Mentions John Quiggin

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.