Following the article on Thames Water dumping raw sewage in the River Wey, it’s a small but locally-important microcosm of the appalling national problem of private water companies dumping raw sewage in our rivers and shore lines. 

The Environment Agency has revealed that in 2022 there were 301, 091 discharges of raw sewage in our rivers and coasts. That equates to 825 raw sewage pollution incidents every single day.

So I was delighted to hear the UK’s privatised water companies finally apologise the other week for all the raw sewage pollution and pledge a massive £10 billion investment over the next seven years investment (until 2030) to stop dumping raw sewage in our rivers and seas.

Sewage works, hopefully like our one at Lindford, will be provided with extra capacity holding tanks so they will not dump sewage into our pristine rivers.

I was so pleased to hear this positive news until it was revealed it is not our privatised water companies, their shareholders and fat-cat chief executives who will be paying for all this, despite their enormous profits. It will be us the poor old consumers/ customers who will be forced to foot the bill.

It was also revealed that over the same period privatised water companies will pay their shareholders  around £15 billion (£14.7bn) in dividends over the same seven-year period from 2023 to 2030.

This is utterly unacceptable.

It’s about time the ineffectual Ofwat and the government got off their corpulent backsides and ordered the private water companies – many of whom are no longer UK owned – to foot the bill for their own mistakes.

By Adam Carew 

Author, historian and wildlife conservation 

Forest Road, Whitehill