Southern Water fined £7.1m for illegal sewage dumping off Kent coast
Southern Water has been fined more than £7 million at Canterbury Crown Court after dumping sewage illegally off the Kent coast between 2019 and 2021.
The company - which reported annual revenues of between £800million and £1billion in the last three years - pleaded guilty last April to 13 offences linked to illegal discharges at Broadstairs and Margate wastewater pumping stations.
Southern was said in court to have caused harm from a ’pattern of repeated incidents over several years’; prosecutors said some of the sewage was ’unscreened’, meaning it still contained solid waste that had not been filtered out.
The company today said it was ’deeply sorry’, adding that under a new leadership team it had made ’significant changes’ to the way it works.
Nine counts related to the incidents of untreated sewage dumped off the Kent coast while three counts were over failure to notify authorities of the discharges as soon as practicable and within 24 hours, as it is meant to by law.
A final conviction was for failing to have a standby pump at Margate’s station between July 27 2019 and October 4 2020 in breach of its permit.
In all, the firm was fined £7,127,083 by Mr Justice Johnson, who said there were ’overall serious failures’ by the firm to maintain equipment that should have prevented the discharges from having to take place.
’It [Southern Water] was well aware of the potential for equipment to fail and for the essential need for robust maintenance and testing procedures,’ the judge said.
’That is because of the dozens of previous occasions on which that had happened.’
He added: ’The harm was not confined to a single event, but arose from a pattern of repeated incidents over several years.
’Taken together, the offending caused serious degradation of environmental quality, significant interference with public amenity, potential risk to public health and damage to the reputation of an important coastal community.’
Southern Water has 174 previous convictions, the court heard, and was convicted every year from 1999 to 2016.
Mr Justice Johnson blasted the company’s ’protracted history of non-compliance with its legal obligations’, as well as its failure to train staff properly or invest in the water network appropriately.
He added: ’This record of criminality, to the great detriment of the environment and the community in Kent, is an exceptionally aggravating factor.’
The court earlier heard that a 22-hour flow of sewage at Margate in 2019 was not reported to the Environment Agency until 32 hours after the first discharge, and that sewage was dumped at Broadstairs in February 2021 for five hours.
Pictures shown in court depicted litter and other ’unscreened’ waste, including sanitary towels, washed up on the shore and in the sea.
Margate’s former mayor, councillor Rob Yates, told BBC South East earlier this year that the spill has had a long term effect on the town’s residents.
He said: ’Every time they want to go swimming, they feel nervous.’
Lindsay Faulkner, of the Environment Agency, said of the ruling: ’Southern Water allowed this repeated pollution to happen. Stronger oversight by the company is needed, and plain to see from their track record.
“These preventable incidents harmed the environment and local communities, but like so much pollution caused by water companies, they were avoidable and should never have happened.’
The firm was previously fined £90million in 2021 after admitting 6,971 illegal spills from 17 sites across Hampshire, Kent and West Sussex.
The judge presiding over that case said the offences had been ’committed deliberately’ by Southern’s board of directors at the time.
On Wednesday, it also pleaded guilty to polluting the River Test in Hampshire, after letting potent amounts of ’suspended solids’ - particles of materials such as silt and soil - and iron into the stream in March 2023.
An Environment Agency probe found that only one of four tanks that was used to remove sludge and scum from the water was working.
The Daily Mail has previously reported on the devastating damage wreaked upon local communities by greedy water firms putting profit over people.
In Whitstable, Southern’s Swalecliffe Wastewater Treatment Works often dumps millions of litres of raw sewage into the bay following heavy rainfall.
Oyster grower James Green previously told of having to order in shellfish from Ireland - after a Swalefish dumping event saw the local mollusks riddled with E.coli.
Southern Water says it has taken steps to improve facilities at Margate and Broadstairs following an internal review, including 24/7 staffing and repairs.
Among the improvements was a £28million investment in the wastewater and sewer network across the wider Thanet area.
A spokesperson said of today’s sentence: ’We’re deeply sorry for the incidents in North Kent which led to today’s fine.
’These events took place more than 5 years ago - since then we’ve made significant changes.
’Our responsibility now is to continue delivering the improvements that will make a meaningful difference for our customers and the environment.’
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