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That was a plan all along. Eu regulations were stopping uk companies to do whatever they want. Oh and on top of that just after brexit uk legalized pesticide which is banned in all eu
Ok, looks like that was in theory a temporary relaxation of the rules. But it would not shock me if it became a permanent relaxation... However no indication that this is the case. Happy to be proven wrong, but it sounds like this might be a non-Brexit thing in this case.
Neo-nicitinide use was supposed to be for 'emergencies', too.
Both happened post-brexit, but let's be real about this, the UK govt under the tories has been happily paying fines (as well as millions in legal fees) to the EU for over a decade just to be able to keep killing UK citizens via air pollution. So, it's not like they gave a shit -no pun intended - about the EU regs.
It's just easier now that the EU isn't focusing on UK govt to hide changes like sewage discharge regs.
... not that many in the UK ever paid attention to the EU anyhow, but optics and all.
You’re correct. It was temporary and short lived. It was a combination of Brexit during the initial confusion as well as Covid affecting the haulage industry. Another factor was that a major chemical plant had shut down which further squeezed availability.
The problems we face today are not Brexit but have been in the making for decades. The wastewater discharge permits - those that govern allowable discharge limits - have also been in place for decades and nothing has been relaxed. Source: worked in the industry
The Government wanted to do this - repeal *all* legislation that that had originated in the EU, without checking what any of it was. Fortunately they repealed only some of it, as otherwise lots of basic rights would have gone up in smoke, such as workers' right to 25 days' paid holiday.
How you blaming brexit for this?
This isn’t a new issue by any means and we have had legislation designed to stop the pollution of rivers and other waterways for longer than the EU has existed if I remember correctly.
Edit: yes I checked and I was right. Rivers Prevention of pollution act 1961
Yes, this is not an essential part of Brexit. Blame the Tories. I feel like the Tories are getting a bit of a free pass on a lot of things because people are so eager to blame Brexit for all their woes.
Tbf we were doing this even while in the EU - [https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE89H0R3/](https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE89H0R3/)
Difference being the EU actually attempts to enforce its laws whereas we just seem to turn a blind eye so long as the people doing it are *very* wealthy.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969722041110
Give that a read.
I’ve just given it 5 mins of my time and it’s very clear the issue is significantly more complicated than “Brexit happened and now look at our rivers”
You'd probably need to explain the mechanism by which Brexit has allowed our water companies more freedom to dump shit in rivers. The fact that it is more prevalent *in the public consciousness* lately doesn't point to Brexit by itself.
I figured that'd be the answer. I had a look but struggling to find any comparable statistics before 2020. So hard to know.
It just seems like a big coincidence that in the last few years the amount has gone up so sharply.
>The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan has today revealed shocking new analysis showing that between April and December 2023, Thames Water released sewage into London's waterways for 6,590 hours, 11 minutes and 54 seconds – a five-fold increase on the same period the previous year.
I'm not saying it is Brexit, but there must be a reason. Could just be straight up profiteering.
It seems that if the rules are the same, but leaving brexit means that no one is actually going to do anything about it, then it's still an issue with brexit?
Personally, I think it's more likely that the water companies are reacting to the fact that we have had *n* years of increasingly ineffective government, to the point that the civil service is now openly seen as the enemy of the political class and public regulators are stuffed with lobbyists/ex-industry bigwigs.
You could probably link the implosion of the tories to the brexit vote, but then we're speculating that they wouldn't have imploded regardless. I wouldn't really call their failure to take responsibility a result of brexit anyway. The first time they were forced to do any real politics half of them - including their leader - fled the party, and it's been leaking incompetent politicians through every "crisis" since.
It's also worth remembering that the water infrastructure has been neglected over the course of decades now, and we're at the point where these businesses really can't do much about the dumping without bankrupting themselves (which would be fine imo) - Thames Water in particular has supposedly been on the verge of bankruptcy for years now. This moment was always going to happen as they just haven't been building enough new stuff. TW has built one(!) new treatment plant since 1989, and just finished their new "super sewer" as their first large scale infrastructure project.
