I’m in touch with South Coast Sirens, a fantastic local group of year-round sea swimmers dedicated to making our coastal seas permanently free from pollution and sewage spills.
The group was set up by sea users in response to serious health and safety implications for human and marine life of continued sewage releases.
Their goal is to stop sewage releases into the sea around the south coast and to commit Southern Water to stopping sewage outlets and investing in upgrades to their outdated system.
The group is raising funds via a crowdfunding campaign to independently test how clean local bathing waters are and to monitor the frequency of raw sewage spillages into our sea.
This will help establish the true level of sewage in our seas and waterways because, unfortunately, we can’t trust the figures published by Southern Water due to their systemic under-reporting of sewage releases.
After criticism from the regulator Ofwat back in 2017 about “basic data errors”, the Environment Agency successfully initiated a criminal prosecution of Southern Water in July for dumping 21 billion litres of raw sewage in Chichester’s “protected” harbour.
Sewage was dumped deliberately 6,971 times at Chichester alone.
If water companies acted responsibly and in the public interest rather than that of just their shareholders, members of the public wouldn’t have to step in to find out the truth about our water quality.
Maybe Southern Water’s new owner Macquarie will turn things around. But it’s hard to trust a company that pays its CEO a £500k bonus after getting fined £90 million, that didn’t pay any corporation tax last year and still has a financial subsidiary in the Cayman Islands and an offshore parent company.
Meanwhile, Southern Water’s shareholders have benefited to the tune of £190 million in dividends in 2016-17 alone while underinvestment and debts have increased.
Water companies have racked up debts of £51 billion since they were privatised in 1988 while giving shareholders £56 billion in dividends.
So, can water companies be trusted to plan and manage for the long term rather than short-term profiteering?
Perhaps water companies need to be taken back into public ownership for this to happen.
Either way, with the real prospect of water shortages due to the climate crisis, we need urgent action now to safeguard our water supplies.
Councillor John Allcock is the joint Labour opposition leader on Brighton and Hove City Council.
Very interesting, but what has this got to do with Brighton and Hove?
Didn’t Southern Water upgrade the sewage treatment works at Peacehaven so that we have had no discharge problems in our area recently?
If an incident does occur doesn’t the discharge get diluted and processed by biological organisms?
Doesn’t Southern Water have a warning system in place for swimmers if problems do occur?
Is this just local Labour politicians attacking water companies that they want to move back into public ownership?
Perhaps they should concentrate on local issues such as the state of central Brighton?
https://www.southernwater.co.uk/help-advice/incidents-page
Perhaps John South Coast Sirens could try https://www.southernwater.co.uk/water-for-life/our-bathing-waters/beachbuoy