Cutting the Crap: The Truth about Sewage
A mainstay for any attack on the Conservative government or Brexit is to mention the sewage being ‘pumped’ into our rivers and seas by psychotic spiv gammons that hate the population. Ironically, for liberal centrists that purport to despise populism, indulging in this is pure populism, designed to prompt a visceral response. It’s also a tool for crude humour (see title), another populist staple. The truth of the matter, you’ll be shocked to hear, is not as clear cut. Yet again, it is a distortion the usual suspects want to become gospel, without anyone finding out for themselves.
Why is sewage being released? In this country and most of the developed world, sewage is usually sent to treatment plants where it is filtered and treated in three stages. The solids and bacteria are removed, leaving water which (although not fit for human consumption) is clean enough to release into the sea and rivers. Treated solids are used as fertiliser and burned to generate electricity. However, this process is not always possible.
The problem is nearly half of England’s sewers (62,137 out of around 155,343 miles) are ‘combined’. This means both sewage and rainwater go into them. This in turn means it is easier for the system to be overwhelmed, especially during heavy rainfall. The situation is made worse with the problem of ‘fatbergs’ and the increasing tendency of people to flush away wet-wipes and other items. When the system is overloaded there is not the capacity nor the time for the sewage to be treated, and in order to stop it bursting into the street and up through our toilets, it has to be released into bodies of water where in theory it will disperse. Should it happen, ideally? Of course not – but it is certainly preferable to towns full of effluent.
In the Victorian era, when these sewers were built, the population was much smaller and there was no point in separating sewage and rainwater. Also houses only had one drain, rather than separating the sewage and the rainwater from the gutters, as happens now. Indeed for some while there was no technology to treat effluent at all, nor the ecological and medical concerns about discharging into waterways. It wasn’t until 1858, after the ‘Great Stink’ (where the sewage dumped directly into the Thames got out of control) that sewers were built to take the effluent out of cities. The London system was completed in 1870, costing £613 million in today’s money. The combined sewer approach continued until the 1960s, when all new sewers were built to separate effluent and rain. With these systems, the rainwater is immediately released into waterways but the pipes containing sewage go to the treatment plants. Sometimes, because of the configuration in certain areas, separate rainwater pipes unhelpfully feed into combined pipes.
After a half-century of mass immigration (skyrocketing in 1997 under Blair) sewers - combined or otherwise - are seriously overstretched. All infrastructure is overstretched. Therefore the need to release sewage in emergencies is more frequent. With record immigration numbers of over a million people a year (606,000 net in 2022) it will only continue. Of course we could fully replace the remaining combined sewers, and in time we should. However the cost is estimated to be at least £150 billion, according to the Storm Overflows Taskforce. According to a House of Lords report, the true figure will be £350 billion to £600 billion. With the current setup this would inevitably be passed on to the consumer through their water bills. The price does not only include building the new pipes, but also the cost of digging up the old ones and everything built on top of them. The sheer disruption, legal costs, compensation, equipment and manpower would be astronomical. To put the cost into context, HS2 and renewing Trident are costing over £100 billion each and the Covid spend was north of £300 billion.
Every time Labour or other parties promise to solve the problem, we must then ask if they intend to replace those pre-1960s pipes, and how they intend to pay for it. The abolishment of non-doms and a ‘proper windfall tax’ again? Or just plain old fashioned borrowing from our unborn descendants? We could also ask why the last Labour governments did not perform the necessary upgrades. After all, they began the unprecedented immigration which exacerbates the problem so.
Combined sewers are not particular to our squalid ‘plague island’. Countries all around the world have them, and there are 333,000 combined sewer overflows (CSOs - often known as ‘storm overflows’) in Europe. England has 14,500, with 13,350 exiting into rivers. As a result the EU have intervened against most of its member states on effluent pollution multiple times, including the UK while we were in the bloc. However, in 2012 the ECJ did rule that releasing of sewage was allowed in exceptional circumstances. Neither is emergency discharge particular to Tory rule. It has been happening as long as modern sewers have existed, and neither Labour nor Tory governments have stopped it.
As the usual suspects will delight in telling you, there is indeed data that shows increasing numbers of sewage discharges, and this goes up significantly since 2016. In 2016, 12,637 incidents were detected. In 2022 there were 301,091. However, the reason for this is that much more monitoring now happens. In 2014 there was a push to increase the monitoring of CSOs. In 2016, only 5% of CSOs were checked. Now 91% are scrutinised, thus the numbers are higher.
