01 Aug Eastern England’s sensitive wilderness areas flooded with raw sewage
Almost 1,200 sewage overflow pipes discharged in England and Wales’ most sensitive wildlife habitats for over 300,000 hours last year, all of which are supposed to be officially protected under conservation rules, Greenpeace’s investigative unit Unearthed can reveal.
This includes 7,172 hours by Anglian Water and 589 hours by Thames Water.
Unearthed mapped water company data on sewage spills in 2022 onto maps of England and Wales’ Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs), Special Area of Conservation (SACs), Special Protected Area (SPAs) and Ramsar sites (wetlands of international importance) to identify every pipe that discharged within 50m of a protected nature site – Defra’s own definition of a “high priority” discharge site.
Examples in the Eastern England include:
Anglian
Rutland Water is a Ramsar, SSSI, SPA, which received 816 hours of sewage in 2022.
Nationally, the analysis found that:
1,193 raw sewage overflows discharge within 50m of a protected area;
305,963 hours of raw sewage spilled in protected areas;
The total number of protected areas affected was 515 (breakdown in notes);
The River Derwent and Bassenthwaite Lake, a conservation area encompassing parts of the Lake District, was one of the worst-hit areas, receiving more than 6,600 hours of sewage. It is the constituency of Trudy Harrison, DEFRA Minister for Natural Environment and Land Use.
Chichester and Langstone Harbour, an SPA and Ramsar site, received over 3,200 hours of sewage. A university study found over 50 chemicals and e.coli bacteria at 760 times the EU’s safe levels after sewage releases.
And in addition to the officially protected areas:
Rivers, lakes and marine areas already in danger from high levels of nutrients from sewage and fertilisers (sensitive to eutrophication) received more than 200,000 hours of sewage.
Unearthed’s investigation found that over 38,000 hours of sewage were released into or within 50m of chalk streams in England last year.
Britain has little unspoilt natural landscape left, and we have lost half of our biodiversity, putting us in the bottom 10% of nations. We do have detailed data on our remaining valuable ecosystems, and they are often officially protected conservation areas, but we are not protecting them.
The government’s current Storm Overflow Reduction Plan, published last summer, outlines a target to ‘improve’ 75% of pipes discharging into high priority areas by 2035, extending to all high priority areas by 2045. For many of these sites, work on spill reduction won’t even begin for over a decade.
