Water companies break promise on sewage spill maps
Water companies have reneged on a promise to produce live maps of sewage spills by the end of last year, leading campaigners to warn they are putting public health at risk.
Just months after The Times’ Clean it Up campaign began, senior water industry sources said companies would beat a 2025 legal deadline for near real-time online maps of discharges. Instead, they said all firms would go faster and release them before the end of 2023.
The pledge was seen as a big step forward for transparency on the annual 300,000-plus raw sewage discharges.
However, no new maps were released after the promise was made. That means swimmers, paddleboarders and other water users are reliant on a “sewage alert” map created by the charity Surfers Against Sewage.
Thames Water was the first to publish a comprehensive map, in January last year, prompting a series of negative headlines about days-long spills. Southern Water and South West Water have limited maps covering beaches but not rivers, known as Beachbuoy and WaterFit respectively.
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On New Year’s Day, Thames Water’s map showed scores of spills in Oxfordshire, while Southern had spills from the Isle of Wight in the west to Folkestone in the east. Five of nine monitored beaches between Exmouth and Lyme Regis were spilling sewage in South West Water’s region.
It is understood the failure of other firms to meet their mapping promises is due to a reluctance to weather criticism. Companies are also keen not to incur the wrath of politicians, including Steve Barclay, the new environment secretary. Last month, he told them that sewage spills from storm overflows were “unacceptable” and a priority for him.
“Until absolute transparency through real-time sewage spill reporting is mandatory everywhere, the paying public’s health and goodwill continues to be at risk,” said James Wallace, chief executive of River Action, a charity that supports water campaign groups.
A spokesman for the industry group Water UK said companies were “on track” to produce maps by the 2025 legal deadline. He did not address why they had failed to meet their 2023 pledge, and there are still no concrete dates for when the maps will materialise in coming months.
Lawyers and managers at six water companies have refused to release data on sewage releases that could reveal evidence of illegal spills.
The Times has twice used environmental information regulations requests to ask for stop and start times of sewage spills, to cross reference with weather data and see whether companies are discharging on dry days. Companies are legally permitted to release sewage only during wet weather. Anglian Water, Northumbrian Water, Severn Trent Water, South West Water, United Utilities and Yorkshire Water refused to conduct an internal review of their initial refusal to publish the data.
Most argue that a release could prejudice a long-running investigation into the problem by the Environment Agency and Ofwat, which is expected to report its findings later this year. Barry Matthews, deputy general counsel at South West Water’s owner, Pennon Group, suggested that “it is the regulators and not the press or the public” who should be able to see the data, which he said concerned “complex technical and regulatory matters”.
Yet the BBC was able to establish from similar data that Thames Water, Wessex Water and Southern Water had last year collectively spilled for 3,500 hours on days when it was not raining. The Times has complained to the data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, over the continued refusals of the other six firms.
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The Liberal Democrats wrote to the commissioner’s office in December to look at whether companies were failing to be transparent enough. “I am asking you to launch an immediate investigation into these firms not complying with [regulations] and call upon those firms to release data they are withholding from public scrutiny. Enough is enough, these firms must be held accountable, and should no longer be able to hide behind fabricated excuses,” said the Lib Dem MP Tim Farron.
The Times is demanding faster action to improve the country’s waterways. Find out more about the Clean it Up campaign
