Foord tables bill to beef up sewage reporting

Liberal Democrat MP Richard Foord has tabled a bill in Parliament to increase the powers of the Environment Agency, to give them greater responsibility and new powers to improve reporting on sewage discharges.

Responsibility for collecting data on sewage discharges is with water companies – where it has been since 2009. This change came about as the Government sought to offload the cost of collecting this important information.

However, this means they are also the only ones able to properly gather data and report on findings in relation to sewage discharges. Data collection and assessment is done ‘in-house’, with little oversight from Government or environmental regulators.

This has led to claims that water companies are ‘marking their own homework’, as the true scale of sewage discharges continues to be unclear. Last year alone, South West Water dumped raw sewage into Devon’s rivers and onto the local coastline for hundreds of thousands of hours.

Lib Dem MP Richard Foord, who represents Tiverton & Honiton and is standing for Honiton & Sidmouth at the next election, has tabled a Bill that places a legal responsibility on the Environmental Agency to assess the data collected by water companies and offer their own assessment of the situation.  

This includes duties for the Government regulator to expand the testing regime, given that responsibility currently lies with water companies.  

The Bill could be debated on Friday 23rd February 2024 and Mr Foord hopes that this will force the Government to put a greater focus on tackling the ongoing sewage scandal that is hurting coastal communities - and further expose some of the water companies’ sharp practices that investigative journalists have revealed in recent weeks.

Richard Foord MP said:

“The current water regulators, Ofwat and the Environment Agency, are clearly not fit for purpose. They lack the powers to properly hold water companies to account and even to properly scrutinise water companies’ actions.

“Last year, South West Water oversaw hundreds of thousand of hours of sewage dumping. They allowed millions of litres of water to be lost due to leaky pipes and received a one star rating from the Environment Agency - yet they still paid out millions in bonuses and dividends.

“This is simply scandalous. It cannot be right that the data on sewage spills is collected privately by water companies and then assessed ‘in-house’. This leaves water bosses to effectively mark their own homework and keeps the rest of us in the dark about the true scale of the crisis.

“We need to beef-up our regulators, by giving them a legal duty to assess this information and offer their own reporting. Since the Conservative Government has failed to take this crisis seriously and act, I have now taken matters into my own hands.  

“I have tabled a Bill in Parliament that would mandate the Environment Agency to independently assess the data collected. This way, we will get a clear picture of what is going on and will be able to hold these firms to account for poisoning our rivers and beaches.

“I hope MPs from all parties will get behind this push and back my Bill, so we can end this sewage scandal and protect our precious natural environment, which brings so many to our part of the world.”