- Scientist Jamie Woodward accuses regulators of being ‘asleep at the wheel’
- Fines ‘petty cash’ compared to huge dividends paid to shareholders
- Ofwat did act until last week despite knowing about illegal dumping ‘for years’
Shameful: Professor Jamie Woodward next to an outflow pipe on the River Tame
The scientist credited with exposing water companies for illegally spilling raw sewage into rivers has this weekend accused regulators of being ‘asleep at the wheel’.
Jamie Woodward, professor of physical geography at Manchester university, said last week’s £168 million fine on three water companies – Thames, Yorkshire and Northumbrian – for failing to stop repeated releases of untreated effluent into waterways was ‘petty cash’ compared to the huge dividends they had paid to shareholders.
The academic added that Ofwat had not acted until last week despite knowing about the illegal sewage dumping ‘for years’.
Water companies are allowed to spill raw sewage into rivers but only in exceptional circumstances such as after heavy rainfall.
Sewage spills into England’s rivers and seas by water companies more than doubled last year to a total of 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency (EA). It is not known how many of the 464,000 discharges from storm overflow pipes occurred illegally on dry days as water companies do not have to report any link between spills and the weather.
Woodward’s ground-breaking research linked huge quantities of microplastics found on a local river bed near Manchester with discharges of untreated wastewater outside of permitted conditions.
Microplastics are tiny particles found in everyday items such as synthetic clothing or wet wipes that enter the wastewater system when washed or flushed away.
They are harmful to aquatic life but existing sewage treatment processes can remove the vast majority of them. Fragments that settle on river beds are normally washed out to sea after flooding.
Their presence, therefore, implies there has been a spill of untreated sewage on dry days, when it is illegal. Woodward and his team at the university’s geography unit found huge concentrations of microplastics remained in the River Tame below sewage treatment works operated by United Utilities, the local water monopoly, even when it hadn’t rained. The presence of these microplastic hotspots, which can form in dry weather and in low flows, ‘offers very clear evidence that untreated wastewater is routinely discharged outside of the conditions allowed by EA permits’, Woodward told peers investigating the scandal.
Apart from the three fined last week, eight other companies are under scrutiny over sewage spills after Ofwat recently expanded its investigation to include four more suppliers, including United Utilities and Severn Trent.
‘The regulators should have been doing what we were doing,’ Woodward told the Mail on Sunday.
‘Instead, water companies have been self-reporting [sewage spills], in effect marking their own homework – with the regulators just ticking it off.
‘Ofwat and the Environment Agency have been asleep at the wheel. What the hell have they been doing the past ten years?’
Information on the date and time of sewage spills is not yet available in a consistent format. It should become available later this year as a single national live feed. Regulators do not record the volume of sewage spills either.
‘We need complete transparency but the water companies have just tried to put a lid on it,’ Woodward said. Experts say regulators have had their budgets for supervising water companies slashed since 2010 with money pumped into improving flood defences instead.
Ofwat said it shared ‘the public’s anger over water companies’ environmental performance’.
A spokesman said: ‘Our investigations into the remaining companies continue and where we find failures, we will act.’ United Utilities said treated wastewater and storm water were a ‘pathway for microplastics’ but there were ‘many other sources’ of plastic waste which are part of ‘a wider societal issue’.
The EA said it first became aware of the scale of non-compliance in 2021 due to increased monitoring.
‘Since 2015 we have concluded 61 prosecutions against water and sewerage companies for pollution offences securing fines of over £150 million,’ an spokesman said.
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