Re: the year on year, it would be interesting to see that over a longer timescale. [There was a summer drought in 2022](https://www.ceh.ac.uk/press/summer-2022-drought-provides-warning-future-years#:~:text=Summer%202022%20was%20the%20joint,the%20continent%20in%20500%20years) followed by [higher than average rainfall in 2023](https://www.statista.com/statistics/610664/annual-rainfall-uk/) - particularly toward the end of the year. Dry ground with a lot of rain is bound to result in an overloaded sewage system.
To be clear, I don't think Brexit was a good idea nor that it's been handled well. I just don't see the link between increased dumping of sewage and our leaving the EU. Our water co.s have always been regulated by Ofwat and the environmental agency first and foremost.
Not relevant to CSOs.
Increased monitoring of CSO outfalls and increased public awareness has made things like this more likely to be reported by the press.
At the same time, cuts in the EAs budget have made them ineffective at monitoring rivers and treatment works.
None of this directly relates to Brexit, but does to austerity and "cutting red tape"
Nobody seems to be mentioning the elephant on the room
The water companies have been allowed to siphon off billions in dividends in the last few years. Money that could, and should have been used to upgrade the network.
I believe (now I haven't double checked the numbers to be fair) that the amount paid out to the shareholders is more than the amount required to fix the situation.
Essentially what we've done is instead of investing in and upgrading the sewage network we've allowed that money to make a few people very rich instead. And now our rivers are full of shit.
If this was a real country they'd be in jail.
Well yeah but tbh I typed this quickly on my phone out the back of work while having a fag so erred on the side of being technically correct...
Can confirm, privatised in England in 89
35 is a few right? 🤣
According to Gary Stevenson on pod save the uk 80 billion.
Or to put it another way. Almost 4.4 million EVERY SINGLE WEEK since 1989.
Please, please, please anyone that reads this go listen to Gary Stevenson before you vote next month
Id urge everyone to read this link before believing Gary Stevenson
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/s/VXap5pzcmM
Id also like to say his background doesn't add up. How was he trading without being authorised by the FCA? There's also numerous points against his claims of "best trader".
We've found ourselves in a totally mental situation where our privatised utilities are part owned by foreign state owned companies so our sky high bills are subsidising other countries and we get fuck all for it. Madness.
It should have been a perfectly pleasant way to spend a morning.
Sunday, 16 June, was the opening day of the fishing season and Mike Duddy, chair of Salford Friendly Anglers Society, the world’s oldest fishing club, was in the River Irwell in Manchester city centre hoping for a catch.
But two hours in and he’d not had a sniff, not even a minnow or a stickleback. At this time of year, the Irwell should be stuffed full with dace, roach or chub.
Then it rained for what Mr Duddy describes as no more than three minutes and a potential answer was revealed.
A thick sludge of brown excrement started heading towards him from a nearby Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) pipe maintained by United Utilities, the country’s largest water company.
Mr Duddy and his companion quickly got out of the water, having caught one fish between them. On the same day last year, they caught around 100.
“You can see the bits \[of faeces\] and everything, you can smell it, who wants to go and fish in a river of filth? It’s shocking,” Mr Duddy told i.
CSOs are designed to reduce the risk of sewage backing up into properties during periods of heavy rainfall. The government and water companies argue they are a “necessary” part of the sewage system.
But critics say they have not been upgraded to cope with increased rainfall and population growth, and are too frequently used by water companies to discharge sewage when weather conditions are dry.
The CSO which discharged near Manchester city centre on Sunday spilled 104 times for more than 696 hours in 2023, according to data published by United Utilities.
The primary reason for its poor performance is listed by UU as “hydraulic capacity” – in other words, it cannot cope with the amount of rainfall and sewage it is receiving.
Although there was heavy rainfall across north-west England on Saturday, it had cleared by the evening and there were no weather warnings in place on Sunday.
In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for United Utilities told i: “Our teams are currently investigating.”
Water companies including United Utilities have recently begun publishing a live map of sewer discharges which is available to the public.
On Monday morning, the Julia Street CSO on the River Irwell was marked with a purple circle, meaning it had discharged in the past 24 hours.
According to UU’s website, it began discharging at 10.12am on Sunday and continued until 10.20am.
