Last night (5 March) BBC2 aired the first of its two-part series with Paul Whitehouse – ‘Our Troubled Rivers’. It highlighted the importance of rivers for our health, wellbeing and for nature – and the pressures affecting them from water companies, farming, a growing population and a changing climate.

The piece was focused on the north of England, in particular the River Wharfe, Lake Windermere and the River Tame. It explored the current regulations and the work being carried out to hold water companies to account.

The government has taken significant action in recent years to hold water companies to account – and will continue to do so. Recent action includes:

• Securing record fines for water companies that break the law. Since 2015, the Environment Agency has secured fines of over £142m through criminal proceedings. We are also making it easier and quicker for regulators to enforce civil penalties, with more detail due to be set out in our consultation in the spring. The Environment Secretary and Water Minister continue to meet regularly with water company chief executives from underperforming companies to make it clear that improvement actions must urgently be put in place. Funding from fines will also now be invested in schemes that benefit our natural environment.
• Hugely increasing monitoring of discharges, from approximately 10% of storm overflows monitored in 2015 to 100% by the end of this year. This transparency is critical in addressing the issue. The EA has also asked companies to install new flow monitors on more than 2,000 wastewater treatment works. This has led to a major investigation, announced in November 2021, with the EA requesting more detailed data from all wastewater treatment works.
• Publishing our Storm Overflows Discharge Reduction Plan, which will require water companies to deliver the largest infrastructure programme in water company history - £56 billion capital investment over 25 years. Water companies are already investing £3.1 billion in storm overflow improvements between 2020 and 2025.  This includes £1.9 billion investment on the Thames Tideway Tunnel super sewer, with the rest used to undertake over 800 investigations and over 800 improvement schemes to storm overflows.
• Demanding a clear assessment and action plan on every storm overflow from every water and sewerage company in England, prioritising those that are spilling more than a certain number of times a year, and those spilling into bathing waters and high priority nature sites.

There was a further reference in the programme to the government allegedly voting to legalise sewage discharges. That is not correct. The law has always allowed for discharges, subject to a regulated permitting system. The way our Victorian sewers are built is that wastewater and rainwater are carried in the same pipe. When it reaches a certain height, it pours into another pipe and into rivers. We believe that storm overflows are operating too frequently, which is why the government has set strict new targets in the Storm Overflows Discharge Reduction Plan that will require £56 billion investment to deliver.

More detail on the government’s plans to deliver clean and plentiful water were also set out last month in its Environmental Improvement Plan 2023, a five-year strategy for a cleaner, greener country.