Sewage warning signs in Portsmouth
They'll let people know of stormwater discharges
Sewage pollution warning signs are being put up at popular bathing sites in Portsmouth to let people know of recent stormwater discharges.
The city council has begun work to place signs along the coast and is drawing up tenders to look for digital versions to connect to the Beachbuoy service, allowing real-time information to be displayed.
The council has lobbied Southern Water to pay for the new equipment but said ‘no progress’ had been made in the several months since the most recent meeting of the two.
The company is responsible for wastewater services from Hampshire to Kent where, according to Environment Agency data, pumped sewage into Langstone Harbour for almost 900 hours in 2021.
Last year it was handed a record £90m fine after admitting to 6,971 incidents of illegal sewage dumping from 17 sites, including in Hampshire, between 2010 and 2015.
Giving evidence to the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee on Tuesday (October 18) the company’s new chief executive Lawrence Gosden said its performance ‘has not been good enough’.
In November it announced an £18m investment into the Budds Farm sewage works in Havant in a bid to tackle the problem.
But city council leader Gerald Vernon-Jackson has urged the company to go further and help fund the new warning signs.
‘I’ve asked Southern Water to pay because it’s their sewage that’s causing the problem,’ he said. ‘They’re a company that makes millions of pounds in profit but so far they haven’t volunteered to provide funding and so the poor taxpayer is having to do it.’
He said the company earlier this year said it would ‘consider’ making a financial contribution but that it had given no update since. The council allocated £35,000 of its own money for the equipment in its most recent budget.
‘People need to make an informed decision about whether they’re going to go swimming or not,’ Cllr Vernon-Jackson added. ‘At the moment Southern Water puts their investments in big salaries for their executive and dividends for their shareholders, we think they should put their money into cleaning up their act.
‘I think it’s privatised water companies an experiment that’s failed, nobody in the world has done this, everyone knows that it doesn’t work.’
At a meeting last year, he suggested councils across the south east work together to buy out Southern Water although this idea has not progressed.
Plans are being drawn-up by the council to start the tendering process for the new equipment.
A spokesman for Southern Water said it ‘remained open to the idea’ of helping fund the signs and said the company ‘would welcome the opportunity to explore this further’.
‘Providing information about bathing water is something we have been working hard on and we have already improved the value of our Beachbuoy app that provides water users with live water quality monitoring across all of our bathing waters,’ they said. ‘We have also installed two real-time water quality monitoring buoys at two of our bathing water sites, including one near to Hayling Island.’