Evesham Branch Secretary, Roger Woollen, calls on those who care to join in demanding ‘clean up our rivers’
Next month Severn Trent Water will install a sewage outflow discharge from Blackminster sewage works into the River Avon just south of the confluence with Broadway-Badsey Brook.
This a further instance of the appalling pollution of our river system, which results from years of underinvestment by the water companies, insufficient resourcing of the Environment Agency to properly oversee the industry and the unwillingness of successive Conservative governments to hold privatised water companies to account.
In 2018 a blockage led to 360 thousand litres of sewage entering Broadway-Badsey Brook, which led to a £1m fine for Severn Trent.
In 2021 the sewer-storm overflow at Blackminster spilled 30 times, for a total of 439 hours, discharging into the same brook, leading the Environment Agency rating its ecological status as ‘poor’.
This discharge of sewage effluent is the single activity that has been found to have the most damaging impact on rivers and represents a threat to both wildlife and human health.
Yet since 2016 raw sewage discharge in England and Wales has more than doubled. Why is this?
Liz Truss, when in charge of the Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) between 2014 and 2016, oversaw massive cuts to the Environment Agency’s funding totalling £235m.
This included reducing drastically the surveillance of water companies and the monitoring of water quality, leading effectively to those companies regulating themselves.
This resulted in what Martin Salter of the Angling Trust has called ‘a polluter’s charter’.
When, in October 2021, The House of Lords tried to amend legislation to require water companies to ‘demonstrate progressive reductions in discharges of untreated sewage’ through investing in treatment, the Conservative government voted it down.
Local MP Nigel Huddleston helped to vote it down, despite representing a constituency which seeks to promote its riverside towns and villages to tourists.
But could water companies have afforded to clean up their act?
Liv Garfield, Chief Executive of Severn Trent Water, pocketed nearly £4m last year. Between 2013 and 2017 Severn Trent shareholders took £1.1 billion in dividends. Such funds could and should have been invested in the industry if it were publicly owned, which two thirds of the public, according to recent surveys, would like to see.
All who care should join in demanding ‘clean up our rivers’.
Roger Woollen
Secretary, Evesham Labour Party
Letter first published in the 22nd September 2022 Evesham Journal