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Ministers may have broken law over sewage dumping in England, says watchdog
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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UK Politics
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
The government and regulators may have broken the law by failing to stem the scale of raw sewage dumping into rivers by water companies, the new independent environmental watchdog has said.
Investigations by the Guardian and other media organisations have revealed that water companies are using storm overflows much more frequently to discharge raw sewage.
The watchdog said the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs had possible failures relating to its duty to make enforcement orders where sewerage companies fail to comply with the law to effectively deal with sewage.
The guidance provided by government to regulators, and the permitting regime they put in place for the water companies, possibly allow untreated sewage discharges to occur more regularly than intended by the law without risk of sanction.
Guy Linley-Adams, an in-house solicitor at WildFish said: “Ofwat, the Environment Agency and the secretary of state are jointly responsible for the terrible sewage pollution of our rivers.
Storm overflows in treatment plants run by six water companies are already at the centre of a major investigation by Ofwat and the EA into suspected widespread illegal dumping of sewage.
The original article contains 729 words, the summary contains 187 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!