Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps he is taking to ensure water companies are held accountable for sewage discharge.

The Government is clear that the amount of sewage discharged into our waters is unacceptable. We will not let companies get away with illegal activity and we have taken a series of actions to ensure that where breaches, are found companies will be held to account.

Government directed water companies to increase their storm overflow monitoring in 2013 and achieved 100% coverage before the end of 2023.

Meeting this target is a significant achievement in creating positive environmental change and holding water companies to account. The wealth of data collected from these monitors will ensure that we know the full extent to the problem – increasing transparency, revealing the worst-offending overflows, and enabling regulators to continue to hold polluters to account.

The Environment Agency can now impose unlimited penalties on water companies for a wider range of offenses following Government’s changes to broaden of the scope of the existing civil sanctions regime and remove the previous cap on penalties.

The Government also has recently announced a consultation to ban water bosses’ bonuses when criminal breaches have occurred, quadrupled company inspections- by the end of March 2025, fast-tracked £180m investment to cut spills, and launched a whistleblowing portal for water company workers to report breaches.