Southern Water Challenged Over 2040 Sewage Targets

Councillors have challenged Southern Water over its 2040 sewage targets, calling them "unacceptable".

The utility company attended a council meeting on Thursday (27 January) to share how its services have been performing across Adur and Worthing.

Councillors wanted reassurances that local sewage releases would be eradicated as soon as possible and challenged Southern Water over its targets.

This comes after the water company was fined £90 million for 6,971 unpermitted sewage discharges into coastal waters across Kent, Hampshire and Sussex over a five year period.

The releases are regulated by the Environment Agency and come from combined sewer overflows (or CSOs).

Southern Water uses the releases when its infrastructure becomes overwhelmed during periods of heavy rainfall.

It does so to prevent the flooding of homes and businesses as sewage and rainwater are collected within the same system.

During a joint overview and scrutiny committee (JOSC) meeting on Thursday, Sally Smith (Lab, Central) challenged the water company over its ‘ambitious target’ to reduce pollution incidents to zero by 2040.

“Given that Southern Water was fined a record ninety million pounds for deliberately pumping billions of litres of raw sewage into protected seas over several years,” she said, “how is the target date of 2040 acceptable?”

Nick Mills, head of Southern Water’s storm overflow task force, told the meeting that ‘no pollution is acceptable’.

“What happened was unacceptable but we’ve got to focus on the future and where we’re going now,” he said.

“2040 is the zero target but we’ve got some pretty aggressive targets to hit in-between.

“At the start of this investment period we were north of 400 category one to three pollutions per year – our target is to get that below 80 by 2025.

“We do have a large task ahead of us: we’ve got 40,000 kilometres of sewer, 3,500 pumping stations, and 360 treatment works.

“The pumping station is a massive focus for us, performance there is not good enough.”

Councillors asked that the ‘Beachbuoy’ service – which provides alerts when a sewage release has taken place – be made more accurate because some residents had reported a ‘lag’ between releases and notifications.

A Southern Water spokesperson said they were working to improve the service and encouraged anyone who witnesses pollution to report it.

“It is really important that suspected pollution is reported to us as soon as possible – if we are hearing about it a week after the event, it’s very hard to find out what’s happening,” they said.

Vicki Wells (Lab, Marine) wanted to know what was being done locally to reduce sewage spills to zero, especially at Sea Lane, Goring-by-Sea, which is popular with kite surfers.

Mr Mills said there were ‘no plans for investment this year’.

Instead, Southern Water is focussing on a ‘regional plan’ for CSO reduction.

This includes a £140 million investment in water supply and treatment across Adur and Worthing.

The water company added that it had identified and fixed 19 ‘misconnections’ at Worthing properties where waste water was being discharged into surface water drains.