Indeed if it was down to Brexit, then how come the releases were increasing between 2016 and 2020, before we had actually left? And why did they then decline after 2020 once we had departed? In 2020 it was 403,375 and in 2022 it was 301,091.
There are only two tenuous aspects linking ‘the bad sewage’ to Brexit. Firstly, by definition the government is freer to make decisions on emergency releases without fearing punishment from the EU’s courts. That doesn’t mean they want to release more, and it doesn’t mean they would do so with impunity, but like all policy areas the government has ‘taken back control’ of it and can be more flexible. Secondly, after the pandemic there was a shortage of chemicals needed to treat sewage. This included ferric sulphate, much of which is produced in the EU, with Germany, Poland, Spain and Slovenia among the top exporters (2021). Many goods saw shortages, price-rises and logistical problems in that period, and still do. The shortage of lorry drivers – many of whom had retired during Covid – was a major factor, compounded by a hopelessly unprepared DVLA. Brexit was, and is, only a small element exacerbating these issues, with the increased paperwork and non-tariff barriers that now exist.
As a result of the chemical shortages and heavy rainfall in the summer of 2021 (memorably involving the flooding of Stratford Underground station) the government adopted a different approach towards the water companies. There has long been a system of permits allowing companies to release sewage, issued for specific CSOs controlled by these companies. Firms are only allowed to do so in certain situations stipulated in that licence – usually heavy rainfall. In normal circumstances, if they dump effluent outside of those terms, they are admonished and fined.
However, because of the difficult scenario, on September 1 2021 the government announced that if a firm could not get the necessary chemicals it would be allowed to release sewage outside of the terms of its permit. It would however, be required to get written agreement to do so. The move applied to sewage that had been through two stages of treatment, rather than the normal three. Sewage plants are categorised into ‘low-risk, ‘medium-risk’ and ‘high-risk’. ‘High risk’ plants handle sewage that has not been treated at all – and these plants were not allowed to release sewage. The arrangement, intended to be temporary until the end of the year, was terminated in January 2022, and we returned to the established permit system.
Emergency releases were also an issue discussed in the Environment Bill, which the government introduced in 2021. The long-planned bill was concerned with bringing sewage discharges and pollution down. It obliged the Environment Secretary to intervene in these matters and required public transparency about releases. With the passage of the bill through Parliament, peers of various parties wrote amendments to further push that aspect. One Tory peer, Lord Wellington, proposed an amendment to legally require water companies to bring down the amounts they were releasing:
A sewerage undertaker must demonstrate improvements in the sewerage systems and progressive reductions in the harm caused by untreated sewage discharges.
The legal text proposed to reduce the discharges, not eliminate them. Its supporting notes, which are not legally binding, stated the aim was to ‘try to eliminate, not simply reduce, the harm caused’. The government initially rejected this amendment when the bill went back to the Commons, whipping its MPs to do so. This prompted a huge amount of performative outrage from the opposition parties and their allies online. ‘Tory Sewage Party’ became the online hashtag, with ‘Tories just voted to dump sewage on our beaches’ the only detail you needed to know. Chris Packhams, Feargal Sharkeys, Gary Linekers and Deborah Meadens were deployed to the masses like cyber missionaries.
The government’s reasoning was that the need for emergency discharges was too great, and therefore frequent fines would be too costly for the water companies. It is something of a contradiction to allow operators to dump in an emergency, out of necessity, but then to punish them for doing so. Although of course, if they dump outside the terms of their licence, they should be penalised, and the government does do this. The answer, ultimately, is to stump up the funds and political resolve to fully modernise the system, but we know the issues with this. The government is requiring the water industry to spend £56 billion over the next 25 years (£2.2 billion a year) – a sizeable amount but nowhere near enough.
You can object to the government’s stance and consider it soft on the water companies. The approach may even have an element of corruption, or collusion with the private firms. However it is dishonest to overlook the ultimately progressive nature of the Environment Bill, the fact emergency sewage releases are sometimes necessary because of the infrastructure, and the fact that Labour won’t commit to fixing that infrastructure.
Because of the political backlash over the amendment, the government decided to draft a similar amendment of its own to compensate - another aspect that is overlooked. With this amendment written in, the bill went through and was signed into law as an act. Labour still tries to come up with opposition bills to champion ultimately hollow policies - and keep hammering home the ‘Tory sewage party’ narrative to the public.
