Sewage spills at a record high

Sewage spills rose to a record high last year, new data from the Environment Agency released on Wednesday will show.

The number of releases topped more than 477,000 over 4 million hours in 2023, according to early estimates from the agency, representing a 58 per cent rise on the previous year.

Final figures are expected to be slightly lower, but will still show that last year saw the highest number of spills in England since monitoring of sewage outflows began in 2016.

Last year there were 301,091 spills, a drop on 2021 that the Government said was largely due to dry weather.

The water industry is expected to point to the fact that last year was the sixth wettest in England since Met Office records began in 1836, as one of the main reasons behind the spike.

Water companies are permitted to release sewage into rivers and seas during exceptional circumstances, such as extreme wet weather, to stop it backing up into people’s homes.

But the regularity of spills has led to criticism that the industry has failed to invest in infrastructure to cope with changing weather and increasing population.

Investigation into water companies

The Environment Agency is conducting the largest ever criminal investigation into potential widespread non-compliance by water and sewerage companies at thousands of sewage treatment works.

The increase in the number of spills this year can also be partly attributed to increased monitoring, with 100 per cent of known storm overflows now fitted with monitors, up from 91 per cent the previous year.

But the new figures will likely put further pressure on the Government to act on sewage spills, which it has said will take until 2050 to fix.

Responding to the new figures, James Wallace, the CEO of charity River Action said the scale of the discharges was “a final indictment of a failing industry”.

“Having run amok with bill payers money for decades, they discharged untreated sewage into rivers and coastal waters more than 4 million hours last year from nearly 500,000 spills through storm overflows that are supposed to be only used in extreme weather events.”

Last year the industry apologised for the first time for dumping sewage into rivers and waterways for decades, but said tens of billions of investment via household bills would be required for the biggest modernisation of sewers since the Victorian era.

Water companies have asked Ofwat to approve bill rises of an average 40 per cent over the next decade to cover the cost of new infrastructure to fix sewage spills and other issues.  

The Government has introduced several new measures to clamp down on sewage spills and tighten regulations in recent weeks, including a whistleblower hotline it announced on Tuesday.

It brought forward £180m in water company investment over the next year, and announced a ban on water company bosses receiving bonuses where a company has committed serious criminal breaches.

But it appeared to row back on plans to completely end the practice of water companies monitoring their own effluent discharges for possible breaches, announcing these would only be reduced from 2025.