Raw sewage dumped in our rivers by the privatised water companies has rightly become a national scandal.

Raw sewage dumped in our rivers by the privatised water companies has rightly become a national scandal.

Shockingly, not a single river in England is in good overall health, according to the Rivers Trust, and only 15 percent are in good ecological health. That is a terrible indictment on the water companies who continue to dump raw sewage into rivers and on to beaches as an increasing rate. Sewage dumping doubled in 2023 compared to the previous year.

(That would be bad enough, but over the years the owners of the privatised water companies have pocketed tens of billions of pounds in dividends and water company executives continue to be paid generous bonuses, even when their company has been fined for dumping sewage.)

The way the water companies have been regulated since they were privatised 35 years ago has not worked. The regulator, Ofwat, has been far too weak in dealing with the companies’ failings and the Environment Agency hasn’t done an effective job in policing pollution spills.

You would expect that a company which pollutes a river should be made to clean it up. But even that doesn’t happen. Sometimes the reasons for this are understandable. Agricultural run-off from fertilised fields is a major cause of pollution but it’s not always obvious where that pollution is coming from.

That’s not the case with sewage which causes worse pollution than agricultural run-off with a bigger impact on plants, animals and microbes. And it’s usually obvious who or what is responsible for it so it’s easy to point the finger. But too often water companies get away with it because it’s actually legal for them to dump raw sewage into our rivers when it rains heavily, and treated sewage at other times, even if it’s harmful to the ecosystem it flows into. Sewage was dumped into the River Waveney on 389 occasions in 2021, much of it quite legally.

There isn’t even one organisation responsible for overseeing all river pollution incidents and restoration projects, partly because of the diverse causes.

All this brings us to the important question of who should be responsible for cleaning up our polluted rivers when so much of the pollution is either difficult to trace or is there “legally”.

The Environment Agency has belatedly begun to get a grip of this, spurred by understandable public anger over the state of our rivers and beaches. Anglian Water has committed to spend £50 million on tackling sewage spills. But local groups aren’t waiting around for Anglian to act – they are taking matters into their own hands to clean up their local river. And they want the fines imposed on water companies to help fund this.

There is an £11 million Water Restoration Fund, set up by the previous government to pay for the clean-up and protection of our rivers. The money for it came from the fines imposed on water companies for serious sewage spills over the course of a year. Just three water companies were fined £168 million last year for polluting our waterways, so this amounts to small change. Given the state of our rivers, not surprisingly there were masses of applications for grants from the fund.

But payouts got held up by the general election last July so all those who applied for money are still waiting to hear if they will receive any. The River Waveney Trust is one of them. It put in a bid for a £144,000 grant, alongside the Broads Trust, to help clean up the river and fund a citizen science water quality testing programme.

Its director, Martha Meek, says water company fines should be spent cleaning up the rivers and waterways they relate to, so the water company is seen to be picking up the costs of the pollution it caused. I couldn’t agree with her more.

The long wait for news on payouts from the Water Restoration Fund is increasing suspicion that the money won’t go to local organisations like the River Waveney Trust – it will disappear into general Treasury coffers instead. As one of the MPs scrutinising the Water (Special Measures) Bill, I’m pushing the Government for a commitment that this money will go where it’s intended, and for the law to be tightened up when it comes to water companies fouling our rivers.

The money in the Water Restoration Fund was ear-marked for good reason, to reinforce the principle that the polluter should pay to clean-up the pollution they caused. There are hundreds of local groups on standby waiting to hear if they will get the funding they need to start work. I hope the Chancellor listens, so the money starts to flow soon.