As the data about emergency releases is misleading, so too is the data about water quality in rivers. 14% of England’s rivers were deemed to have ‘good’ ecological status in 2023 – on a par with Belgium, while ahead of Germany’s 8% and Holland’s 4%. The scale is set by the EU Water Framework Directive, enacted in 2009 to monitor bodies of water across the continent of Europe. The state’s Environment Agency takes the English measurements and passes the data on. The scale goes from ‘bad’ to ‘poor’, ‘moderate’, ‘good’ and higher. England’s score (and those of other countries) has declined since 2009 – it was 25% in that year and 16% in 2015. However this is largely because the EU’s standards went up in that time. They increased the list of substances required to be tested for in 2015. Even then sewage does not count for much of the increase (36% according to the regulator Ofwat). Nitrogen and phosphorous from agriculture is a bigger factor (40%). Urban and transport pollution is also a significant contributor (18%).
Rivers are not only graded on ‘ecological’, but also ‘chemical’ status as well. Biased articles are keen to point out that none of England’s rivers managed to score ‘good’ on both counts. Out of 3,740 rivers, 2810 were rated ‘moderate’ (75%) with 793 rated ‘poor’ (21%) and 137 rated ‘bad’ (4%). Moderate grading is hardly much to boast about, but it could be worse.
England is the outlier in the United Kingdom. In Scotland and Wales respectively, 66% and 45% of rivers are at overall ‘good’ standard. In Northern Ireland, 52% of ‘inshore coastal waterbodies’ are good or above. Of course, England has a much larger population, surface area (meaning more rainfall hits it and there’s more agricultural runoff) and more industry than its fellow constituents. Commonly, the usual suspects also blame England’s lower standards on its privatised water companies, and uphold Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as poster children for public ownership.
England is indeed the only country in the world to have a fully privatised water industry, which has been the case since 1989. The government retains regulatory overview through the Environment Agency, but the water companies own the infrastructure and deliver the service.
I happen to believe that water companies should be in the full control of the state, and thus under the scrutiny of the voters. It doesn’t make sense for private companies and the markets to be entrusted in something that is a basic need of life and society. They will always prioritise profit over performance, especially as they are monopolies. On top of that nationalisation would provide secure job opportunities as well as government revenue (once the billions are spent buying out the private companies, that is). Nationalisation however is not necessarily a panacea. It still requires competence, proper funding and transparency. Neither would it solve the current problem of combined sewers – the money to fix this will still have to come from somewhere, no matter who is running the show. Replacing the sewers will still take a huge amount of time – perhaps generations – given the scale of the task and the disruption it will mean. Neither will the pressure on the system from population growth ease off, even if strong measures against immigration are taken.
Indeed, despite the public ownership, combined sewers are still in operation in the home nations – they have 7,000 CSOs between them and these are in regular use. There is also less investment in the other UK nations, and proportionally more clean water leaks than in England. Between 2020 and 2025 England invested more in water infrastructure than any other nation in Europe.
Both rivers and beaches have vastly improved since the bad old days of the 1970s. The UK meets the average of the EU – 93% of bathing waters were rated excellent. It was 70% in 2009 and was around 45% in the 1990s. Of course, we do not want to go backwards on any of these fronts. Sewage continuing to be released – or releases increasing – jeopardises this record. It is therefore essential to deal with the increasing population, the dated infrastructure and any supply chain problems. We should be able to make the treatment chemicals we need ourselves, which fits in with our broader need to rebuild British manufacturing. Wet-wipes should be banned as planned and solutions to fat disposal should be found. Nationalisation should at the very least be considered, and tried out in some areas to prove its efficacy.
The purpose of this article is not to downplay the problems in our sewage system and our waters. It is not to belittle peoples’ genuine concerns. Wanting a country as free as possible from pollution is noble, and not a left or right issue. Nobody would dispute the need for a clean and safe environment, to be enjoyed by wildlife and our descendants. However, the current framing of the issue is often dishonest and political. It doesn’t consider the realities of our infrastructure, the (lack of) policies of all previous governments, the international context, the discrepancies in the statistics or what the proper solution must be. It simply says to the uninformed voter ‘this is bad and the fault of the Tories’ – not ‘your house will fill with effluent if we don’t discharge sewage elsewhere’.
It is yet another parlour game to propel the Labour Party into power and blame the Brexit that the liberal establishment and deep state wants to cancel. The type of people pushing the narrative will always blame the Conservatives, conservativism and Brexit, because all they are interested in is their agenda. It is the duty of fair-minded people to call this simplistic narrative out wherever we see it. To engage, wearily, in some crude populist humour: we’ve got to cut the crap.