Medway Liberal Democrats have been campaigning on 'Dirty Business' for years

Since the water companies were privatised in the 1980s, they’ve paid out billions in dividends and bonuses for CEOs, all while piling up debt. At the same time, they’ve been dumping untreated sewage into our rivers and across our coastlines. But it’s not just costing us money. As Channel 4's ‘Dirty Business’ drama shows - it’s costing us lives too.

Nationally, Liberal Democrats have long been calling for action to hold the companies to account and clean up their act. So far, this government is moving far too slow, while the Conservatives who came before them did nothing at all.

Pushing hard on this issue is Medway Liberal Democrats, who for the last 4 years have been calling for serious scrutiny of Southern Water over the scale of sewage discharges into our local river. We have consistently campaigned and publicly challenging the state of our river long before the TV cameras arrived. Given everything exposed in Channel Four's 'Dirty Business', it’s reassuring to know that this issue has come to the attention of the wider public. 

John Castle, local Medway Liberal Democrat campaigner, said "This government should scrap Ofwat and replace it with a new regulator actually given the powers to hold companies to account. It should ban bosses’ bonuses. It should transform every single one of the water companies into Public Benefit Companies with environmental experts on their board, forcing them to meet strict environmental standards before they can pay out dividends. There's absolutely no reason for them not to have done this already - if they cared, they would.

The programme shows we are still living with the consequences of 14 years of Conservative weak action against sewage pollution.  We need to replace Ofwat with a tough regulatory body, and bring water companies out of private ownership. We need them to focus on performance and not profits.. 

We are very lucky to live in Medway with the pleasant walks around St Mary’s Island and the wetlands in Rainham and the Hoo Peninsula. We must do everything to protect River Medway right on our doorstep that the whole community can benefit from. However, the national scandal of water companies dumping sewage into lakes and rivers threatens to damage the beauty of our surroundings. Last year sewage was discharged across our local rivers, Southern Water had 58.9 incidents per 10,000 km of sewers in 2023, that’s 2.6 times greater than the committed target of 22.4 and the 2nd worst in the country – and with many of these discharges being illegal, this situation is completely unacceptable. 

As Southern Water company customers, we must always demand higher standards, there is much more to be done to recover our local rivers, however, let's hope these fines help to drive better environmental performance by water and sewerage companies in the future.

 I do hope Government Ministers take the time to watch ‘Dirty Business’. It makes the decades of failure from the water industry so incredibly clear. As we’ve been asking for years now - it’s time they made it a top priority. If you watched it, you’ll know just how deep the sewage scandal runs — and it might leave you wondering what our elected representatives have been doing about it. It is a damning exposé of the Conservative's failed water privatisation polluting rivers, hiking bills and rewarding shareholders while the public pays the price. 

We owe a huge debt to the brave whistle-blowers and campaigners who exposed the tangled web of politicians, regulators and corporations behind this corrupt model. Labour now faces a choice: renationalise our water or prop up a utterly broken and discredited system. Programmes like this are so important as they shine a spotlight onto scandals that deserve public attention, and the decades-long profit-driven sewage scandal is a prime example.

Medway Liberal Democrats will continue to put pressure on Southern Water locally to clean up our rivers and seas, and push for seismic change from government to revolutionise the water sector, so all residents can enjoy the benefits of clean water locally here in Medway. "

ENDS 

NOTES FOR EDITORS

If you would like to follow the discharges into the river here is a link .https://www.sewagemap.co.uk/ This is a third-party site.