Sea View

Chris Haslam writes:

Another week and yet another horror story from the nation’s privately owned water companies as a Times investigation reveals that raw sewage was illegally dumped into our rivers and seas on more than 15,000 occasions last year.

The top five offenders were Wessex Water, with 1,474 offences; Anglian Water with 1,479; Severn Trent with 1,610; debt-ridden Thames Water with 1,983; and South West Water, which illegally dumped sewage in seas around Devon and Cornwall a staggering 4,345 times in 2025.

But such revelations, while horrifying, are now routine and the responses from the water companies so predictable that we could write them ourselves: “We’re investing billions in building a super-duper infrastructure to keep you, your kids and your dogs safe at the seaside #yay.”

They’re taking the piss. And then dumping it in our seas. Last May, on the first day of my 17th circumnavigation of the British coast to research The Times and Sunday Times 50 best beaches for 2025, I fell sick with violent diarrhoea and vomiting within hours of a swim at Holme next the Sea in Norfolk.

On day five my Jack Russell, Dave T Dog, fell into a pit of raw sewage on a track below the Maer Lane sewage works at Exmouth in Devon. He was sick for four days. I was unaware, as you might have been, that sewage had been leaking from there for months and that East Devon District Council had warned locals four months earlier to keep pets out of the area.

In seven weeks I’ll set off for the 18th year to inspect the coastlines of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The most notable change I’ve registered in nearly two decades is that in our attitude to our beaches. What once were playgrounds have become minefields where washed-up wet wipes are wrapped around the bladderwrack, earbuds lurk in razor shells and a dip in the sea could ruin your week — or worse.

Did the Thatcher government know that a trip to the seaside would require a risk assessment when it sold off the water companies in 1989? Or was this another unseen consequence of the prioritisation of profit over public safety?

Either way, 37 years of platitudes, action plans, investment strategies and fob-offs from government, water companies and the feeble Environment Agency have brought us to what the Undertones singer and water campaigner Feargal Sharkey has described as “one of the greatest acts of criminality and lawbreaking that we’ve witnessed in the modern world in this country”.

Let’s be clear: dumping a toxic cocktail of untreated sewage a few hundred feet out to sea when you’ve spent billions paying dividends to foreign investors rather than upgrading infrastructure is little different from fly-tipping.

Get caught dumping an old mattress down a quiet lane and you face a £400 fixed penalty. Get caught dumping sewage for 46,191 hours — as South West Water did in 2025 — and, in theory, you face up to two years in prison according to legislation introduced in 2025 aimed at circumventing corporate personhood, which protects the guilty by making the company they work for liable for their crimes.

But will judges have the courage to put the chief executive of a water company on a six-figure salary — plus bonus — behind bars?

Last week South West Water pleaded guilty at Plymouth Magistrates Court to 18 illegal pollution incidents between 2015 and 2021 in Bodmin, Harlyn Bay, Truro, Polperro and Plymouth. Sentencing is scheduled for June, but if magistrates think a fine will make the West Country’s beaches safer for families they should check the records. In 2023, the same court fined South West Water £2.15 million for almost identical offences.

The Times investigation of illegal spills in 2025 offers, in South West Water’s case, 4,345 reasons to suspect that the penalty has not worked as a deterrent. A custodial sentence, however, may serve to remind water company executives of their duties to the public.

And then renationalise water. Just do it.