The Times: Water bosses told they can no longer monitor themselves on sewage
“Water bosses have been told by ministers they will no longer “mark their own homework” on whether they are illegally polluting rivers, in a shift in how the sector is regulated.
Private water companies have to run checks to ensure they are meeting permits issued by the Environment Agency about how they run sewage works, including taking samples of the effluent they discharge into rivers and their releases of raw sewage.
There were more than 300,000 sewage spills into rivers and seas in 2022, which are legally allowed under permits. However, concern is growing that some of those discharges were illegal.
An investigation by the Environment Agency and Ofwat into the possibility of systematic permit breaches is expected to report this year, and the Office for Environmental Protection, England’s green watchdog, said last year that Defra and its regulators may have broken the law by allowing sewage spills to become too routine.”
This is a huge win for the Save Windermere campaign. Our last film and petition focussed heavily on the failures of Operator Self Monitoring and it is reassuring to see the government taking a stance against this ridiculous practice.
You can watch our film “An Upstream Battle” here to learn more about Operator Self Monitoring and the failure of the regulator.
