From The Sunday Times October 18, 2009
Fines fail to stop river polluters
Steven Swinford
WATER companies and factories are threatening to undo two decades of work to clean Britain’s rivers by continuing to spew out sewage and chemicals.
They are largely responsible for 1,500 serious pollution offences in the past five years, killing hundreds of thousands of fish and destroying wildlife habitats and ecosystems.
Yet the average fine for each breach was just £4,411, the Environment Agency has revealed. Critics claim the penalties — a fraction of the firms’ multi-million pound profits — are failing to deter the polluters.
They are also concerned about the agency’s move to hand water companies responsibility for monitoring and reporting pollution. Campaigners say it amounts to self-regulation and will be open to abuse.
“The punishment does not meet the crime at all,” said Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat environment spokesman. “It makes no sense to put the power to monitor waterways in the hands of people who are guilty of polluting them.”
Mark Lloyd, chief executive of the Angling Trust, said: “These fines are meaningless to huge companies whose primary concern is profit.”
In 1989, The Sunday Times launched its Water Rats campaign to expose companies routinely polluting UK rivers. Although water quality has improved dramatically since then, there are still more than 400 breaches each year.
Water companies have been prosecuted 342 times in the past five years. The worst offender was South West Water which was prosecuted for 42 pollution offences.
However, the most damaging incident involved Thames Water, which has committed 30 offences and has been fined £481,000 since 2004. In September 2007, employees cleaning filters at the company’s sewage works in Beddington, south London, accidentally allowed sodium hypochlorite, a bleach, to be released into the Wandle.
Within a few hours, a three-mile stretch of the river was in effect stripped of life.
In January this year Thames Water was fined £125,000 with £21,335 court costs. It also gave the Wandle Trust, a conservation charity, £500,000 to help restore the river. The combined sum is less than the annual pay of David Owens, the company’s chief executive.
Anglian Water is also a repeat offender, having been fined a total of £328,405 for 20 incidents of water pollution.
In some cases, water companies have been able to pump raw sewage into waterways without fear of prosecution.
When the industry was privatised in 1989 the government granted water firms a temporary exemption on 20,000 overflow pipes.
In 2007 environmental campaigners discovered that 4,193 of the pipes remained unregulated. A year earlier, tens of thousands of fish had been killed along a 10-mile stretch of the River Don when sewage from Sheffield and Rotherham poured through one of these unregulated overflow pipes.
The pollution was so bad that local anglers reported fish trying to jump out of the water.
In July this year the agency announced that it planned restrictions on all remaining unregulated pipes.
Water companies responded by launching appeals on 3,959 of them.
Factories, farms and other industries have been responsible for 832 serious incidents in the last five years and paid fines totalling £3.74m.
Earlier this month sewage and cyanide found its way into the Trent, killing thousands of fish. The Environment Agency has linked the leak to Red Industries, a metal production factory in Stoke-on-Trent.
The Environment Agency said: “Over the last 15 years the number of water pollution incidents has fallen by just over 90%. Nevertheless, 440 incidents a year is 440 too many.”
Thames Water said it had improved its pollution record but claimed that progress could be jeopardised if companies were not allowed to raise bills.
