Privatisation

Every major English water company has reported data suggesting they’ve discharged raw sewage when the weather is dry – a practice which is potentially illegal.

BBC News has analysed spills data from nine firms, which suggests sewage may have been discharged nearly 6,000 times when it had not been raining in 2022 - including during the country’s record heatwave.

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Helen Wakeham from the EA says the BBC’s methodology is, in fact, “more generous” to the companies than the EA’s.

Commenting on the results of the BBC’s investigation in general she said: “I'm not surprised, these networks haven't been invested in for decades. That investment needs to take place.”

In May the UK’s top engineers and medical professionals warned in a public report the risk from human faecal matter in our rivers will increase without changes to the network and how we build our cities.

Dr David Butler, professor of water engineering at the University of Exeter, and co-author of the report, said investment from water companies has “not really been up to scratch”.

As the Labour leader faces a backlash for his praise of the former Tory prime minister, a leaked email shows he stopped Sam Tarry, then the party’s shadow minister for transport, from attacking her failed policies in 2021.

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Left-winger Mr Tarry had wanted to criticise her 1985 Transport Act, saying it “failed to deliver lower fares and better services across Greater Manchester”.

But when the comments were sent to Sir Keir’s office for approval, one of his top aides insisted the reference to Thatcher be taken out.

The leaked email said: “Can we take out the Thatcher stuff and instead criticise the current government?” 

An adviser to Mr Tarry pushed back on the suggested edit and replied: “Mr Burnham’s happy with it and she’s despised in the north, so it will play well with voters.”

But Sir Keir’s aide insisted the reference be removed to “focus on the current set of elections and criticise the current set of Tories”.

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A source familiar with the exchange said it was indicative of Labour’s refusal to criticise Ms Thatcher under Sir Keir’s leadership, adding that recent praise for her was “less of a surprise and more of a confirmation of the Labour leader’s admiration for the former prime minister”.

A parliamentary inquiry has laid the foundations for government to reinvent unemployment services, finding the system has become obsessed with "kicking people off welfare", instead of helping them.

The government-dominated committee, established in the weeks after the government's 2022 federal election win, has called for a shift away from intense compliance measures and the return of some privatised job services to government.

Its chair, Julian Hill, said the ground-up review was the first of its kind since employment services were privatised 25 years ago.

Mr Hill wrote that in that time, the sector had degraded into a system that was not helping people find work and was neglecting employers.

"It's harsh but true to say Australia no longer has an effective coherent national employment services system," Mr Hill wrote.

A new campaign calling for ten thousand people to stop paying their wastewater bills, to force companies to end the practice of pouring 11bn litres of raw sewage every year into UK rivers and seas, was launched on 15 November by Extinction Rebellion and local water action groups.

The Don’t Pay for Dirty Water campaign, which targets all of the major water companies, kicked off with a splash, with campaigners swimming beneath the sewage outflow into the River Roding in East London.

The organisers vow to sign up at least ten thousand people to withhold the wastewater or sewerage part of their water bill. By collectively withholding millions of pounds, the boycotters hope to pressure water companies and the government to fast-track infrastructure upgrades and stop diverting ordinary billpayers’ money into massive profits for shareholders while billpayers’ local waterways are poisoned.

Last November, however, Trevaunance Cove turned brown with sewage. Lifeguards described the stench as "unbearable". The utility company responsible — South West Water — said heavy rains forced it to release the sewage and storm runoff to avoid the local filtration system becoming overwhelmed.

But the pollution event was no one-off. Two months prior, discharge alerts were in place at more than 100 beaches around the country, and in 2021, there were more than 370,000 such releases of raw sewage by water utilities across the United Kingdom. That year, another company, Southern Water, was fined a record 90 million pounds ($170 million) for dumping 21 billion litres of untreated sewage into protected marine areas off the southern coast of England.

Rivers and lakes have also been used as dump sites; there are credible reports that untreated sewage is spilled into natural waterways every two-and-a-half minutes. As temperatures across the UK have risen, there has been a growing backlash against the government's inability to fix the problem.

At the heart of the scandal is a decision taken in 1989 to sell off the country's water and sewerage industry.