Southern Water fined £7m over coast sewage dumping

Southern Water has been fined more than £7m for dumping sewage off the Kent coast, causing widespread damage to the local economy and tourism.

The company pleaded guilty in April to 13 charges over illegal discharges at Margate and Broadstairs wastewater pumping stations between 2019 and 2021.

At a two-day sentencing hearing at Canterbury Crown Court, Mr Justice Johnson said there were "overall serious failures" by the company.

He said Southern Water's record of convictions showed a "protracted history of non-compliance with its legal obligations, and a repeated pattern of inadequate staff training, insufficient investment in the infrastructure and a failure properly to maintain equipment".

He added as a result of the offending, it had caused "serious degradation of environmental quality, significant interference with public amenity, potential risk to public health and damage to the reputation of an important coastal community".

The judge told the court Southern Water had 174 previous convictions, convicted every year from 1999 to 2016, and convicted as recently as April of this year.

"This record of criminality, to the great detriment of the environment and the community in Kent, is an exceptionally serious aggravating factor," he said.

Mr Justice Johnson imposed a total fine of £7,127,083.

It comes after the company was fined £90m for nearly 7,000 incidents across Hampshire, Kent and Sussex in a case brought by the EA in 2021.

During the two-day sentencing hearing, prosecutor Andrew Marshall said some of the sewage was "unscreened" – meaning it still contained solid waste.

Defending Southern Water, Dominic Kay said there had been new leadership at the company since 2022 and it had been rebuilt around accountability.

The court heard that nine counts against the water company related to incidents of untreated sewage being dumped, including an intermittent flow of sewage on 20 July 2019 at the Margate site which lasted from about 02:00 BST to just before midnight.

The Environment Agency (EA) was not notified until more than 32 hours after the first discharge.

The court heard that on 16 February 2021, untreated sewage from the Broadstairs wastewater station was dumped into the sea due to a technical error.

It lasted for nearly five hours and authorities were only notified at the end of the discharge, the court was told.

Three charges concerned failures to notify authorities as soon as practicable, which is a condition of Southern Water's environmental permit.

A final charge was for failing to have a standby pump at Margate's station between 27 July 2019 and 4 October 2020.

In June 2021, 11 beaches in Thanet had to be closed for a week, with the district council declaring it a "high profile pollution incident".

Marshall said tourism was a "major industry" in the area, with 20% of employment related to it.

Thanet District Council's director of environment Michael Humber said the sewage discharges had been "particularly negatively impactful".

The EA said in June 2019 an investigation had found that about 10 million litres of sewage had been discharged over almost 24 hours.

It added that around the August bank holiday in 2020, a failed pump at Margate pumping station was out of order for weeks which led to the release of sewage into the sea.

The agency said a second pump then failed and at least 16 million litres of sewage was released into the sea across two days.

Lindsay Faulkner, environment manager for the EA in Kent, said Southern Water had "allowed this repeated pollution to happen".

"These preventable incidents harmed the environment and local communities, but like so much pollution caused by water companies, they were avoidable," she said.

"Our inspections of sewage treatment sites, including pumping stations at fault in this case, will continue.

"We are holding them to account."

A Southern Water spokesperson said the company was "deeply sorry".

"Pollution incidents like these are unacceptable, and we fully recognise the impact they can have on the environment and the communities we serve," they said.

The company added they had made "significant changes" since then.

They said under a new leadership, the company has "radically addressed its culture, governance and operations".

The company said its responsibility now was to "continue delivering the improvements for customers and the environment".