The water regulator Ofwat announced water bills in England and Wales will increase by an average of 36 per cent – or £31 per year – over the next five years earlier this week.
But environmental groups have warned these bill hikes alone are not enough to pay for the clean up of waterways in England and Wales.
The fallout over the water bill hikes has piled pressure on the Government, who has promised to reform the water sector via an Independent Commission that is set to publish its findings next summer.
It comes as water companies face intense scrutiny for the amount of raw sewage being dumped into the environment.
But dumping sewage has become regular practice, with firms releasing waste in this way 464,056 times last year.
Ofwat has set a target that untreated sewage spills will reduce by 45 per cent by 2030 as a result of these bill hikes.
The bill hikes will also fund a number of other infrastructure projects, including nine new reservoirs, which are set to supply water to around 2.5 million households.
But campaigners who supported the manifesto said the investment announced by Ofwat was “not enough” to safeguard the environment from sewage pollution.
“From an environmental perspective, nothing will be enough until we have stopped unlawfully discharging sewage into our rivers and what this accelerated investment programme will do is move us faster towards that ultimate objective, but after five years we will still have widespread illegal discharging of sewage into our rivers.”
“By 2030 we’ll still be swimming in shit and surfing in shit.”
Ofwat has been criticised for stifling investment by keeping bills too low over the past decade; Thursday marked the first time in 15 years that the regulator has allowed water bills to rise above inflation.
Concerns have been raised over firms’ abilities to undertake this level of investment; water companies were forced to pay back £157.6m to customers this year for failing to meet targets set under their current, less ambitious, business plans.
Ali Morse, the water policy manager at The Wildlife Trusts, agreed that “everything won’t be fixed by 2030”, but said this investment was putting water companies on the right “trajectory”.
However, much more will be spent on what is sometimes described as “concrete solutions”, which include giant underground tanks that store excess waste when the sewerage network is under pressure.
“So we might find in the next five-year period, or the five-year period after that, they have to build more and more tanks, and those are incredibly costly.”
Sewage in National Parks
Earlier this week The i Paper reported that campaigners had lodged a legal complaint against Ofwat arguing that the regulator had ignored its duties towards National Parks in making its final decision on water bills.
Campaigners warned the bill rises were not enough to protect iconic sites like Lake Windermere from sewage spills.
United Utilities is proposing to invest almost £200m over the next five years around Windermere, which it said will significantly reduce sewage spills into the lake.
But Matt Staniek, founder of the Save Windermere campaign group, described the plans as “tinkering around the edges”.
Save Windermere is campaigning for an investment plan that would see an end to the dumping of both untreated and treated sewage into the lake entirely, modelled on a similar project that was introduced at Lake Annecy in France in the 1960s after the lake suffered from algal blooms. United Utilities has said such a project would cost between £3bn and £6bn and take up to 15 years to complete.
The Government is undertaking a review of the regulation of water companies, but has made clear that nationalisation is off the table, as they argue it would be too expensive for taxpayers.
“How can Labour allow, if one of our pledges was to tackle the cost of living crisis, just allow bills to go up by an average of 31 per cent. That to me is absolutely ludicrous,” said Clive Lewis, MP for Norwich South, who has tabled a Private Members’ Bill in an attempt to force the Government to look at different models of ownership.
“We’re almost back in the Victorian days it feels with the amount of sewage. I describe the River Ouse as like an open sewer running through the middle of our city” she said.
Alongside the Independent Commission, Labour is also in the process of passing a new Water (Special Measures) Bill, which will introduce automatic fines for polluting water firms and tougher powers to jail the bosses of companies responsible for serious pollution.
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