HENLEY-ON-THAMES, England — Endurance swimmer Joanne Fennelly dreads cold water and long distances, and swims in nature year-round. But he takes extra precautions in his backyard. The River Thames is one of the many waterways in the UK that have been polluted by sewage and agricultural pollution.
“If it looks good, if it smells good, I’m in,” Fennelly said.
Britain has become notorious as a place where a simple swim can lead to a lengthy visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A flood of news about the dirty water has flowed into next month’s election to determine which party will control the government for the next four or five years.
Although not a central issue of the election campaign, it smacks of a bigger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.
Bad water is decades in the making, linked to the privatization of water companies under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1989 and fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis, which slashed budgets for regulators and others.
The British public became aware of the extent of this disturbance during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the expansion of outdoor activities such as canoeing and wild swimming. The sight and smell of faeces, toilet paper and other waste in streams and beaches, along with clean water campaigns by some London newspapers, led to outrage and protests.
Nick Kirsop-Taylor, lecturer in environmental policy at the University of Exeter, said: “We suffer from shockingly poor infrastructure as a result of underinvestment in the long term by water companies who seem more interested in paying dividends to shareholders. “There’s a lot more to it than that, although … the regulatory culture is weak.”
Kirsop-Taylor said Britain had such a culture of anti-environmental regulation that it was known as the “dirty man of Europe” in the 1970s and 1980s. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said it had been pushed back since the union’s 2016 vote to leave the EU.
While private companies operate regional monopolies providing combined water and wastewater services, population has grown and industrial demand for the system has increased. The plumbing – dating back to the Victorian era in many places – has not been updated to meet the needs.
In addition, climate change has brought more intense rainfall to the overflowing sewers.
“Water companies have a choice: either they let sewage go into people’s homes or they open the pipes and let it flow into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and president of River Action, which was founded in 2021. That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.
The number of untreated sewage spills last year increased by more than 50% from the previous year, reaching a record 464,000 sewage spills. According to the Environment Agency, one of two water regulators, the cumulative duration of the spill has doubled to 3.6 million hours.
According to Water UK, a trade group for water companies, the increase was mainly due to the wetter year and because monitors were installed in most sewer outfall pipes. But there is no similar oversight for farm runoff such as manure, a bigger problem than sewage.
While sewage releases are legal during rainy periods, their frequency has come under scrutiny, leading to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, is not doing enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.
Water companies blame Afwat for not allowing them to raise rates high enough to finance the improvements. Ofwat did not comment on specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies have spent 25% of their budgets on improvements since 2020.
Water companies have felt the pressure. Water UK apologized for the sewage spill last year and CEO David Henderson said the industry should have woken up sooner.
“We know the current levels of sewage leakage are unacceptable and we have a plan to address it,” Water UK told The Associated Press in a statement. 40 percent by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the green light to go ahead with it.”
Activists accuse companies of paying huge debts to shareholders at the same time. Watson with RiverAction said the industry paid out £11m ($14m) last year for environmental violations such as sewage discharges while paying out more than 100 times the dividend – £1.4bn ($1.8bn). .
“It’s not a deterrent,” Watson said. “It’s an incentive to pollute.”
A bipartisan committee in the House of Lords found last year that the two regulators needed to go further in fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The number of Environment Agency prosecutions has fallen significantly over the years, from 787 in 2007-08 to 17 in 2020-21.
The industry and regulator committee also said Ofwat had prioritized reducing water bills for customers over improving infrastructure.
Political parties take advantage of the crisis by talking hard. Labor leader Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into open sewers”.
But neither the conservatives nor the center-left party have presented a detailed plan. Like many other parties, they have not promised to increase the regulator’s budget.
The leader of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, made the biggest splash of the campaign by ducking for the cameras.
“The Conservatives have allowed water companies to pump their dirty sewage into our rivers, lakes, beaches and seas,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that would include replacing Offwater with a new, tougher regulator.
The Green Party, which struggles in a political system that makes it difficult for smaller parties to win seats in parliament, has even proposed re-nationalizing water services.
Some communities agree. The town council in Henley-on-Thames, a Tory stronghold in west London, this month passed a vote of no confidence in bankrupt Thames Water and called for the nationalization of its water supplier.
The town is home to the Henley Royal Regatta, which attracts 50,000 people a day for the regattas in July. But the dirty water has distorted its face. The city center is downstream of the Thames Water sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.
Fennelly, an endurance swimmer, who suspects a nasty infection once there.
He and other members of Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now turn to a Thameswater phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do a sniff test before jumping.
On a recent morning, Fennelly and Joe Robb walked across a pasture, strapped flotation devices around their waists, and headed up the Thames. The intensity of the flow was from the rain the night before.
Rob screamed as he hit the river, not because it was dirty, but because it was cold. It was refreshing – as water should be.
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