Water companies poured raw sewage into rivers for 3 million hours last year, MPs are told 

Water companies poured raw sewage into rivers for 3million hours last year, while paying shareholders billions in dividend payments, MPs were told yesterday.

‘Dysfunctional’ regulator the Environment Agency (EA) is failing to hold firms to account, the environmental audit committee was told.

MPs heard that the huge Mogden treatment plant sent the equivalent of 400 Olympic swimming pools worth of raw effluent into the Thames over two days last autumn.

Sewage is allowed to be discharged only during periods of heavy rain, but former Undertones singer Feargal Sharkey, a campaigner for the Angling Trust, told MPs the River Chess and Cheshunt plant in Buckinghamshire ‘was discharging sewage for 35 days, one continuous discharge’.

Water companies poured raw sewage into rivers for 3million hours last year, while paying shareholders billions in dividend payments, MPs were told yesterday. ‘Dysfunctional’ regulator the Environment Agency (EA) is failing to hold firms to account, the environmental audit committee was told [Stock image]

MPs heard that the huge Mogden treatment plant sent the equivalent of 400 Olympic swimming pools worth of raw effluent into the Thames over two days last autumn [Stock image]

Peter Hammond, retired former professor of computational biology at University College London, said his analysis of sewage treatment works had found 160 breaches of permits granted by the EA to allow sewage discharges. 

He said the watchdog has only prosecuted 174 cases of illegal discharges in the last decade.

‘My research has found that many of the treatment works do not continue to treat a minimum rate of sewage when they are spilling and many of these illegal spills are not identified by the EA,’ Hammond told MPs on the environmental audit committee on Wednesday. 

‘My research found 160 breaches of permits in 2020. I believe they are in order of magnitude that I think is 10 times more … than the agency have identified.’ 

Late last month, the EA revealed there were 403,171 spills of sewage leaked into England’s rivers and seas in 2020 due to ‘storm overflows’. 

It also said that there were more than 3.1 million hours of spillages in 2020.  

The data was published ‘proactively’ for the first time as part of a pledge to increase transparency around the issue.