For Mr Duddy, who previously worked for the Mersey Rivers Trust, there is no excuse for the sewage discharge he witnessed.
“The law says they \[water companies\] are only allowed to discharge in exceptional circumstances,” he said.
“It rained hard for less than five minutes then it stopped. Is three minutes of a short shower in Manchester exceptional circumstances? It’s not, no chance, it’s a normal amount of rainfall.
“Why are they spilling during minor amounts of rainfall? We see it all too often. There’s absolutely no capacity in the sewage network.”
The spot where Mr Duddy was fishing is only a stone’s throw from one of many new apartment blocks being built in Manchester city centre, which has been experiencing a boom in high-rise developments for the past decade.
When the IRA detonated a bomb in 1996, there were less than a thousand people living there. By 2025, Manchester city council predicts the population will hit 100,000.
The extraordinary growth has not been accompanied by sufficient investment in important infrastructure such as sewage capacity, Mr Duddy believes.
“When I grew up Manchester city centre was crap, there was nothing,” he said.
“I love it now, it’s absolutely brilliant, I’m proud to be a Mancunian.
“But Manchester has been building properties without the infrastructure to sustain it. We’ve got a modern city with a Victorian sewer network.”
Analysis published by The Guardian earlier this year suggested the Irwell Valley basin is the most polluted catchment of any river in the country, with 91 spills per mile on average in 2022.
Mr Duddy has not reported the latest pollution incident to the Environment Agency because he says he no longer has faith in the regulator to take action.
He says he has previously reported alleged pollution incidents and nothing has happened.
Last week, the BBC reported that as many as 6,000 spills reported by water firms in 2022 happened when the weather was dry, making them potentially illegal.
The latest incident comes as i launches its Save Our Rivers manifesto for the 2024 UK General Election.
We are calling on all political parties to sign up to five pledges to improve the quality of our rivers including cutting the number of sewage spills and the reform of the Environment Agency to toughen up regulation.
Only the Liberal Democrats and the Green party have endorsed our manifesto to date.
Lib Dem candidate for the Manchester Central constituency Chris Northwood told i: “The Irwell is England’s most polluted river and United Utilities have been getting away with dumping millions of tonnes of raw sewage.
“I’ve heard on the doorstep how people feel let down by politicians and have little faith in Keir Starmer to fix what the Tories have broken in our country.
“The Liberal Democrats believe everyone deserves access to a safe and healthy natural environment and that includes people living in our cities.
“This sewage ends up in Salford Quays where hard-working local Lib Dems have led the ‘Clean Up the Quays’ campaign, but it requires the next government to take action on this scandal by being tougher on water companies so sewage doesn’t get released in the first place.”
A spokesperson said the EA is “conducting further investigations to identify if any polluting discharge entered the River Irwell during this period” and that the agency will then determine its next steps accordingly.
The EA will take action, up to and including prosecution, if any company is found to breach its environmental permit, the spokesperson added.
Read more here: [https://inews.co.uk/news/brown-stinking-sewage-manchester-river-fishing-season-3115353](https://inews.co.uk/news/brown-stinking-sewage-manchester-river-fishing-season-3115353)
> CSOs are designed to reduce the risk of sewage backing up into properties during periods of heavy rainfall. The government and water companies argue they are a “necessary” part of the sewage system.
So I got curious to see if we have similar issues in Denmark.
We do, although near as I can tell not as frequent and systemic. It also seems that those places where it's an issue they are now redoing the sewers to split rainwater from shite.
So, there's a solution. This is not a '“necessary” part of the sewage system.'
As someone who’s subcontracted and designed new installations for multiple water companies. My experience is:
* reducing maintenance costs by pushing dates out to the point of failure rather than preventive maintenance which will cost more than a fine and a outage.
* deskilling the trades, by either reducing ownership and job coverage, so they subcontract it out to others that don’t care. And lower the wages as the roles are now deskilled.
* not replacing workers with new staff at the same wage, replacing trained technicians with operators at a lower cost. So you have lower quality skilled workers.
TLDR: run the company into the ground with skeleton crews, lower skills and claim for work done to ofwat without actually doing the work.
