The Environment Agency recently released the Water and sewerage companies in England: environmental performance report 2022.
This raises the performance of South West Water (SWW) from one to two stars. This still leaves SWW bumping along the bottom of the league table of nine alongside Southern Water.
SWW performed significantly below target (red) for the Supply Demand Balance Index metric.
A correspondent writes
The Times “Clean it up” campaign quotes, 13th July:
“Susan Davy, the chief executive of Pennon, which owns South West Water, one of the former one-star companies, said the firm was on track to reach four stars next year.”
How in the world will she achieve this in a year?
The expanding new town Cranbrook has the main sewage treatment works at Countess Wear, adjacent to the Exe SSSI. SWW data for 2021 indicates that storm water was released on 72 combined occasions over a period of 230hrs +. This plant cannot expand due to the SSSI. A new plant is not even in view.
So where will the sewage of the latest approved development of 870 houses go on a rainy day? The overloaded Exe? Then into Lyme Bay?
What about Honiton? The combined 2 waste water treatment plants had 226 discharge episodes of 2646 hours and if I add the nearby village of Gittisham (2021 census population 838) the total from the Honiton area is 283 episodes and the colossal 3252 hours of pollution. All going to the small River Otter
How is Susan going to sort these two severe pollution incidents out by next year? Let alone the chronic case of Combe Martin in North Devon.,
I have not even mentioned our beaches. Are overflow tanks storage capacity being increased? When will we be able to bathe pollution free after we have had a downpour like we have recently had? (And are having today?)
Perhaps we should not rely on the Star rating to solve our pollution incidents. It is clearly not worth the paper it is written on.
East Devon Watch 