The Times: Windermere sewage spill firm ‘treated watchdog with contempt’
United Utilities refused to hand over information on discharges despite instruction from Information Commissioner’s Office.
A water company that spilt raw sewage into Windermere for more than a week has been accused of treating the data watchdog with contempt after withholding information.
United Utilities, whose chief executive Louise Beardmore recently received a £420,000 annual bonus, has been under fire for polluting England’s largest lake. In one incident this year, millions of litres of untreated sewage were dumped in the lake due to a telecoms fault.
The company has refused to hand over data that might show evidence of illegality at sewage treatment works around Windermere.
Matt Staniek, of the Save Windermere campaign, asked for information on start and stop times of sewage discharges from Ambleside, other nearby wastewater treatment works, and local pumping stations.
Start and stop times can be cross-referenced with weather data to uncover evidence of potential dry spills, which are illegal. Outfalls are only allowed to discharge in heavy rainfall, to avoid sewage backing up into homes and businesses. One analysis suggested water companies collectively caused 6,000 such dry spills in 2022.
United Utilities refused Staniek’s Environmental Information Request — akin to a Freedom of Information Act request — on the grounds that the data was “internal communications” and “unfinished documents”.
“We recognise the importance of demonstrating transparency but we are concerned that releasing incomplete or unvalidated data could lead to public misunderstanding and misuse of information on this important topic,” the company told him. They said he would have to wait until spring 2025, when the Environment Agency is due to publish sewage spill figures.
The Times has called for the target date for improving overflows discharging near sensitive sites to be brought forward as part of its Clean It Up campaign.
The United Utilities refusal came weeks after John Edwards, the head of the Information Commissioner’s Office, told water firms to be more open with data to rebuild trust. “My message to water companies is simple: put transparency first,” he said in a letter to 12 companies in July. The data watchdog also recently ruled against United Utilities, telling the firm to release stop and start times of spills because it was “purely factual information”.
“It’s showing contempt for the regulator. United Utilities is just ignoring the information commissioner,” Staniek said. “They’re fighting giving us data as if they’ve got something to hide. You can only assume that they are refusing us scrutiny because they’ve got something they don’t want the public to see.”
Edwards said: “Reticence to release information about sewage pollution only dents people’s confidence in the water companies they have no choice but to use. I have recently written to these companies, who already collect this data and do have a choice whether they disclose it, with a simple message: put transparency first. This should be their default position.”