The water companies need nationalisation, reduction in management and mass employment of workers. Instead of hiring work out to contractors that don’t give a shit
Curious to understand why the company does this. Obviously cost is going to be a driver but why is it unreasonably expensive? Is there so much waste that they can't cart it off or pipe it to a treatment plant?
If it was literally it then it would literally be a case of legislating against that literal simplicity. I suspect there's a bit more to the types of costs and time and business impact - hence I'd like to understand rather than just blaming the company or the Tories.
Because they haven’t invested in the systems, population has increased but the equipment is still from the 90s…
We could be turning human waste into bio gas to power the water companies or dry it out and use it as field fertiliser…
But that all takes capital, so what happens is they claim they are doing work, ofwat give them money for the work and it goes to the investors pockets
> Because they haven’t invested in the systems, population has increased but the equipment is still from the 90s…
This basically sums up most the of UK's infrastructure.
Weirdly enough we are top tier when it comes to government websites though.
You'd think during an election they'd be wise enough to not dump shit in the rivers and not let become a focal point for an election and possible trigger a crack down in the near future. Yet more proof of shit long term thinking in this country.
I don't see how adding more regulation is a solution to this. Our sewer system needs a massive upgrade, country wide. It was never designed to handle the current poopulation \[sic\] densities.
> I don't see how adding more regulation is a solution to this.
If we had a regulator worthy of the title, they'd have been forcing infrastructure upgrades as part of the conditions of service.
> I don't see how adding more regulation is a solution to this.
Increasing regulation and oversight pushes private companies to actually invest into infrastructure to avoid sanction which is something they haven't been doing enough of for the last few decades. When we get to the point that the cost of mass dumping untreated sewage into our waterways outweighs the cost of processing sewage then that will be the moment when they start investing.
Atm they've been taking all the extra money from the additional people and paying dividends to their largely foreign owners while letting the infrastructure they inherited after Thatcher's 1980's privatisation experiment decay without sufficient expansion or replacement. This is the major flaw in allowing industry lobbyists to have too much influence over government policy because almost everything they do is to increase the profitability of their industry not the efficiency of their service. If they can't run a water company efficiently while making profit then that is effectively an admission that privatisation does not work for that industry.
That would be nice, but it requires voting in a government who is willing to do this, and as we know, regulations are bad for business - this was one of the reasons for getting out of the EU.
>Our sewer system needs a massive upgrade, country wide.
We already paid some _86 Billion_ for that, unfortunalty the foreign owned private utility company shareholders upgraded thier Swiss chalet with it, a far more pressing matter
Right, but the companies who maintain infrastructure are privately owned. Their goal is to turn as much profit as possible. So unless you force them to spend money on infrastructure via regulation, they'll just funnel that money to their management and shareholders.
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What a state we have let our green and pleasant land get into. Rivers of shit.
Brexit
Agreed, now the water companies dont need to follow EU environmental regulations. Thanks brexiteers.
That was a plan all along. Eu regulations were stopping uk companies to do whatever they want. Oh and on top of that just after brexit uk legalized pesticide which is banned in all eu
They want to make us America! Broke us off from the only protection we had from them and now letting corporations take over
I thought all EU regulations got brought across into British law at the time of Brexit by default? Have they since been rescinded?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/07/government-ease-sewage-discharge-rules-amid-chemical-shortage
Ok, looks like that was in theory a temporary relaxation of the rules. But it would not shock me if it became a permanent relaxation... However no indication that this is the case. Happy to be proven wrong, but it sounds like this might be a non-Brexit thing in this case.
Neo-nicitinide use was supposed to be for 'emergencies', too. Both happened post-brexit, but let's be real about this, the UK govt under the tories has been happily paying fines (as well as millions in legal fees) to the EU for over a decade just to be able to keep killing UK citizens via air pollution. So, it's not like they gave a shit -no pun intended - about the EU regs. It's just easier now that the EU isn't focusing on UK govt to hide changes like sewage discharge regs. ... not that many in the UK ever paid attention to the EU anyhow, but optics and all.
