I've driven 4,858 miles around the UK coast. Our seas are in a bad way

Times

3 days ago

This week Ofwat, the water regulator for England and Wales, fined Thames Water a record £123 million for sewage spills and for paying dividends despite failing to reach customer service and environmental targets.
Kudos to Ofwat for showing its teeth, but I can confirm that fining water companies after the fact won't stop you, your children, or your dog getting sick at the seaside this summer. As I write, sewage is being pumped into the sea in 47 locations on the English and Welsh coasts, including Sheringham, Gorleston, Hythe, Hastings, Bexhill, Hove, eight locations on the Isle of Wight, Mill Bay opposite Salcombe, East Looe, Mumbles, Solva and Llandudno.
For the past 17 years I've made an annual circumnavigation of the British and Northern Irish coasts researching the The Times and Sunday Times Best UK Beaches guide. It's a tradition to begin and end the trip with a swim in the first and last beaches on the list. This year, the inaugural dip was at Holme-next-the-Sea, in my home county of Norfolk.
The beach isn't monitored by government sampling teams and I was unaware of Environment Agency (EA) advice against bathing at Old Hunstanton, a mile-and-a-half west, so I waded in confident that the chances of being poisoned were negligible.
The E. coli infection that arrived with impressive violence at 3am, in a tent, three days later, suggested otherwise, but it was a calamity I'd brought upon myself.
My dog, on the other hand, was an innocent victim. He fell into a hole full of effluent on a suspiciously soggy footpath 200 yards downhill from a water treatment plant outside Exmouth, Devon. He spent the next 72 hours in a miserable state.
South West Water confirmed that a pollution incident had been reported there six days earlier, but had concluded that the leak wasn't theirs and the water flowing down the lane had possibly come from 'a natural groundwater spring'. Whether that is the case or not, the greater truth is that we should no longer be confident that our rivers and seas won't poison us.
Over the past four weeks I've inspected more than 600 beaches in the UK and Northern Ireland. It was the back end of the sunniest spring on record, and yet I saw significantly fewer surfers, swimmers or paddleboarders than I've seen in previous years.
That could be that such fads are out of fashion — in 2021 it seemed that the entire nation had bought inflatable SUPs — but I fear that it's actually because we're all more wary of our inshore waters. Sewage has oozed into the public consciousness via news stories, pressure from groups such as Surfers Against Sewage and the Rivers Trust, and the coverage from The Times' Clean It Up campaign. There's even been effluent on The Archers, with clean water activist Feargal Sharkey pointing the finger for the Ambridge sewage spill at Borchester Water.
The official statistics justify our fears. The number of beaches rated by the Environment Agency as insufficient — ie containing unsafe levels of faecal matter — has increased from four in 2021 to 37 in 2024.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said: 'The number of Poor (sic) bathing waters rose to the highest level since adopting the four-tier classification system in 2015,' but noted that 'in-part this reflects the designation of new sites not previously managed to meet bathing water standards.'
You'll find beaches deemed too polluted to swim in this summer in Tynemouth, Bridlington, Clacton, Dymchurch, Bognor Regis, Worthing, Southsea, Lyme Regis, Weston-Super-Mare and Blackpool.
Saddest of all the failures, though, is Scarborough. The seaside holiday is said to have been invented there, but now Defra warns against bathing in South Bay and gives North Bay the lowly 'sufficient' rating that I no longer trust.
That's bad for business. 'People think dirty water, dirty town,' a shopkeeper called Fran told me last week. 'No one wants their kids to get sick. I understand that. But it's killing us.'
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Let's not forget, though, that last year 424 of the 675 monitored bathing waters in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were rated excellent. That's 63 per cent, which sounds good until you learn that in Cyprus it's 97.6 per cent, Croatia 96.7 and Spain 87.6, with an EU average of 85 per cent.
And a Defra three-star rating is no guarantee that you won't get sick. Rain has been washing faecal matter into streams and on to beaches for millenia, but the menace of the Combined Sewage Outfall (CSO) is a 21st-century problem.
Victorian engineers designed our sewage systems to channel wastewater from homes and businesses in the same pipes as groundwater from rainfall. These combined sewers fed into treatment works where the contaminants were removed and the clean water was returned to the environment.
In the unlikely event, as it was then, that excess wastewater threatened to overwhelm the treatment works, the CSO could divert untreated sewage and contaminated surface water directly to rivers or the sea.
That worked just fine in the 19th century, but as the population grew from around 40 million in 1898 to 69 million today, lack of investment stunted infrastructure growth and now it takes just a few hours of rain, or a fault at the treatment works, to trigger a CSO discharge.
Defra lists 14,254 active CSOs operated by ten water companies in England and Wales. If you see a long pipe jutting out from a beach, that's one of them. Last year, they discharged 450,398 times, pumping faecal matter and whatever else we flushed down our toilets for 3,614,428 hours. To put that in context, if each CSO discharged in turn, the pollution incident would have ended would have ended sometime in the 2430s.
South West Water ran its 1,370 CSOs for 544,439 hours in 2024. Severn Trent for 454,155 hours and Anglian Water for 448,938. Thames Water dumped sewage for a mere 298,081 hours.
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In an average of 38.6 per cent of cases, water companies blamed exceptional weather as the cause of the discharge. Asset maintenance was responsible for 20.1 per cent; and insufficient capacity 37.8 per cent. That suggests that just short of 60 per cent, on average, of the sewage dumped in our rivers and seas last year was due to infrastructural inadequacies.
The total cost of bringing our water system up to 21st-century standards is a staggering £290 billion, according to the National Audit Office, but even a quarter of that would go a long way towards keeping our rivers and seas clean.
So it might make you a bit sick to learn that between privatisation in 1990 and 2023, water companies paid out £72.9 billion in dividends. That's just a few drops over 25 per cent of that £290 billion.
Our coast is the most beautiful on Earth, and our water companies treat it like a gutter. So let's fight them on the beaches. Start with a Two-Minute Beach Clean. Pioneered in Bude in Cornwall, the movement now has litter-picking stations at 1,200 locations across the UK and Ireland and has reduced rubbish in some places by 61 per cent.
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Or join an organised beach clean operated by the National Trust, Surfers Against Sewage or community action groups: if they're happening, you'll see the posters. Email your concerns to your MP, keep a close eye on your water company through local and national media, and if you see — or smell — a sewage spill, report it to the Environment Agency Pollution Hotline on 0800 80 70 60, or to the Surfers Against Sewage hotline on 01872 555950.
Finally, before you head to the seaside this summer, download the Safer Seas and Rivers Service app from Surfers Against Sewage. It shows bathing water ratings, pollution alerts and CSO discharges in real time.
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