Conservative minister tried to block release of sewage data

A Conservative minister repeatedly tried to stop England’s environment regulator from publishing data showing a rise in sewage spills into waterways, emails obtained by Unearthed show.

In March, ahead of the Environment Agency’s (EA) annual release of sewage spill statistics, then-Defra minister Robbie Moore ordered the agency to withhold the headline figures about the total number and total hours of the spills.

This led to a five-day disagreement between senior agency leadership and the minister’s private office about the data release, culminating in an email sent the night before the figures were due to be published.

The minister, it read, “has decided that the portal should be published tomorrow, but should NOT include total hours or total number of spills”.

Phillip Duffy, the EA’s chief executive, refused to comply, describing the minister’s steer as “highly counterproductive” and arguing that NGOs “will tot up the numbers and accuse us of trying to cover them up”.

“It will damage the EA and it will damage the government,” he concluded.

The EA released the data as planned, which showed 464,000 sewage spills over 3.6 million hours occurred in 2023 — increases of 54% and 105% respectively. This was blamed on unusually wet weather.

Dr Doug Parr, Policy Director of Greenpeace UK, said:

“The boundless faith of previous governments that multinational companies will operate competition-free monopolies as though they care about their customers has been flushed away by the UK’s sewage system. They will do less than the minimum while charging as much as they can extort. The only situation where the UK’s current crop of utilities might be of some use is with a regulator with all the resources necessary to closely monitor them, all the powers to make them provide an acceptable level of service, and all of the incentives to prioritise that service before any consideration of returns for investors.

“The pollution isn’t just in our rivers but in our politics, with ministers trying to protect investors from public scrutiny. The new government needs to take a much tougher line, because preserving investment is not their only job. They also need to show that UK is not a soft touch and that investment in utilities is not a risk-free opportunity to profiteer, safe in the knowledge that consumers will always have to pony up in the end.”

Read the full story on Unearthed here