Last week on Thursday in the House of Lords there was a discussion entitled Water and Sewage Companies: Directors’ Remuneration – Question for Short Debate which was set out by Prem Nath Sikka (Lord Sikka) who opened the session with “To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have for reforming remuneration of the directors of water and sewage companies operating in England.” and he and several other people contributed including Stephen Benn (Viscount Stansgate) who included this comment which can be seen on the discussion which is available here. The image above relates to the Southern Water area which does not include Surrey in their location.

In 2020, I believe there were more than 400,000 raw sewage dumps into England’s rivers and seas or more than 3 million hours of spillages. In one incident, in June 2022, raw sewage spilled into Windermere lake for three hours. In 2020, Severn Trent was fined £2 million by Cannock magistrates for illegally spilling more than 260 million litres of raw sewage into the River Trent. Finally—I think I am right about this—in the High Weald of Sussex, Surrey and Kent, almost 27 hours of sewage releases took place in a single year. If we cannot protect the vital ecosystems of our areas of outstanding natural beauty, we are failing badly. I could go on, but I will not. The bad news is that they still continue.