(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.