Anglian shareholders invest £100m to tackle pollution

Anglian Water’s owners are ploughing £100 million into developing a spills taskforce to accelerate the company’s efforts to tackle water pollution.

This will bring Anglian’s total investment for the year to more than £1 billion, with almost half of that dedicated to environmental protection measures.

Money will be spent improving sewer networks and wastewater processing plants and assets. The work aims to reduce the number of spills from combined sewer overflows, prevent pollution and protect waterways.

Director of water recycling, Emily Timmins, said: “This is an unprecedented amount of money, directly injected into areas we know matter to our customers, and where we are not confident we are making headway with results.

“We know we need to reduce pollutions and storm spills, and we agree no number other than zero will do. As part of our intense focus on driving improvements, we are now starting to see the green shoots of recovery from our work and investments.

“We have the lowest level of sewer blockages in five years, have had no serious pollutions from our network of sewers in 14 months and are continuing to roll out smart sewers at a rapid pace to ensure we can predict and prevent more incidents even faster. Our plans will take time, but this boost from our shareholders means we can make even faster progress.”

The £100 million from shareholders will be spent on projects that include £34 million on public sewer cleaning and improvements in the top 100 highest risk areas, with 30,000 monitors added to give early warning signs of potential problems from blockages.

Sewer capacity will be expanded including storm tanks added at treatment plants for use in times of extreme rainfall.

Groundwater will be removed from systems in areas that have suffered with sewerage problems due to excess groundwater, and £13 million will be spent on improvements to wastewater treatment plants at Peterborough, Ingoldmells and Whitlingham.

Sustainable drainage systems will be added at locations that need surface water to be slowed before entering the sewer network. This is intended to prevent flooding and reduce discharges.

The company said more than 100 jobs will be created as part of the taskforce.

Subject to regulatory determination, the company plans to spend £9 billion in 2025-30, this is £4 billion greater than its current total expenditure.

In 2020, Anglian rejected its final determination from Ofwat and sought a redetermination from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on the grounds that its customers wanted to see higher levels of investment.

Anglian criticised Ofwat’s approach, which it said was kicking the can down the road at a time when it wanted to get work underway to bolster resilience and protect the water environment.