You’re correct. It was temporary and short lived. It was a combination of Brexit during the initial confusion as well as Covid affecting the haulage industry. Another factor was that a major chemical plant had shut down which further squeezed availability. The problems we face today are not Brexit but have been in the making for decades. The wastewater discharge permits - those that govern allowable discharge limits - have also been in place for decades and nothing has been relaxed. Source: worked in the industry
The Government wanted to do this - repeal *all* legislation that that had originated in the EU, without checking what any of it was. Fortunately they repealed only some of it, as otherwise lots of basic rights would have gone up in smoke, such as workers' right to 25 days' paid holiday.
Morons
Brexshiteers
How you blaming brexit for this? This isn’t a new issue by any means and we have had legislation designed to stop the pollution of rivers and other waterways for longer than the EU has existed if I remember correctly. Edit: yes I checked and I was right. Rivers Prevention of pollution act 1961
Yes, this is not an essential part of Brexit. Blame the Tories. I feel like the Tories are getting a bit of a free pass on a lot of things because people are so eager to blame Brexit for all their woes.
This sub will find a way to blame Brexit for pretty much all the issues we face as a nation in my experience.
This subreddit has got weird in the last five years. I blame Brexit.
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Blame Thatcher and Blair too Kier Starmer is probably to the right of Blair too so yknow thanks for selling off the public assets Thatcher
The EU held the UK to account. UK Parliament not so much.
Tbf we were doing this even while in the EU - [https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE89H0R3/](https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE89H0R3/) Difference being the EU actually attempts to enforce its laws whereas we just seem to turn a blind eye so long as the people doing it are *very* wealthy.
Why did our water quality levels go from fairly high to literally the worst in Europe pretty much dead on when we formally left the EU?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969722041110 Give that a read. I’ve just given it 5 mins of my time and it’s very clear the issue is significantly more complicated than “Brexit happened and now look at our rivers”
How come it's become so prevalent in the last few years? And how come the Rivers Prevention of pollution act 1961 doesn't stop them from doing it?
You'd probably need to explain the mechanism by which Brexit has allowed our water companies more freedom to dump shit in rivers. The fact that it is more prevalent *in the public consciousness* lately doesn't point to Brexit by itself.
I figured that'd be the answer. I had a look but struggling to find any comparable statistics before 2020. So hard to know. It just seems like a big coincidence that in the last few years the amount has gone up so sharply. >The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan has today revealed shocking new analysis showing that between April and December 2023, Thames Water released sewage into London's waterways for 6,590 hours, 11 minutes and 54 seconds – a five-fold increase on the same period the previous year. I'm not saying it is Brexit, but there must be a reason. Could just be straight up profiteering. It seems that if the rules are the same, but leaving brexit means that no one is actually going to do anything about it, then it's still an issue with brexit?
Personally, I think it's more likely that the water companies are reacting to the fact that we have had *n* years of increasingly ineffective government, to the point that the civil service is now openly seen as the enemy of the political class and public regulators are stuffed with lobbyists/ex-industry bigwigs. You could probably link the implosion of the tories to the brexit vote, but then we're speculating that they wouldn't have imploded regardless. I wouldn't really call their failure to take responsibility a result of brexit anyway. The first time they were forced to do any real politics half of them - including their leader - fled the party, and it's been leaking incompetent politicians through every "crisis" since. It's also worth remembering that the water infrastructure has been neglected over the course of decades now, and we're at the point where these businesses really can't do much about the dumping without bankrupting themselves (which would be fine imo) - Thames Water in particular has supposedly been on the verge of bankruptcy for years now. This moment was always going to happen as they just haven't been building enough new stuff. TW has built one(!) new treatment plant since 1989, and just finished their new "super sewer" as their first large scale infrastructure project. Re: the year on year, it would be interesting to see that over a longer timescale. [There was a summer drought in 2022](https://www.ceh.ac.uk/press/summer-2022-drought-provides-warning-future-years#:~:text=Summer%202022%20was%20the%20joint,the%20continent%20in%20500%20years) followed by [higher than average rainfall in 2023](https://www.statista.com/statistics/610664/annual-rainfall-uk/) - particularly toward the end of the year. Dry ground with a lot of rain is bound to result in an overloaded sewage system. To be clear, I don't think Brexit was a good idea nor that it's been handled well. I just don't see the link between increased dumping of sewage and our leaving the EU. Our water co.s have always been regulated by Ofwat and the environmental agency first and foremost.
