A TOP executive at Southern Water took the plunge into the chilly waters with sea swimmers in Eastbourne when he met them to face questions about sewage discharges.
Dr Toby Willison (below), the director of environment and corporate affairs, swam for a few minutes on Saturday before emerging to declare: “It was a bit cold, but it was lovely.”
He then joined Eastbourne Conservative MP Caroline Ansell and a group of regular swimmers for a private meeting at the Langham Hotel before answering questions on a Facebook Live session.
Dr Willison said he expected that bathing water in Eastbourne, which received a one-star rating from the Environment Agency in 2021, should warrant a three-star rating (out of four) by 2024. “We are on that improvement journey,” he added in the Facebook discussion.
The swimmers say that during the private meeting he told them that repair work would be carried out to a storm overflow near the Wish Tower which may not be correctly connected to the overflow system.
We have approached Southern Water for a comment.
Storm releases are permitted and take place when there is too much demand on treatment works during heavy rainfall.
But critics say each discharge contains many pollutants which are dangerous to swimmers and wildlife.
The subject has become the focus of protests across England as water companies reveal details of millions of hours of releases into rivers and coastal areas.
Eastbourne Sea Swimmers founder Chris Brooks (above) said afterwards she was pleased with the meeting and what was discussed.
“We were very happy with it and feel it was very helpful. We are going to stay in touch and follow up – we are not going to leave it,” she told the Eastbourne Reporter.
She gave Dr Willison and Ms Ansell (above) advance notice of three questions relating to the topics of the action being taken and how swimmers could get real-time information about water quality from Southern Water’s Beachbuoy system showing storm releases.
On Saturday, Beachbuoy showed releases from Bexhill and St Leonards that “may have affected water quality”.
The questions were:
- The water quality in Eastbourne in 2017 [measured by the Environment Agency] was ‘excellent’. It has now dropped to ‘sufficient’. What are you doing about it now?
- According to the Clean Seas taskforce website, ‘… there are broadly three ways to reduce overflows’. Why is the third one listed, ‘Build bigger infrastructure’, the last solution when we are repeatedly told that our problem in Eastbourne is the Victorian infrastructure?
- In order for sea swimmers and other sea users to know how much pollution you are putting in the sea, can you provide accurate real-time information? For example, so the Beachbuoy website functions so we don’t swim in the sea and then find out a week later that we were swimming in human waste.
Ms Brooks said that Dr Willison explained the company could not see a correlation between sewage releases it makes and the water quality of the sea.
She said Southern Water had agreed to investigate if pipes feeding into an outlet near the Wish Tower (above), where Environment Agency readings are taken, have been wrongly connected or need repair – and that they hoped to rectify any faults this summer.
In terms of the question about Victorian infrastructure, the swimmers were told the emphasis was on reducing the flow into drains by use of measures such as water butts and wetland areas.
Ms Brooks said the answer became a little vague in her opinion: “Nobody said ‘we’re going to take up pipes and put new ones in’,” she said.
And Southern Water is to investigate an alert system based off-shore which would give beach users real-time information on the quality of the sea water.
Southern Water was fined £90 million in July 2021 after admitting thousands of illegal discharges of sewage which polluted rivers and coastal waters in Sussex, Kent, and Hampshire.
It was responsible for a total of 372 pollution incidents in 2021, 12 of them serious, according to the Environment Agency, which downgraded the company to a one-star rating (out of four).
The Environment Agency’s latest figures, released on Friday, showed that water companies had released raw sewage into rivers and the sea for 1.75 million hours in 2022.
There were an average of 825 spills per day last year, down 19% on the previous year. But this was largely due to dry weather, not action by the water companies, the agency said.
Environment Agency executive director John Leyland said: “We want to see quicker progress from water companies on reducing spills and acting on monitoring data.
“We expect them to be fully across the detail of their networks and to maintain and invest in them to the high standard that the public expect and the regulator demands.”
Southern Water released a total of 16,688 spills across 2022, an average of 45 a day. The total for England was 301,000 spills.
During the Facebook session with Ms Ansell, Dr Willison said if storm overflows were not used to discharge excess water, there was a risk sewage would come back up through sinks and toilets.
However, he said that the overflows “are not the right technology at this time”, adding that reducing surface water going into the system, with measures such as water butts and use of wetland areas, would stop it reaching the foul water part of the system.
Dr Willison said that when the water industry was privatised more than 30 years, only 30% of foul water was treated. Now the figure is 95%.
Last month, the Eastbourne Reporter looked into how safe our sea water is. We reported that Ms Ansell was one of 292 of Conservative MPs who voted in favour of new environmental regulations in January which will allow sewage discharges to continue until 2038.
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Another very interesting interview on the subject of sewage by Southern Water. Eastbourne has lost its star rating because of sea pollution so I hope that Dr Willison keeps his word and will investigate and bring back some decent investments and solutions to Eastbourne sewage system to protect our marine life.
Very interesting angle on sea pollution. The article keeps mentioning overflow of polluted water with human waste spilling in wetlands?? Is that normal and safe for the environment? I am a bit shocked! But not an expert in water! I thought wetlands were natural reserves for wildlife and plants!
One has to ask who, in their right mind, would vote to allow another 15 years of sewage discharges? Disgraceful.