Bexhill Galley Hill Marine Treatment Works

CWAG calls sewage protest meeting on Friday by Azur

As local and national standards of water management provoke widespread concern and anger, the local Clean Water Action Group has called a protest meeting on the beach opposite the Royal Victoria Hotel at noon on Friday. Bernard McGinley reports.

A year after the leak at Bulverhythe, Southern Water are still dumping raw sewage into our seas, forcing our beaches to close at Bexhill and prompting red flags at Pelham Beach. Seaford is a Marine Protected Area but raw sewage was pumped into the sea regardless. A sewage discharge monitor was defective, according to the Environment Agency. In Hastings and St Leonards the E. coli count has increased worryingly.

The signs are that Southern Water continue to put profit before people. Last year their CEO took a £550,000 bonus, despite them spilling 147 times, totalling 1,300 hours, in Hastings and St Leonards alone, and despite them being fined last year a record £90m after admitting deliberately dumping vast amounts of sewage into the sea across the south coast between 2010 and 2015. Even the pro-privatisation Centre for Policy Studies has referred (in August 2022) to ‘the monumentally bad performance of Southern’. 

The 2021 beach demo

In 2021 bonuses nationally for water bosses increased by 20%, though most firms failed to meet their sewage pollution targets. The average bonus was about £100,000 on top of salary. £24.8m was paid to the 22 top water bosses, including £14.7m in bonuses, benefits and incentives in 2021/22.

Such rewards for failure are expensive.  This water crisis has got steadily worse since privatisation from 1989, causing enormous environmental harm, huge damage to tourism and coastal economies and risking public health. The rallying cry is: Enough is Enough!

CWAG, the local Clean Water Action Group, has said: 

We need our whole community to come together to say #NOMORESHIT and show Southern Water the red flag once more.

Placards and red flags are welcome at Friday’s demonstration. Assemble on the beach near Azur at noon. A subsequent march remains a possibility.

2021 (photo: Chloe Dewe Mathews)

Southern Water has indicated that it is willing to meet CWAG to explain its work, including its spending programme on improving pipes, pumping stations and sewers.  However Cllr Amanda Jobson of Hastings Borough Council said that in over a year there have been no productive talks with Southern Water, who have yet to produce a timeline or a plan to deal with the Bulverhythe leak of 2021. (This is despite its Pollution Incident Reduction Plan.) Recent pollution of the south coast was worse, she indicated.

Fly-fisherman and former Undertone Feargal Sharkey is among those severely dissatisfied with the present water industry regulation in England and Wales.

There is also a national campaign and petition on change.org.

Also in: Clean Seas Please!