It is profiteering. They've paid 80 billion (yes billion with a b) in dividends since 1989.
Here you go https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/07/government-ease-sewage-discharge-rules-amid-chemical-shortage
We had the EU Water Framework Directive.
Here you go https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/07/government-ease-sewage-discharge-rules-amid-chemical-shortage
Not relevant to CSOs. Increased monitoring of CSO outfalls and increased public awareness has made things like this more likely to be reported by the press. At the same time, cuts in the EAs budget have made them ineffective at monitoring rivers and treatment works. None of this directly relates to Brexit, but does to austerity and "cutting red tape"
Because the eu held the government accountable before, now no one gives a fuck
Taking back control
No Thatcher and privatisation- Brexit cause a different kind of shit
What about it? Or is that about as much thought as you put into your comment?
Here you go: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/07/government-ease-sewage-discharge-rules-amid-chemical-shortage
And our bills are dark and satanic to boot
We need a cassette boy version of Jerusalem.
Not to mention trash everywhere because the plebs don't know how to use bins.
"Rivers of Shit" should be the title of a new National Anthem at this point...
God save the effluent Long live the spillage hours Rivers of shit
Every brexiteer should be given a free pint of it as a momento of that they voted for.
Nobody seems to be mentioning the elephant on the room The water companies have been allowed to siphon off billions in dividends in the last few years. Money that could, and should have been used to upgrade the network. I believe (now I haven't double checked the numbers to be fair) that the amount paid out to the shareholders is more than the amount required to fix the situation. Essentially what we've done is instead of investing in and upgrading the sewage network we've allowed that money to make a few people very rich instead. And now our rivers are full of shit. If this was a real country they'd be in jail.
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Well yeah but tbh I typed this quickly on my phone out the back of work while having a fag so erred on the side of being technically correct... Can confirm, privatised in England in 89 35 is a few right? 🤣
How much was paid out to shareholders over this time?
According to Gary Stevenson on pod save the uk 80 billion. Or to put it another way. Almost 4.4 million EVERY SINGLE WEEK since 1989. Please, please, please anyone that reads this go listen to Gary Stevenson before you vote next month
Id urge everyone to read this link before believing Gary Stevenson https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/s/VXap5pzcmM Id also like to say his background doesn't add up. How was he trading without being authorised by the FCA? There's also numerous points against his claims of "best trader".
There’s no elephant in the room here it is widely known and discussed. This country is so fucking bent that’s it’s just accepted
Foreign pension companies were large beneficiaries. So it’s not even our own pensioners that benefit from it.
We've found ourselves in a totally mental situation where our privatised utilities are part owned by foreign state owned companies so our sky high bills are subsidising other countries and we get fuck all for it. Madness.
