Water sector needs greater ambition on reducing pollution

There needs to be “a big step forward” in the ambition of water companies to reduce pollution incidents and manage wastewater in response to growing public scrutiny, a senior figure at the Environment Agency has warned.

Speaking at the Zero Pollutions Conference, Helen Wakeham deputy director of water quality, said public expectations of bathing water are changing and concerns about waterways and the environment have risen rapidly.

Local campaign groups for river health have caught national media attention with sewer overflows and chalk streams also being the focus of a roundtable last week where environment minster Rebecca Pow challenged the sector to better protect the environment.

Wakeham told delegates that while combined sewer overflows were not something that could be changed overnight, reducing pollution incidents is a way for faster improvements.

“We absolutely need to make a step change,” she said, to reduce the number of incidents and improve drainage and wastewater planning. Wakeham said pollution reduction investment plans should be ambitious, not a summary of what is already being done.

She said pressures from population growth and climate change did not explain the variation in different companies’ records on reducing pollution, with some performing seven times better than others.

As well as making improvements, Wakeham said the whole sector needed to “articulate the good stuff that is already going on” to protect and enhance the natural world as well as the processes involved in processing wastewater.

That was echoed by Anna Boyles, head of performance, risk and optimisation at Thames Water, who advocated not only for storytelling but for calling a climate emergency.

She suggested the water sector uses its position to draw attention to the severity of the environmental situation and highlight that companies are working for the environment, not polluting it.

The event, organised by Southern Water, was the second of its kind and explored the growing problems of plastic pollution  and the need for behavioural change to reduce non-flushables entering waterways.