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Northumbrian Water has agreed to pay £1.179 million after it was found to have committed multiple environmental offences by the Environment Agency.
The company has accepted responsibility for a total of five offences relating to the discharge of wastewater at sites in West Cornforth, Crook Beck and Chilton in County Durham and Marske-by-the-Sea in North Yorkshire.
The majority of the money – £970,000 – will be handed to local charities and environmental organisations. The rest will be used to cover the Environment Agency’s costs and fund various actions by Northumbrian Water to rectify its failures such as surveys, investigations and site repairs.
Fiona Morris, environment planning and engagement manager for the Environment Agency in the North East, said: “We feel enforcement undertakings are a more balanced response to dealing with these environmental offences. The outcome is beneficial to the environment relevant to where the offence took place.
“It will also help to change the behaviour of the company and focus on their activities. This approach achieves more than if the company in question had been convicted and fined.”
“In these cases Northumbrian Water Limited have taken action to rectify the situation and the environment will now benefit from some great work by local charities.”
Richard Warneford, wastewater director at Northumbrian Water, said: “Over the last two years, we have been through a transformation in many of our wastewater processes, which has delivered a significant improvement in our performance towards our goal of having zero pollution incidents. The total number of pollutions in our area was the lowest nationally in 2017 and we further improved during 2018.
“In these incidents, which happened in 2015 and 2016, we reacted as quickly as possible to minimise the impact and have since worked hard to reduce the likelihood of such problems occurring in these or other areas again, including £1m of work to proactively assess our sewer network close to watercourses and other activity to upgrade vulnerable assets.”
Earlier this week, Southern Water agreed to pay £126 million in penalties and payments for failing to correctly operate its sewage treatment sites. Moody’s responded by lowering the company’s credit rating and placing it under review for a further downgrade.
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