EDITOR’S NOTES

DO RECORD-BREAKING FINES FOR WATER COMPANIES MATTER?

Let’s imagine we live in a small, American town in the mid-1980s. A corporation is pumping raw sewage into the surrounding rivers and people are getting sick, including kids, who no longer swim there. But the company boss keeps on pumping that sewage, as he’s making a fortune, and all the corrupt sheriff does is look the other way. There’s only one thing left to do: hire The A-Team.

If you can find them...

A game of cat and mouse ensues. For a while, it looks as though the polluting corporation will win the day. But in the end, the mercenaries deploy some ingenious - if unorthodox - tactics, using whatever they can find in an abandoned barn to create a cannon that fires raw sewage all over the evil boss and his posse. In the final scene, Hannibal Smith lights a cigar and makes a profound remark about corporations putting profits before people. Then B.A Baracus angrily adds something like ‘And if I hear about any more kids getting sick, we’ll be back, sucker!’ Everyone remembers that B.A was strong and didn’t like planes, but his affection for children is often overlooked.

In West Sussex, we don’t have a band of Vietnam war vets convicted of a crime they didn’t commit, going around righting society’s wrongs. If we had, I wonder what they’d make of Southern Water? That’ll be the Southern Water that pumps untreated waste water into our seas. Like last August, when videos of sewage gushing from a pipe at the beach in Bexhill made the national news, cancelling many a trip to the seaside. The same Southern Water that was fined a record £90m in 2021 for polluting rivers and coastal waters in Hampshire, Kent and Sussex.

Last month (before all the drama of the water shortages that hit Horsham in mid-May) the Environment Agency published data from all the water and sewerage companies in England, showing the frequency and duration of spills caused by storms and flash floods. While such floods cause major problems wherever they occur, we do seem to be particularly vulnerable in the south. If you look at a map of sewage hotspots reported by Surfers Against Sewage (who do a brilliant job of highlighting the issue) the overwhelming majority are in the south east and south west.

Following the Environment Agency’s report and recommendations, the government told water companies to install monitors on all its storm overflows by the end of this year (devices are now fitted in 963 of Southern Water’s 978 storm overflows). These overflows are essentially a safety valve that releases excess storm water from the sewers into rivers and seas during periods of heavy rainfall and melting snow, to ensure the sewer system isn’t overwhelmed. This is a step in the right direction, although monitoring the overflows won’t actually stop them from happening. It’ll just mean that when it does, we can hold water companies to account and dish out a massive fine.

But does dishing out a massive fine make a difference? You would like to think so, wouldn’t you? And yet, in the same year that Southern Water was the worst performing water company in the UK, the CEO received a £550,900 bonus. That more than doubled his normal salary, which was already nearly five times that of an MP. In fact, the Liberal Democrats analysed the salary of executives of the UK’s 22 water companies and found they were collectively paid £24.8m, including £14.7m in bonuses.

I should point out that Southern Water has a new CEO, who only took up the post in July 2022, following his predecessor’s ‘intention to retire’. This new CEO has vowed not to take a bonus this year, which you might think is the least he could do, but nonetheless, that’s a tidy sum.

Anyway, I digress...

The net result of the overspills and sewage leaks in recent years has resulted in Water UK committing to spending £10b on storm overflows between 2025 – 2030, with new technology used to replace ‘Victorian’ systems. It was Southern Water who coined the term to ‘Victorian’, by the way. I guess they’ve never had any opportunity to do anything about that in the last 122 years, having to get by on shoestring budgets and paltry executive bonuses...

Anyway, just as I was thinking how refreshing it was to hear some good news for a change, they hit us with details of how these improvements are going to be paid for. By us, of course! Higher water bills for the rest of our lives. A hundred years, say the experts, all under the indisputable cover of an urgent need to modernise sewerage systems.

If I was a water company investor right now, I’d be chomping on a fat cigar, with the words of Hannibal Smith ringing in my ears. ‘I love it when a plan comes together!’