Red sign on the beach reading “beach closed, no swimming”. Image by YM / Unsplash
The government is consulting on proposals it claims would make fining English water companies for dumping sewage quicker and easier.
Regulators have been forced to be lenient to water companies which have been fined for illegally dumping sewage but are in dire financial straits, with Thames Water creditors asking for leniency on up to £1 bn in expected fines. While data from the water industry’s own monitoring equipment has shown how frequently rules are broken around sewage spills the Environment Agency has, reportedly by its own admission, struggled to act.
New proposals under consultation
Under new Environment Agency powers, water companies in England could face more frequent, and automatic, fines for sewage dumping. The government is consulting on allowing the regulator to use a lower, civil, standard of proof instead of the higher criminal standard, for minor to moderate environmental offences.
Other measures under consultation include setting a cap at either £350,000 or £500,000 for penalties issued to the civil standard, introducing new automatic penalties, like a speeding tickets, for specific and obvious breaches without the need for lengthy investigations, and setting a value of either £10,000, £15,000 or £20,000 for the new automatic penalty.
The Environment Agency has said it is pushing water companies to strengthen their efforts to improve the environment by tightening up the way it ranks and tracks their performance. They EA says it will look like the number of pollution incidents has increased; however they believe the guidance creates greater transparency in the way water companies record and report pollution incidents.
Regulators ‘streamlined’ by government
The government is consulting on streamlining its regulators, and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, announced they will be given a growth duty, meaning that financial performance of companies has to be placed ahead of regulatory compliance, and will be placed in a league table to show which regulators are failing to deliver economic growth.
Defra recently announced it would be abolishing the much-criticised regulator Ofwat and merging its powers with that of the Drinking Water Inspectorate and the Environment Agency. A government-built AI tool, Consult, was employed to speed up and support the ultimate decision to scrap the regulator. Part of the Humphrey suite of UK public sector AI tools, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) hopes it will save officials collectively from 75,000 days of manual analysis every year.
The environment secretary, Emma Reynolds, said that she wants “to give the Environment Agency the teeth it needs to tackle all rule breaking.”
The new policies are expected to cost the water sector between £50m and £67m annually, but the true cost could be lower if the penalties drive improvement in behaviour.
The plans will be put to a six-week public consultation starting on Wednesday.
The English water companies welcomed the proposals, with a spokesperson for trade body Water UK saying: “It is right that water companies are held to account when things go wrong.”