The Times: The Times view on sewage dumping in Windermere, Murky Waters
The illegal discharges into the Lake District’s most famous lake and the failure to report them is destroying the UK’s natural treasure.
The beauty of Windermere in Cumbria, the largest lake in England, has long inspired both pleasure and awe in onlookers. In his poem The Prelude, William Wordsworth described climbing to a ridge from which he overlooked “the bed of Windermere” where “With exultation, at my feet I saw/ Lake, islands, promontories, gleaming bays/ A universe of Nature’s fairest forms/ Proudly revealed with instantaneous burst”.
That instinctive reverence for Britain’s natural treasure, shared by so many visitors before and since, seems alien to United Utilities, a water company serving seven million customers in the northwest of England.
Between 2021 and last year, a BBC investigation has found, the company dumped more than 143 million litres of raw sewage into the lake when it was not legally permitted, and failed to report most of the discharges. In the blunt words of Matt Staniek, a campaigner against sewage pollution, Windermere was “the jewel in the crown of the Lake District National Park, and it’s being used as an open sewer”.
The history of United Utilities’ compliance with the Environment Agency (EA), the official body tasked with policing pollution, is a dismal tale of rule-breaking and seeming cover-up. The company’s environmental permit allowed it to discharge untreated sewage into Windermere during heavy rainfall, so long as it was pumping at least 245 litres of sewage a second to the treatment works. Yet the BBC has established that United Utilities regularly released sewage into the lake at times when it was not in fact sending the agreed amount for treatment: waste which should have been going to the sewage works was being dumped directly into Windermere. Nor did the company reliably alert the EA to such breaches, as its permit also requires. Over three years, waste flowed unchecked into Windermere for an alarming total of 165 hours, of which at least 118 hours apparently went unreported until earlier this month.
These are not the first criticisms of the water company, which caused more sewage spills last year than any other. It is already under investigation for an apparently illegal discharge of waste in February this year, and was issued with a severe reprimand this week by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for lacking transparency over such incidents. For presiding over this catalogue of failure, only some of which pre-dated her arrival, the company’s chief executive Louise Beardmore recently received a £420,000 bonus.
As the Times Clean It Up campaign has long argued, polluters must face stringent punishments and regulators must be bolstered, even as necessary steps are taken to upgrade the UK’s sewage infrastructure. But although the new Water (Special Measures) Bill promises to hold chief executives and companies to account — up to and including prosecutions — it is questionable why those who have broken existing laws are not already being brought to book. In such cases the government argues that “a high evidential bar” must be met. Yet it seems that where evidence of law-breaking does already exist, there is little political appetite for vigorous further investigation and, where necessary, the logical next step.
This is a growing source of bemusement to a frustrated public, who cannot understand why the persistent, reckless destruction of our shared natural heritage — our rivers, lakes and seas — has yet to meet with convincingly deterrent action.
