spill into the Gatwick Stream and river Mole on
the Sussex/Surrey border. Judge Christine Laing said members of the public alerted the Environment Agency to the spill, which happened unnoticed by Thames for at least six hours. When called, the firm took hours to respond before denying it was to blame.
Both the prosecutor and judge repeated the words of Sarah Bentley, who quit as chief executive last week, saying Thames has ‘a history of poor management, aggressive cost-cutting and underinvestment’. no one at the Crawley treatment works spotted a storm pump running when it shouldn’t have been, the court heard. A tank that should have coped with the malfunction was much smaller than required under the firm’s operating permit.
Judge Laing described the damage as ‘substantial’, adding: ‘About 1,400 fish carcasses were recovered – likely to be a
‘Shareholders should pay’
fraction of the true figure killed.’ She said shareholders should foot the bill, noting Thames has some 180 previous convictions, including a £20million fine for polluting a public waterway imposed just months before the present case in 2017.
Thames said it was ‘truly sorry’ and was spending £33millon on the Crawley works and also paying to fund the restocking of the river with fish.