Extensive UK plan to renovate sewers

The British government intends to reduce untreated wastewater discharges into the sea to zero by 2050. An ambition requiring colossal investments, financed by an increase in consumer bills, the Minister for the Environment said on Saturday, George Eustice. Water distribution companies will have to invest 56 billion pounds (66 billion euros) over twenty-five years to renovate sewer systems, according to this government plan presented on Friday. They will have until 2035 to renovate the pipes discharging near designated bathing areas and until 2050 for the others.

Currently, some 15,000 sewage pipes still flow into the sea. A situation that can lead to spills of large quantities of untreated sewage, especially when the drainage systems are saturated by violent storm rains. And in this case, the consequences are deplorable on both sides of the Channel. Many beaches in the United Kingdom have thus been banned for swimming this summer due to the health risk, while the president of the Hauts-de-France region, Xavier Bertrand, alerted the French government on Friday to these waste water discharges. . A “ecological disaster” which, according to him, has worsened since Brexit.

In view of the additional costs for consumers (the government mentions an eventual increase of 42 pounds, or 50 euros, per year and per household), the critics were not long in coming. The Liberal-Democratic opposition thus described this plan as “cruel joke”, estimating that there would still be 325,000 wastewater discharges per year in 2030, into the sea, lakes or rivers. George Eustice, for his part, assured that the current British government, which has only a few days left of its existence, was “the first to seriously tackle this issue”.