There are no shortcuts: we will all have to pay to fix sewage leaks

Editorial: Therese Coffey, the environment secretary, admits ‘more needs to be done’ to protect rivers and coastal waters

Therese Coffey proposes to lift the cap on civil penalties (PA)

Therese Coffey, the environment secretary, has obviously decided that if she cannot beat the hue and cry against the privatised water companies, she might as well join it. She has responded to the latest opportunist attacks from the opposition parties on the government’s record on sewage with a populist plan to “crack down” on discharges into English rivers and coastlines.

Labour and the Liberal Democrats have been competing with each other to produce ever more dreadful-sounding statistics. The latest, from Labour’s Jim McMahon, is that, on average, “there’s a new sewage dumping event into our waters every two and a half minutes” since 2016.

This is one of those facts that is impossible to assess without context. The immediate context is that discharges were 19 per cent lower in 2022 than in the previous year, which ought to be good news – except that this figure, too, needs to be understood in context. John Leyland, the executive director of the Environment Agency, said the reduction was “down to dry weather, not water company action”.