We would like to hope that in 2025 we might have some positive news from the Solent regions’ water companies, but as 2024 draws to a close, this is starting to look unlikely.
The Society made a conscious decision in 2024 to stand back and just keep a monitoring brief on the perpetual problem of the Company’s CSO discharges, a problem that steadfastly refuses to go away. Then in September, Southern Water published the latest iteration of its Water Resources Management Plan for consultation with the public, an exercise which went over the heads of most customers given the lack of any direct customer publicity by the Company.
We have now responded to three public consultations on the matter and with each subsequent release of ‘new’ consultation material it becomes ever clearer that responses by the public to the earlier iterations have simply been ignored. (Our response to the latest consultation attached our previous two responses as appendices in an effort to make the point while saving ‘digital ink’ and typing effort.)
Meanwhile, the sewage networks under the Solent’s towns and cities are now at breaking point and that portion of the volume of sewage and wastewater run-off which actually succeeds in reaching the wastewater treatment works still regularly overwhelms them. With climate change and the need to adapt to more extreme rainfall patterns, these problems need urgent UK Government-level focus on infrastructure planning and investment. The country cannot sit back and ignore this since as sea levels inevitably continue to rise, the sewage systems of Victorian seaside towns will simply cease to function.
Rather than focus on prohibitively expensive ‘solutions’ to the creation of ‘new water’, the UK needs to take a long hard look at the way in which the natural water cycle is evolving and look for carbon-neutral ways of exploiting that cycle to serve the needs for both water supply and wastewater treatment. Simply throwing ever more debt-based funding at vanity projects to please overseas investors is not the answer. The one thing that we can be sure of is that the problems and the solutions selected, will outlive the companies which are currently servicing the communities’ water supply and wastewater treatment needs. With Thames Water very publicly teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, Southern Water may not be not far behind.
Solent Protection Society 