According to The Observer, Water firms “passed” thousands of pollution tests under a self-monitoring regime … yet the tests were never even conducted, the Observer can reveal. The water firms’ own operational data for sewage plants across the country reveals how outflows of effluent had stopped – in some cases for just a few hours – on days that samples were supposed to be taken.

Photo credit: Stephen Noulton

Despite testers being unable to check whether firms were allowing too much pollution to flow into rivers, the Environment Agency rules allowed these “no-flows” to be recorded as compliant with the environmental conditions of their operating permits.

Southern Water has already previously been found to have “deliberately manipulated” the effluent flow to avoid pollution detection. The number of no-flows it reported plummeted after its practices were investigated.

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