Sewer instead of idyll
Why faeces are polluting Britain’s coastline
Jason DeCaires Taylor’s art installation “Sirens of Sewage” honors people who work to protect waterways and marine ecology. photo
© Gareth Fuller/Press Association/dpa
Hardly any other country in Europe has as much coastline as the United Kingdom. But the “Great British Seaside” is increasingly polluted by sewage. The reasons for this are hair-raising.
Cowes Beach, near Queen Vicky’s home, is the most polluted beach in the country, an analysis of official data by environmental campaigners Friends of the Earth has revealed. According to this, dirty water flowed into the sea there for almost 5,000 hours last year.
Small piles mark polluted beaches
This is anything but an isolated case, as a look at the website of another organization shows: The Surfers against Sewage (Surfers against Sewage) provide a map that shows where untreated sewage has just been released into the sea. Small piles mark the places where a bath is strongly discouraged and there are often quite a few of them.
In England alone, raw sewage was discharged from the coast into the sea for more than 440,000 hours in 2023. A quarter of them are near beaches.
The problem is not new. The country ranked last in the European Environment Agency’s 2020 bathing water quality report, the last to include Britain before Brexit. Only 17.2 percent of bathing waters were rated as excellent. In comparison: In Germany this applied to 89.9 percent of the waters and in Greece to 97.1 percent. But why is Great Britain of all places doing so badly?
Untreated wastewater regularly flows into bodies of water
The fact that untreated wastewater occasionally ends up in lakes, rivers and coastal waters also happens in Germany. The reason for this is that, particularly in large cities, wastewater and rainwater often flow into a single sewer system. To ensure that the wastewater is not pushed back into houses and streets during heavy rainfall and that sewage treatment plants do not overflow, the sewer system is relieved by the so-called combined sewer overflow. A mix of untreated wastewater and rainwater then flows directly into nature. The problem: In Great Britain, this has almost become the norm. In some cases, it even happens when it hasn’t rained.
Basically, according to infrastructure expert and professor of economic policy Dieter Helm from the University of Oxford, the combined sewer system is not the core of the problem. In fact, a comprehensive separate sewerage system would not be financed at all – and would not be necessary, he says in an interview with the German Press Agency.
Dividends were financed by loans
The problem is that in recent decades there has been little investment in the existing wastewater system despite higher demands and a growing population. According to Helm, the reason for this is a catastrophic failure on the part of the supervisory authorities: the water utilities that were privatized at the end of the 1980s were not prevented from diligently paying out dividends to their shareholders instead of investing – even with money that came from loans.
“It’s like taking your own goalkeeper off the pitch in football and then doing without a referee,” says Helm, who sees insolvency-like proceedings for the heavily indebted water company Thames Water as the only way out. But both major political parties in Great Britain have so far rejected this. Instead, the supervisory authorities are negotiating with the water companies about investment programs that are expected to result in price increases of up to 44 percent for households. Many Britons find this shameless.
Just in time for the start of the swimming season in Great Britain in mid-May, the news hit the headlines that even the idyllic Lake Windermere in the Lake District was contaminated with faeces. In Devon, dozens of people became ill with diarrhea and nausea due to contaminated drinking water. Expert Helm believes that it will take at least ten years for Britain’s faeces crisis to be resolved.
History of UK water suppliers on regulator Ofwat website BBC report on Thames Water debt and investment plans Map of surfers against sewage Guradian report on bathing water quality 2020 Government announcement on the start of the bathing season Friends of the Earth website