For achieving nothing on rural broadband in Devon! – Owl

Richard Foord Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Defence)

Devon County Council is spending its broadband clawback money on anything but broadband. That £7.8 million was intended for improving broadband in rural areas, including in villages such as Northleigh. Residents have encountered numerous pledges on poles, but they still do not have full fibre. Does the Minister think the clawback funding for broadband should have been ringfenced by Devon County Council?

Julia Lopez Parliamentary Secretary (Cabinet Office), The Minister of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Minister of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)

These issues have been highlighted many times by Conservative Members from Devon. We thought we had worked through some of those challenges. The clawback challenge that the hon. Gentleman highlights has not previously been raised with me, and I will happily look into it for him.

One of Devon’s most popular beaches is again being subjected to untreated sewage being pumped into the sea just a month after the last major spill.

David Parsley inews.co.uk 

South West Water (SWW) has told local residents that it has re-launched the use of tankers to transport sewage each day from a burst pipe to pumping stations along the Exmouth coast.

The move has, once again, resulted in pollution warnings at the East Devon tourist hotspot on several occasions in the past week. The water firm has apologised for the disruption.

Campaigners claim that the pollution warnings began on 8 February, but SWW did not directly write to customers alerting them to another burst pipe until last Wednesday.

In an email dated 13 February, the water company, which was fined £2.15m for illegally dumping sewage into rivers and the sea in Devon and Cornwall last year, told residents: “We’re working hard to repair another burst in the Exmouth area. We need to temporarily use tankers again to allow our team to safely work on the damaged pipe.”

Three days later the company wrote to locals again, apologising for the issues, which were ongoing as of Wednesday afternoon, 13 days after the tankering of millions of litres of sewage through the town began.

In January, i revealed SWW had been accused of dumping millions of litres of raw sewage into the sea at Exmouth after sending 240 tankers a day to an overflowing pumping station.

Local sea swimmer Jo Bateman, who is taking SWW to court over the sewage spills that regularly prevent her from taking her daily dip, said: “We’re just getting the usual guff from SWW. They say they care and are doing everything that can to fix the problems but they keep happening.

“There were all the issues from mid-December that went on well into January, and this latest burst pipe is leading to yet more pollution with warnings about the dangers of swimming at our beach being made since 8 February.

“The issue is that SWW just react to problems as they occur rather than proactively trying to prevent them from happening in the first place. Meanwhile, the executives and shareholders continue to profit from bonuses and dividend payments.”

Since the transporting of sewage from the site of the latest pipe burst to pumping stations and treatment works around Exmouth, the Environment Agency (EA) advised against swimming in the sea due to raw sewage being pumped into the water.

This warning from the EA, which was issued on 15 February remained in place on Wednesday evening. It reads: “Bathing is not advised, due to pollution from sewage.”

During a community meeting held by SWW in Exmouth on Tuesday night locals staged a protest against what they say is the company’s continued failure to protect the local environment.

East Devon District Council leader Paul Arnott, who attended the protest, said SWW had brought five security guards to the meeting for protection, but there were no reports of any trouble.

Twenty-six of the 30 district council wards in East Devon have experienced an untreated sewage spill since 2022, meaning more than 82 per cent of the local population lived in a ward affected by the pollution.

A spokesman for SWW said: “We want to reassure our customers that we are working hard in Exmouth to fix the burst on one of our critical rising mains.

“We have now completed the extension of the temporary overland pipe which we hope to bring online later today.

“This will mean we can then stand down the tankers. We are also working on a permanent replacement of the entire rising main which we expect to complete by the end of March.

“We are very sorry for the disruption caused, and we will continue to keep everyone updated.”

(Excuse the pun)

Last night EDDC overwhelmingly passed the motion in a recorded vote with 46 councillors voting for and two abstentions. It incorporated six actions (details here).

The two councillors who abstained  were the leading Tories: Cllr Colin Brown, Dunkeswell and Otterhead, and Cllr Mike Goodman (chair of scrutiny), Sidmouth Sidford.

Cllr Sophie Richards, Sidmouth Town, attended part of the meeting but had left the chamber before the vote. What could have been more important than sewage spewing into the sea for Sidmouth?

Given its importance, the chair had brought the motion to the top the agenda.

Two attempts to derail it by amendment were defeated. 

One from Cllr Ian Barlow, Sidmouth Town, who continued the “non-confrontational” line he pursued at the SWW Scrutiny Meeting on February 1, trying to water it down. He wants a line drawn under the past and a new start made with SWW. (Despite this he voted for what he described as a “pointless” motion.)

The second from Cllr Mike Goodman to take it back into scrutiny.

Many councillors wanted to speak of their ward members experience with SWW.

One councillor mentioned that he had learned at the end of Wednesday’s SWW “Road Show” in Exmouth that the sewer repairs would take a year to repair.

Cllr Jess Bailey, West Hill and Aylesbeare, proposed strengthening the EDDC action to ask EDDC’s chief executive, Susan Davey, to forgo any bonus until substantive (to be defined) progress is made to improve matters locally, and to ask SWW to follow other water companies in actively monitoring sewage discharges into rivers before the government deadline of 2025. SWW is only doing the minimum. It was agreed that these sentiments would be added to the actions placed on the Leader.

Opening remarks

To finish, here is an extract of the remarks made by Cllr Todd Olive, Whimple and Rockbeare, when he proposed the motion. 

There are two things that I want to really pick out. First is the sheer scale of South West Water’s failure, and the environmental vandalism that has resulted. Sewage overflows in East Devon spilled raw, untreated effluent for over twenty thousand hours in 2022. That’s the equivalent of one pipe spewing poo into our rivers and onto our beaches for over two years and three months. In the few weeks since this motion was submitted, we have seen the third burst of a sewage main in the Maer valley in Exmouth in the space of barely two months, with the overflow at Phear Park operating twenty-four hours a day every day since February 13. The worst performing CSO in East Devon in 2022 spilled on more than two in every three days that year: it seems to me that South West Water is inadvertently heading for a new record. Only today I understand colleagues have been dealing with another burst pipe, this time in Colyton. Chair, briefly at this point, I should like to extend thanks to Geoff Crawford and Andrew Tyerman of Exmouth’s ESCAPE group for their tireless efforts in keeping track of what’s going in Exmouth.

Our residents are angry. They are angry at the desecration of our rivers and our coast; at the disruption caused by weeks of noisy, obnoxious tanker movements from works in Exmouth and Budleigh to try and keep a lid on this mess; angry at the literal eruptions of sewage from manholes that we are seeing in the West End, in Clyst St Mary, where raw sewage has more than once been flowing down our streets. Angry at a faceless, unaccountable corporation that sends PR chiefs to meetings of our Scrutiny committee with promises of answers in the future, and of a new sewage works in the West End that won’t be built until at least thirty years after South West Water themselves identified the need for it, found a site for it, ringfenced the funding for it, and obtained permission to build it. Angry with a government that has, belatedly, only this morning got its act together and provided only a partial restoration of the funding and capacity that was deliberately stripped from the regulator that’s supposed to keep an eye on water quality.