Britons will still be swimming in sewage in 2030 despite water bill hikes of over 30 per cent due to the scale of the pollution crisis facing our rivers, lakes and seas, campaigners have warned.
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.
Ofwat’s decision sparked a public backlash, as campaigners and voters expressed anger at being forced to pay for years of underinvestment by water companies.
But environmental groups have warned these bill hikes alone are not enough to pay for the clean up of waterways in England and Wales.
They said the investment will put England and Wales on the “trajectory” to cleaner rivers, but it will not solve the problem of illegal sewage dumping.
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.
The increase in water bills over the next five years will fund a £104bn upgrade to England and Wales’ crumbling sewerage infrastructure.
It comes as water companies face intense scrutiny for the amount of raw sewage being dumped into the environment.
They are allowed to release untreated waste into rivers from points in their network known as storm overflows during periods of exceptional rainfall to prevent their systems from becoming overwhelmed and sewage backing up into people’s homes.
But dumping sewage has become regular practice, with firms releasing waste in this way 464,056 times last year.
Raw sewage is dangerous for both swimmers and wildlife; many rivers across the country have seen a decline in biodiversity, while wild swimmers have reported illnesses, including ear infections and serious stomach bugs.
Ofwat has set a target that untreated sewage spills will reduce by 45 per cent by 2030 as a result of these bill hikes.
A total of 2,844 storm overflows are due to be improved as part of the investment, which accounts for roughly 20 per cent of the overflows in England and Wales.
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.
The i Paper’s Save Britain’s Rivers campaign has been calling on the Government to ensure sewage spills will no longer damage high-priority sites, including bathing spots and protected nature sites, by 2030.
But campaigners who supported the manifesto said the investment announced by Ofwat was “not enough” to safeguard the environment from sewage pollution.
Charles Watson, founder of River Action, said: “There’s no question that there is total widespread law breaking by the water industry and what this is going to do is cut that in half.
“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.”
Giles Bristow, CEO of Surfers Against Sewage, said the funding was a “good injection, but it isn’t enough to solve the problem”.
“By 2030 we’ll still be swimming in shit and surfing in shit.”
Despite frustrations, many environmental and consumer groups feel that tackling the sewage crisis on a faster timeline would require bill hikes beyond what many members of the public could afford.
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.
Bristow also questioned whether water companies will be able to follow through on their investment plans, which will see infrastructure spending roughly quadruple.
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.
“This is the madness of the system. The water companies ask for more money to pay for investment like this and they end up having to pay it back because they never finished the job and they never complete what they are getting tasked to do and being paid to do,” Bristow said.
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”.
She said she would like to see more of the investment being put into “nature-based solutions”, which involves creating areas like ponds and wetlands to capture rainwater before it makes its way into the sewerage system. Around £3.3bn of the £104bn investment is planned to be spent on these types of projects.
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.
“One of the problems that we can envisage is that they will build these storage tanks as big as they can afford to build them at the moment. That might not be a permanent solution depending on how our climate continues to change,” she said.
“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.
Many campaigners have blamed privatised water firms for the current crisis, as they argue firms have prioritised dividends to shareholders over investment in their infrastructure.
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.
However some of the Government’s own MPs have questioned the logic of ruling out public ownership of water firms as they argue private firms have “failed”.
“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.
Rachael Maskell, Labour MP for York Central, said it was a “massive mistake” that Labour was refusing to look at the ownership model for water companies.
“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.
“I do have a massive problem if then these companies are going to get more money for more failure. Yes [Environment Secretary] Steve Reed’s done some things and had some cross words with them, but why are we replicating a failed model?”
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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