Last year England’s 10 privatised water companies paid £1.4 billion in dividends to shareholders and at the same time allowed more than 300,000 discharges of raw sewage into rivers and the sea. Most of the discharges were technically legal under storm overflow permits because unlike other rich countries the UK has accepted the idea that there’s no accounting for storms in the sewage management business. But 554 spillages were illegal because they breached overflow permits. Even so, responses to a freedom of information inquiry by the FT show that the Environment Agency has issued a total of four fines in four years to a value of £94 million, £90 million of which is accounted for by one fine levied against Southern Water. The water companies are finding it pays to spill.
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