In the sweltering summer of 1858, London reached its olfactory nadir. The Thames was an open sewer which putrefied in over 30° heat, and MPs would retch into their handkerchiefs as they left parliament. Benjamin Disraeli was chancellor at the time and described the once “noble river” as a “Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror” – a suitably Dantean alternative to the “Great Stink” as it became known. Instead of blaming the weather or the people, Disraeli took action. That July he proposed the Thames Purification Bill and within eighteen days it became law. Over the coming years, Joseph Bazalgette would build the sewer system we have today.
Fast forward to spring 2024, when the then government finally snapped into action as the Post Office scandal entered public consciousness thanks to an ITV drama. After prevaricating for years, the Tories passed emergency legislation to exonerate wrongly convicted sub-postmasters. With a new government in power, a similar pivot under the glare of public scrutiny is needed to clean up our rivers and seas, and campaigners are full of ideas for how it can be done.
“The fundamental aspect to this is that pollution is profitable and the regulatory system has failed,” says Matt Staniek, who campaigns against sewage pollution in Lake Windermere. “Until that is addressed, it’s just going to continue, because these companies prioritise dividend return over environmental protection.” Staniek thinks the Environment Agency, which regulates the water industry, needs to take a leaf out of its own book. “They also regulate waste companies, and when waste companies have been demonstrated to act illegally, they have assets seized under The Proceeds of Crime Act and directors are put in jail and fined. They clearly have the remit to be able to do that, so why is it not applicable to the water industry?” Labour has promised to introduce “severe and automatic fines” for water companies and criminal charges for repeat offenders, but it only had one passing reference to sewage in the manifesto, suggesting the issue is relatively low on the agenda.
Some activists favour a more drastic solution to the pollution for profit model. England is the only country in the world with a fully privatised water system and has been since 1989. It’s perhaps no wonder that water privatisation hasn’t caught on: in three decades, £78 billion has been paid out in dividends to shareholders, while the companies have racked up £60 billion in debt. Ed Acteson, a campaigner at SOS Whitstable, believes it is time to acknowledge that water privatisation is an experiment that has failed dramatically. “There is no reason why a financial consortium in the Middle East, America or Australia would want to run a public service in England other than profit, and that cannot be the overriding factor in how this industry is run. Water is too vital,” he says.
Whitstable has suffered acutely from Southern Water’s illegal sewage dumping. The seaside town on the Kent coastline is famous for its oysters and reliant on tourism, but swimmers have developed stomach issues and local oystermen are barely scraping a living due to reputational damage and repeated shutdowns. “It really is an existential issue for our whole town,” says Acteson. A petition he launched to renationalise the water companies received nearly 300,000 signatures, and polling shows that the majority of Britons support public ownership of utilities.
Water companies are set to hike bills by up to 70 per cent in the next five years
But renationalisation is a divisive topic among campaigners. Singer turned sewage activist Feargal Sharkey told this magazine last October that buying back the water companies would essentially “let them off the hook”, and the taxpayer would have to shoulder their debt mountain. But Acteson sees it as short-term pain for long term gain, and points out that water companies are set to hike bills by up to 70 per cent in the next five years. “We’re going to end up paying more anyway, so at least this way we get them back into public ownership.”
While campaigners blame sewage spills on lack of investment and corporate negligence, water bosses are keen to portray enemy number one as our combined sewer system, where rainwater and wastewater mix together in the same pipe. We are all complicit in the sewage crisis according to Matt Wheeldon, director of infrastructure at Wessex Water. Rain runs off our roofs, driveways and paved gardens and into drains, leading to sewage treatment works becoming overwhelmed in wet weather. “My strapline when I’m doing presentations on this is ‘we want your poo, keep your rain,’” he says. Replumbing the entire system has been floated as an idea, but it would take decades and cost tens of billions. Wheeldon has an alternative: “Rain is a resource, let’s capture and reuse it, and then let’s dispose of it locally.”
Wessex Water wants every household to “harvest” rainwater in a water butt or a storage tank, and then use it to water the garden or flush the toilet, and Wheeldon thinks it should be mandatory for new homes to be built with such systems. “That would push up the cost for the developer, but it would reduce the cost for the customer and the planet,” he says. “It’s obvious low-hanging fruit for any government, to change the rules so that when we build new things, we get it right.” While it’s unclear whether domestic rainwater harvesting would be enough to turn the tide on the crisis, it would be a start. “We are not self-sufficient,” says Wheeldon, “and we need people in government with a long-term strategic view of how we use natural resources.”
Whichever path they choose, the new government could take a lesson from Disraeli. “Almost all living things that existed in the waters of the Thames have disappeared or been destroyed… there is a pervading apprehension of pestilence in this great city,” he said in parliament two centuries ago. His bill would cost £3m (nearly half a billion in today’s money), but Disraeli saw the need to put people above profit, “to terminate a state of affairs so unsatisfactory and fraught with so much danger to the public health.”
Claudia Cockerell is a freelance journalist in London. She’s written for the Evening Standard, The New Statesman and The Oldie