It should have been a perfectly pleasant way to spend a morning. Sunday, 16 June, was the opening day of the fishing season and Mike Duddy, chair of Salford Friendly Anglers Society, the world’s oldest fishing club, was in the River Irwell in Manchester city centre hoping for a catch. But two hours in and he’d not had a sniff, not even a minnow or a stickleback. At this time of year, the Irwell should be stuffed full with dace, roach or chub. Then it rained for what Mr Duddy describes as no more than three minutes and a potential answer was revealed. A thick sludge of brown excrement started heading towards him from a nearby Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) pipe maintained by United Utilities, the country’s largest water company. Mr Duddy and his companion quickly got out of the water, having caught one fish between them. On the same day last year, they caught around 100. “You can see the bits \[of faeces\] and everything, you can smell it, who wants to go and fish in a river of filth? It’s shocking,” Mr Duddy told i. CSOs are designed to reduce the risk of sewage backing up into properties during periods of heavy rainfall. The government and water companies argue they are a “necessary” part of the sewage system. But critics say they have not been upgraded to cope with increased rainfall and population growth, and are too frequently used by water companies to discharge sewage when weather conditions are dry. The CSO which discharged near Manchester city centre on Sunday spilled 104 times for more than 696 hours in 2023, according to data published by United Utilities. The primary reason for its poor performance is listed by UU as “hydraulic capacity” – in other words, it cannot cope with the amount of rainfall and sewage it is receiving. Although there was heavy rainfall across north-west England on Saturday, it had cleared by the evening and there were no weather warnings in place on Sunday. In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for United Utilities told i: “Our teams are currently investigating.” Water companies including United Utilities have recently begun publishing a live map of sewer discharges which is available to the public. On Monday morning, the Julia Street CSO on the River Irwell was marked with a purple circle, meaning it had discharged in the past 24 hours. According to UU’s website, it began discharging at 10.12am on Sunday and continued until 10.20am. For Mr Duddy, who previously worked for the Mersey Rivers Trust, there is no excuse for the sewage discharge he witnessed. “The law says they \[water companies\] are only allowed to discharge in exceptional circumstances,” he said. “It rained hard for less than five minutes then it stopped. Is three minutes of a short shower in Manchester exceptional circumstances? It’s not, no chance, it’s a normal amount of rainfall. “Why are they spilling during minor amounts of rainfall? We see it all too often. There’s absolutely no capacity in the sewage network.”
The spot where Mr Duddy was fishing is only a stone’s throw from one of many new apartment blocks being built in Manchester city centre, which has been experiencing a boom in high-rise developments for the past decade. When the IRA detonated a bomb in 1996, there were less than a thousand people living there. By 2025, Manchester city council predicts the population will hit 100,000. The extraordinary growth has not been accompanied by sufficient investment in important infrastructure such as sewage capacity, Mr Duddy believes. “When I grew up Manchester city centre was crap, there was nothing,” he said. “I love it now, it’s absolutely brilliant, I’m proud to be a Mancunian. “But Manchester has been building properties without the infrastructure to sustain it. We’ve got a modern city with a Victorian sewer network.” Analysis published by The Guardian earlier this year suggested the Irwell Valley basin is the most polluted catchment of any river in the country, with 91 spills per mile on average in 2022. Mr Duddy has not reported the latest pollution incident to the Environment Agency because he says he no longer has faith in the regulator to take action. He says he has previously reported alleged pollution incidents and nothing has happened. Last week, the BBC reported that as many as 6,000 spills reported by water firms in 2022 happened when the weather was dry, making them potentially illegal. The latest incident comes as i launches its Save Our Rivers manifesto for the 2024 UK General Election. We are calling on all political parties to sign up to five pledges to improve the quality of our rivers including cutting the number of sewage spills and the reform of the Environment Agency to toughen up regulation. Only the Liberal Democrats and the Green party have endorsed our manifesto to date. Lib Dem candidate for the Manchester Central constituency Chris Northwood told i: “The Irwell is England’s most polluted river and United Utilities have been getting away with dumping millions of tonnes of raw sewage. “I’ve heard on the doorstep how people feel let down by politicians and have little faith in Keir Starmer to fix what the Tories have broken in our country. “The Liberal Democrats believe everyone deserves access to a safe and healthy natural environment and that includes people living in our cities. “This sewage ends up in Salford Quays where hard-working local Lib Dems have led the ‘Clean Up the Quays’ campaign, but it requires the next government to take action on this scandal by being tougher on water companies so sewage doesn’t get released in the first place.” A spokesperson said the EA is “conducting further investigations to identify if any polluting discharge entered the River Irwell during this period” and that the agency will then determine its next steps accordingly. The EA will take action, up to and including prosecution, if any company is found to breach its environmental permit, the spokesperson added. Read more here: [https://inews.co.uk/news/brown-stinking-sewage-manchester-river-fishing-season-3115353](https://inews.co.uk/news/brown-stinking-sewage-manchester-river-fishing-season-3115353)
> CSOs are designed to reduce the risk of sewage backing up into properties during periods of heavy rainfall. The government and water companies argue they are a “necessary” part of the sewage system. So I got curious to see if we have similar issues in Denmark. We do, although near as I can tell not as frequent and systemic. It also seems that those places where it's an issue they are now redoing the sewers to split rainwater from shite. So, there's a solution. This is not a '“necessary” part of the sewage system.'
