WildFish has started a court action seeking to force the withdrawal and redrafting of the Government’s Sewage Overflows Plan

In 2021, raw sewage was dumped in UK rivers by water companies for over 3 million hours.

WildFish are campaigning for urgent action

The Government’s Storm Overflows Discharge Reduction Plan (The Plan) is supposed to show how the government will deal with sewage pollution from storm overflows, but:

• It is confusing and contradictory.
• It fails to deal with the overflows that are causing the problem.
• It sets targets which would allow water companies to continue dumping unacceptable amounts of raw sewage over a prolonged period, in some cases up to 2050.

The cause of the problem

The laws to deal with the problem have been in place for many years. The underlying cause of the current problems is the continued failure of the water companies to comply with the duties imposed on them, and the government, to properly enforce them. The Plan does not deal with this.

WildFish argues that the Plan is unlawful on the grounds that: it approves continuing unlawful conduct, fails to take into account the existing law, breaches the Habitats Regulations, and is irrational. WildFish has instructed leading environmental law barrister James Maurici KC and Charles Bishop of Landmark Chambers, and Fieldfisher LLP, to bring the challenge.

“Years of underinvestment and absent regulators have got us where we are today with widespread illegal sewage discharges. If The Plan is intended to deal with illegal discharges, it is unlawfully encouraging law breaking for years to come. If it is not intended to deal with these illegal discharges, it is irrelevant.”

Nick Measham

CEO, WildFish

Nick went on to say:

“We have no problem with The Plan being used to arrive at an initial rough estimate of the costs required to provide upgrades to storm overflows. However, its failure to deal with the vast majority of relevant outfalls and the production of sub-targets and headline targets, which have no basis in the application of the existing regulations, is unacceptable.”

The Plan tacitly approves unlawful conduct and frustrates the existing legal framework:

• Most of the problem overflows are not complying with the existing duties and regulations which require for example that there be no overflows in all normal climatic conditions.
• The Plan sets out targets for water companies to improve overflows by 2035 (for priority sites) and 2050 (for other sites).
• In doing so, the Plan appears to accept that sewage overflows before those dates will continue to breach the current duties and regulations.
• Water companies will use those targets to argue against more rigorous enforcement and planning in accordance with the existing law.

The Plan fails take into account important matters:

• The Plan fails to take into account that a large proportion of the problem overflows are not complying with the law. It does not provide any response to those overflows, assess the extent of those overflows, or assess the extent to which those overflows could and should be reduced by enforcement of the existing law.

The Plan is in breach of the Habitats Regulations:

• The Plan purports to set targets for overflows which are having unacceptable and harmful discharges into European sites, yet there has been no “appropriate assessment” under the Habitats Regulations.

The Plan is Irrational:

• Although those parts of the Plan which set the targets are clearly drafted to apply to all overflows, another part of the Plan states that improvements to deal with nonconforming overflows are “outside the scope of the Plan”.
• If the Plan does not deal with nonconforming overflows then it does not deal with the majority of the problem overflows and is irrational, and not fit for purpose.