As covered last week, thousands of people took part in the first National Day of Action on Water Quality on Saturday 23 April, a mass protest over water firms dumping sewage in rivers.

Ocean conservation charity Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) joined forces with clean water campaign groups to organise  simultaneous protests against water companies from Scotland to Cornwall.

The government announced a plan to overhaul the sewage system last month. Hugo Tagholm, CEO of Surfers Against Sewage, said it did not go far enough. The charity is calling for an end to sewage discharge into British bathing waters by 2030. As the BBC reported, he said British rivers had become pollution superhighways “riddled with sewage, chemicals and filth”. “The river and beach-loving public have had enough,” he said. “Water companies must make urgent investments, funded from their vast profits, to turn off their filthy pollution tap and restore our rivers and seas.”

An Anglian Water spokesperson said: “Data from our 2021 monitoring programme tells us our performance continues to improve, and the increasing visibility we have of combined sewer overflow (CSO) activity gives us even more opportunities to act faster in the areas where we can have most environmental benefit. “But we agree that CSOs are no longer an acceptable way of dealing with flooding and overloaded sewers and we need to do more.”

Coverage of the events can be read on the BBC and Big Issue websites and here is a piece from Channel 4 News.