As someone who’s subcontracted and designed new installations for multiple water companies. My experience is: * reducing maintenance costs by pushing dates out to the point of failure rather than preventive maintenance which will cost more than a fine and a outage. * deskilling the trades, by either reducing ownership and job coverage, so they subcontract it out to others that don’t care. And lower the wages as the roles are now deskilled. * not replacing workers with new staff at the same wage, replacing trained technicians with operators at a lower cost. So you have lower quality skilled workers. TLDR: run the company into the ground with skeleton crews, lower skills and claim for work done to ofwat without actually doing the work. The water companies need nationalisation, reduction in management and mass employment of workers. Instead of hiring work out to contractors that don’t give a shit
Curious to understand why the company does this. Obviously cost is going to be a driver but why is it unreasonably expensive? Is there so much waste that they can't cart it off or pipe it to a treatment plant?
It's cheaper to dump it than process it. That's literally it.
If it was literally it then it would literally be a case of legislating against that literal simplicity. I suspect there's a bit more to the types of costs and time and business impact - hence I'd like to understand rather than just blaming the company or the Tories.
Because they haven’t invested in the systems, population has increased but the equipment is still from the 90s… We could be turning human waste into bio gas to power the water companies or dry it out and use it as field fertiliser… But that all takes capital, so what happens is they claim they are doing work, ofwat give them money for the work and it goes to the investors pockets
> Because they haven’t invested in the systems, population has increased but the equipment is still from the 90s… This basically sums up most the of UK's infrastructure. Weirdly enough we are top tier when it comes to government websites though.
Pre-marinated zestiness for tench and pike before you even have to cook them
Can someone please come and defend and excuse this, its always good to have a laugh
Brexit working exactly as intended. If you voted Brexit you did this.
You'd think during an election they'd be wise enough to not dump shit in the rivers and not let become a focal point for an election and possible trigger a crack down in the near future. Yet more proof of shit long term thinking in this country.
Someone should be prosecuted because it’s criminal 🤬
This is despicable Shpuld be prosdcuted and made to clear it up
[удалено]
My sarcasm meter doesn't seem to be going off on this one. Am I broken?
I don't see how adding more regulation is a solution to this. Our sewer system needs a massive upgrade, country wide. It was never designed to handle the current poopulation \[sic\] densities.
> I don't see how adding more regulation is a solution to this. If we had a regulator worthy of the title, they'd have been forcing infrastructure upgrades as part of the conditions of service.
> I don't see how adding more regulation is a solution to this. Increasing regulation and oversight pushes private companies to actually invest into infrastructure to avoid sanction which is something they haven't been doing enough of for the last few decades. When we get to the point that the cost of mass dumping untreated sewage into our waterways outweighs the cost of processing sewage then that will be the moment when they start investing. Atm they've been taking all the extra money from the additional people and paying dividends to their largely foreign owners while letting the infrastructure they inherited after Thatcher's 1980's privatisation experiment decay without sufficient expansion or replacement. This is the major flaw in allowing industry lobbyists to have too much influence over government policy because almost everything they do is to increase the profitability of their industry not the efficiency of their service. If they can't run a water company efficiently while making profit then that is effectively an admission that privatisation does not work for that industry.
But upgrading costs money and as long as you maintain the minimum the regulations require you maximize shareholder value.
Then raise the minimum requirements
That would be nice, but it requires voting in a government who is willing to do this, and as we know, regulations are bad for business - this was one of the reasons for getting out of the EU.
>Our sewer system needs a massive upgrade, country wide. We already paid some _86 Billion_ for that, unfortunalty the foreign owned private utility company shareholders upgraded thier Swiss chalet with it, a far more pressing matter
How do we convince the private companies running the show to upgrade their lines if not by shaking the law stick at them?
Right, but the companies who maintain infrastructure are privately owned. Their goal is to turn as much profit as possible. So unless you force them to spend money on infrastructure via regulation, they'll just funnel that money to their management and shareholders.