Thames Water has been accused by a judge of “either deliberate dishonesty or breathtaking blindness” as it was fined more than £3 million for polluting rivers near Gatwick with sewage.

Peter Chappell www.thetimes.co.uk

The debt-laden utility firm was criticised over a “reckless failure” as Judge Christine Laing KC said it had deliberately misled the Environment Agency during its investigation.

Nearly 1,400 dead fish were found in Gatwick Stream in Sussex and the River Mole in Surrey in 2017 after the UK’s biggest private water company pumped raw sewage into them for nearly 24 hours. Bream, perch and pike were among the species killed. The true number of deaths is believed to be much higher.

The interim chief executives, Alastair Cochran and Cathryn Ross, the former boss of Ofwat, the regulator, were questioned by MPs today over the firm’s £14 billion debt and fears that it may collapse and need to be taken into public ownership.

Judge Laing said the sewage leak at Crawley on October 11, 2017, was a serious pollution incident that had caused substantial environmental harm along a 2.8-mile stretch of water.

Lewes crown court heard that failures in systems and management at Thames Water resulted in raw sewage being pumped into an overflow lagoon instead of the company’s treatment works.

Technology that could have alerted staff to the inevitable pollution incident existed but was not being used, the court was told. Laing said it should have been obvious the pump was running in error and it seemed extraordinary there was no process in place to check.

Raw sewage was pumped into the lagoon for 21 hours. There were no alarms in place to alert staff and no physical checks were made as pumping continued even after the lagoon filled and overflowed. The court was also told the lagoon capacity was shallower than it should have been.

“Thames Water missed several opportunities to prevent this pollution incident from occurring,” Jamie Lloyd, a senior environment officer at the Environment Agency, said. “Staff appear to have been oblivious to malfunctions at the sewage treatment works leading up to it and did nothing to intervene. When the alarm was raised, no decisive action was taken until the damage was done.”

He said the company failed to take responsibility for several years and did not provide vital information to the regulator.

The judge said there was a failure to disclose readings which showed levels consistent with sewage entering waterways. The readings were only provided years later after it was revealed that an Environment Agency officer had taken a photograph of the readings being taken by a contractor on the riverbank. Thames Water tried to blame the omission on a mix-up caused by similar file names.

Thames Water continued to deny there had been a leak from its facility at complete odds with the evidence, the judge said. “This was either deliberate dishonesty or breathtaking blindness,” she said, adding that documents filed by the company with the Environment Agency were utterly misleading.

Thames Water pleaded guilty at the court. The company said it was sorry about the incident. “It should not have happened and we deeply regret the incident,” Ross said.

The six-year lag between the pollution incident and the successful prosecution is one of the reasons the Environment Agency is pursuing unlimited fines via civil sanctions, which the regulator believes will be much faster and for which the burden of proof is lower.

The scale of the fine is broadly in line with other recent penalties, such as the £2.65 million Anglian Water was ordered to pay in April over sewage released in the North Sea, but well short of the biggest fine to date, the £90 million Southern Water paid out in 2021.

The Times’ Clean it Up campaign has been calling for tougher penalties for water companies who cause major pollution incidents, and for better funding for the Environment Agency. This week it was revealed the regulator’s funding still remains below 2011 levels.

The Times is demanding faster action to improve the country’s waterways. Find out more about the Clean It Up campaign.