Who’s to blame for Britain’s sea sewage problem? It’s not as simple as you might think

I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t know a lot about sewage. Life is short, we all have our priorities, and somehow the disposal of various effluents had never quite appealed to me as a topic. Still, sometimes you can see something and know it to be wrong, even if you are not an expert.

Britain’s beaches becoming unusable due to, among other things, human excrement being pumped out into the sea by water companies feels like one of those things. You don’t need a degree in waste management to feel that it is not an ideal state of affairs.

When confronted with a scandal so obvious, the next logical step is usually to look for the culprit. Who on earth allowed this to happen? According to one especially viral tweet, the answer is simple. Brexit meant that Britain could no longer import the chemicals it needed to treat water, so the government allowed water firms to get rid of sewage in rivers and the ocean. Clear, straightforward.

Well... ish. It is true that the government once updated its guidance to tell water companies that the “Environment Agency will not normally take enforcement action” if they failed to get the necessary chemicals. Brexit was, however, only one of the reasons cited, alongside the pandemic and “other unavoidable supply chain failures, for example the failure of a treatment chemical supplier”.

Crucially, that guidance was withdrawn eight months ago. How to account, then, for the fact that “between 2016 and 2021 water companies discharged sewage into waterways and the sea for a total of 9,427,355 hours [...] an increase of 2,553 per cent over five years”?

The figure is jaw-dropping. What is happening? Again, it is a bit complicated. In 2016, water companies only had several hundred Combined Sewer Overflow monitors, which they use to measure the amount of sewage being released into the water. They now have around 13,000.

The issue, as far as this newfound effluence aficionado can tell, is with increased measurement, not an increase in sewage overflow. Water companies can now adequately monitor what they pump out into the wild and quickly warn the people who may wish to swim in them. That is, in some ways, a good thing: being able to have a good, detailed sense of what a problem is means it then becomes easier to deal with said problem.

In other ways, however, it doesn’t offer much comfort. In short: it’s not that you’ve recently been put at a heightened risk of swimming in human excrement, just that you didn’t used to be told about it. I may only be a mere dabbler in the arts of sewage disposal but, if you were to ask me, I do not believe water executives deserved last year’s hefty bonuses. It is good when, say, a toddler realises that something they have done is wrong, but they should only be rewarded once they stop engaging in said bad behaviour altogether.

This brings us to the line of attack which flooded social media over the weekend. As countless tweets asserted, Conservative MPs voted last year to allow water companies to pump raw sewage into the sea. It is, like the very waters we have collectively been discussing, a frustratingly murky issue.

Yes, the House of Commons voted on an amendment from the Lords on the topic of sewage disposal last year. No, the amendment had nothing to do with allowing water companies to dispose of raw sewage into rivers, as it is already something they do. The amendment also wouldn’t have stopped the practice altogether, meaning that the summer’s chaos wouldn’t have been avoided.

In that respect, the Twitter claims are incorrect, as Conservative MPs have desperately been trying to point out. On the other hand, however, their defence has also been flawed. “We voted against an unworkable amendment that would have caused sewage flooding in people’s homes and hundreds of billions of liability for the taxpayer” was the way Marcus Fysh put it. Others made similar arguments. They are wrong.

The amendment asked relevant companies to “demonstrate improvements in the sewerage systems and progressive reductions in the harm caused by untreated sewage discharges” and required “The secretary of state, the director and the Environment Agency [to] exercise their respective functions [...] to secure compliance with this duty.”

There is nothing in there forcing companies to stop sewage discharge with immediate effect, meaning that it would not have incurred any huge immediate cost. Though the explanatory statement added that the amendment aimed “to eliminate, not simply reduce, the harm caused to the environment and individual and public health by the discharge of untreated sewage into rivers”, explanatory statements have no legal effect. Whatever reasons those MPs had to vote against the amendment, it had nothing to do with protecting taxpayers’ hard-earned dosh and pristine bathrooms.

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here

In conclusion: everyone was a bit right, everyone was a bit wrong, it’s a complicated issue and there doesn’t seem to be any simple solutions. Water companies are behaving poorly but it is not a new problem. Growing populations, urban creep, the flushing of unflushable items and ageing infrastructure are, if my exciting Sunday evening reading is to be believed, all to blame for the current crisis.

It is a long-running problem that has suddenly become very public, partially due to better monitoring, which is ironically the first step towards fixing the problem. Scrutiny certainly is a good thing; if water companies are to become better behaved, adequate pressure must be put on them. It just isn’t clear that partisan screeching and misleading statements are helping anyone.

On which note – this reluctant sewage sleuth has had enough for now. Only thing left to do is to clear my head by going for a swim in the... ah, s***.